CoreTrace, a visual 16-bit CPU simulator
Details
- External ID
- 49281755
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- CoreTrace, a visual 16-bit CPU simulator
- Website domain
- srianjaneyam.me
- Launched
- Aug. 13, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.12634408602150538
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
I built a 16-bit CPU simulator that runs entirely in the browser.You can write assembly, run it, or step through it one instruction at a time while watching what happens inside the CPU.It shows the registers, memory, flags, ALU, buses, and datapath as the program executes.You can also set breakpoints, inspect execution cycles, replay previous cycles, and try some example programs.I built this because I wanted CPU architecture to feel more tangible. Reading about fetch, decode, registers, buses, and the ALU is one thing. Watching an instruction actually move through the CPU is much more interesting.Try it here:https://coretrace.srianjaneyam.me/This is my first Show HN, so I'd really appreciate feedback, especially from people interested in CPU architecture, emulators, or computer architecture education.
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- interactive cpu architecture simulator
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes An educational 16-bit CPU simulator in the browser consists of an instruction set emulator (fetch-decode-execute loop in JS/TS) and a visual React UI displaying register and memory states.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: SAP-3 (8-bit CPU simulator)
Concerns raised: Poor web accessibility standards in text contrast, especially dark mode, Distracting cyberpunk bloom visual effects, Browser resize causes scaling issues
Feature requests: Add option to reduce or disable bloom effects, Improve subtext readability/contrast for program counter and instruction register
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 41 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #39 of 42 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 288 days after the earliest competitor.
- I made a game where you build a CPU from logic gates · hn · 2026-07-30 · 102 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students · hn · 2026-06-15 · 108 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I wrote a minimal memory allocator in C · hn · 2025-11-23 · 137 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- I wrote a custom assembler for CHIP-8 in C++ · hn · 2026-09-17 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Von Neumann Bottleneck · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I made some transistor animations · hn · 2026-07-24 · 212 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Running BitNet b1.58 inside DRAM by breaking DDR4 timing rules · hn · 2026-05-23 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Memory Graph · hn · 2026-01-05 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.