Ruby in the 8 Bit World - A Small mruby VM for the Zilog Z80
summary
A tiny mruby VM called mrubyz runs compiled mruby bytecode as a ROM on Zilog Z80 hardware at 3.5 MHz with 8 KB RAM and 16 KB VRAM, implemented as a Sega Master System binary that actually boots and drives a live presentation and a simple shooter demo. Supported features: integers, fixed ROM strings, arrays (read only), while and if, built‑in puts; unsupported: GC, floats, classes, procs, most comparisons and user functions, so performance is slow but functional.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction with demo
- 3:05What is mruby and bytecode VM
- 8:48Z80 processor and Sega Master System
- 12:02Minimal mruby VM for Z80
- 17:24Unsupported features and limits
- 21:15Demo game and conclusion
related talks
29mmruby in the 8-bit world: mruby VM for Zilog Z80
27mMegaruby - mruby/c on Sega Mega Drive
30mRuby on NES - how to make the smallest ruby ever
26mMegaruby - mruby/c on Sega Mega Drive
27mROM: the final frontier of mruby
33mmruby/c: Running on Less Than 64KB RAM Microcontroller
36m(m)Ruby on small devices
36mmruby: AltRuby