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A developer named Jan de Jager has built a complete Intel four-eighty-six PC emulator that runs entirely in a browser, written in one hundred percent pure JavaScript. The project, called Retro four-eighty-six Modular Browser PC, includes tabs for screen, motherboard, storage, and expansion cards — and boots with a single click. Notably, Claude gets a development credit, making this one part human, one part AI collaboration.
Staying in the world of developer tools, a programmer has released a Kotlin compiler written in Go that claims to run ten times faster than the official kotlinc. The project, called kc, targets the JVM and is aimed squarely at the pain points developers feel daily — slow linters, sluggish language servers, and CI builds that drag. Speed, the author argues, isn't just convenience, it changes what tooling becomes possible.
And in a story with real implications for the emulation and preservation community, Anthropic's Claude models appear to be blocking users from performing reverse-engineering tasks — including legitimate work like converting games between systems. Multiple users report that Claude Code and the Opus model are refusing requests tied to the popular Reverse Engineer Anything tool, raising fresh questions about where AI guardrails end and useful assistance begins.
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