January 7, 2026
Old CPU, new spicy comments
Musashi: Motorola 680x0 emulator written in C
Retro chip emulator drops; OGs flex, license nerds cheer
TLDR: Musashi is a C-based emulator for classic Motorola chips, used in retro systems, and it’s MIT-licensed. Comments mix OG bragging about 1994 regex wizardry with cheers for the permissive license, making this both a nostalgia flex and a “use it anywhere” win.
Musashi just re‑entered the chat: a C‑written emulator for the Motorola 68000 family—the retro brain behind classic arcades and old computers. It’s mature (it’s been powering MAME), it’s fast, and it’s open. But the real show is the comments. Veteran energy crashed the party as user kazinator rolled in with a mic‑drop: “I made a 68010 emulator in C in 1994,” complete with tales of regex‑powered opcode dispatch (translation: they matched 0s and 1s to functions using clever scripts). Cue the collective gasp and a flood of “okay grandpa, but drop the numbers,” capped by the funniest cliffhanger: on a 66 MHz box it was “emulating about …” and then, nothing—the ellipsis that launched a thousand jaw‑drops. Meanwhile, license hawks swooped in with “FYI: MIT licensed”, sparking cheers from the permissive‑license crowd who love code you can use anywhere. The mood? Nostalgia + flex + relief. Folks praise the project’s portability (runs on lots of systems), while others snicker at the regex war stories as “peak 90s hacker vibes.” With Musashi on GitHub, the community’s split between retro glory stories and modern “just give me the license” pragmatists—and it’s oddly beautiful.
Key Points
- •Musashi 4.10 is a portable C-based emulator for Motorola 680x0 CPUs focusing on portability and speed.
- •The code adheres to ANSI C89 and uses C9X-compliant inline functions; it has matured through use in the MAME project.
- •The software is distributed under a permissive license with “AS IS” warranty disclaimers and liability limitations.
- •Source is available on GitHub, and the author provides a contact email for support.
- •Basic setup requires implementing memory I/O functions, calling m68k_pulse_reset(), using m68k_execute(), and optional detailed interrupt handling via configuration macros and callbacks.