“The PIC32 robot from my 2022 Project Goals is finally finished! Building it was a fun way to learn about the MIPS architecture and programming the PIC32. It was also a chance to work on a 6502 emulator that will be useful for other projects.
As far as robots go, this is not a very useful one since all it does is blink its eyes every few seconds. The interesting part is how it does the blinking. Rather than switching the LEDs on then delaying a while before switching them off, the robot runs several layers of emulation with the innermost emulated system blinking the LEDs as fast as possible. All the layers of emulators within emulators combine to produce enough overhead to slow the blinking down to a rate that is visible.
The first level of emulation is the 6502 emulator written in MIPS assembly mentioned in my post about Tali Forth 2 on Linux.”