Summer 2026 Project Recap

Summers allow time for the combination of two of my passions: low-level programming and music. This summer, thanks to the latest software development tools, I made significant progress on several projects.

Tenori-ON Simulator / Assembly Language Interpreter

The goal of this project is to create a Yamaha Tenori-ON simulator with a custom Toshiba assembly interpreter. I finally got the "Abacus" layer I contributed to run correctly. (This has been a multiple-summers project... my first git commit on this one was in 2020!)

In this screenshot you can see the code in hardware.asm is actual assembly code that is compiled to be run on the Tenori-ON firmware. My simulator accepts the source code verbatim — which helps a lot with the development lifecycle.

Xous Precursor SIDPlayer

This project is a SID (C64 sound chip) emulator on a Rust microkernel, deployed on the FPGA-based Betrusted Precursor. Now everyone can carry vintage game music on a fully open, encrypted hardware device. 😄

Steelpan Tuning Simulator

A steel pan tuning simulator that captures the elusive “bloom” of each note’s overtones. (Incredibly exciting when this started working.) My hope is this simulator becomes a practical learning tool for others navigating steel pan tuning.

There’s something satisfying about writing/debugging assembly, wrestling with hardware cycles, experimenting and optimizing... and learning from breaking things and getting them working again.

I plan to write up some more detailed individual blog posts about each of these projects, their design, and dive into some of the interesting features I was inspired to add to them.