mruby in the 8-bit world: mruby VM for Zilog Z80

EN

Zilog Z80 was a popular 8-bit processor back in its day, and still remains popular in many use cases today. It was widely used for personal computers and game consoles including Sega Master System and Game Gear. However, there is currently no Ruby implementation that runs on Z80.

I am working on mrubyz, which is an mruby VM implementation that aims to run the mruby bytecode on the Z80 processor, with caveats and limitations.

It is very limited in terms of supported features and instructions. Also, Z80 is a rather old, and slow processor with many limitations. However, I am making it usable for some purposes.

This presentation will share with you what it takes to run (a subset of) Ruby on an old 8-bit processor, and some insights gained from developing one.

  • Yuji Yokoo
    Yuji Yokoo
    @yujiyokoo

    Yuji is a software developer based in Tokyo, Japan. He was born and raised in Tokyo, spent over 2 decades in Adelaide, Australia, and has recently migrated back to Japan. He used to be a Windows desktop application developer until he discovered Ruby.