▲Z80 Sans – a disassembler in a font (2024)(github.com)
113 points by pabs3 4 days ago | 7 comments
▲Averave 12 hours ago
You can do a lot of crazy things with fonts. Just off the top of my head:

Tetris Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737294

A font which is also an LLM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791

And in the same vein:

Tetris in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218

Doom in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678754

▲california-og 4 hours ago
I made a syntax highlighting font (also mentioned as an inspiration to Z80 sans):

https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig...

▲pwnfunction 11 hours ago
next is to build a disassembled inside a pdf
▲anthk 11 hours ago
get zmachine.ps and you could play zork i-iii, Tristam Island and tons of z3 zmachine games (search for calypso.z3 too) without cheating as the PDF format implements an ad-hoc JS interpreter where not all viewers parse it.
▲billforsternz 10 hours ago
I thought my Z80 project (https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon) was close to the whimsical end of the practical to just for fun spectrum but this takes things to a whole new level, kudos.
▲ilaksh 12 hours ago
I guess it would be cheating, but he actually could have just written it in Rust, since OpenType can execute web assembly. People have abused that to embed things like Tetris and even an LLM inside of fonts.

What he did was more impressive in a way.

▲erk__ 4 hours ago
It's not OpenType that can execute wasm it's a experimental extension in HarfBuzz so compared to this it does not work online since it is not enabled for the HarfBuzz builds in Chrome or Firefox. Which makes this more cool to show of online.

(disclaimer, I made the Tetris font)

▲tgv 13 hours ago
This made me smile. What an astonishing combination. The oddball application of a font as a disassembler works like a wonderful practical joke to me. Merging parsing, processing and rendering into a single step feels mad genius.
▲notglossy 13 hours ago
Man... I'm lucky if the fonts I'm using even have tabular figures as alternates. This is on a whole other level.
▲userbinator 12 hours ago
Not too surprising given that a font maps bytes into glyphs, and an instruction set maps them to instructions. I suspect a 6502 or 8051 version would be much simpler.
▲dhosek 12 hours ago
Definitely. I wrote an incomplete z80 disassembler as a high school student back in the 80s, but never got to the 2-byte opcodes. 6502 has none of those so would be much easier to manage.
▲iberator 11 hours ago
Ha ha this is the best thing I have seen today in hacker news!

So clever and funny