// the take
A toy transpiler that translates a subset of x86 assembly into 6502 assembly, aimed at retro computing tinkerers writing for the C64 or Commander X16. It's a personal learning project by its author, not a production code-generation tool.
- Clever use of C++ template metaprogramming and constexpr evaluation so some translation and even program logic can run at compile time, which is a neat trick for a hobby CPU-targeting project
- Includes working example programs (Pong, a hello-world for the Commodore 64 and X16) that prove the pipeline actually produces runnable 6502 code, not just a parser exercise
- CMake setup has sanitizers, clang-tidy, and warnings-as-errors wired in, so the little code that exists is held to a decent bar
- All values are truncated to 8-bit with no 16-bit math or pointer support — a hard functional ceiling for anything beyond trivial programs
- Instruction coverage is whatever the author happened to need for test cases, not a real x86 subset, so most real-world assembly won't translate
- No real test suite (it's literally on the README's to-do list) and no commits since 2021, so this is a frozen snapshot, not something you'd build on
- README admits 'nothing is guaranteed' and the code organization is acknowledged as ad hoc by the author — treat this as a proof of concept, not a dependency
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →