justinmeiners/lc3-vm resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2087 stars · 224 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A tutorial and accompanying source code for building a virtual machine for the LC-3 educational computer in about 250 lines of C. It is written as a literate program that explains each part of the VM implementation, including memory, registers, instruction execution, and trap routines.

Use cases

• learn how a CPU executes machine code
• write your own virtual machine from scratch
• understand low-level computer architecture concepts
• run LC-3 assembly programs like 2048 or a roguelike
• study a small complete emulator implementation in C

When to choose

• you know basic C and want a hands-on systems programming project
• you want to understand how VMs, CPUs, and assembly work internally
• you prefer a short, fully explained literate-programming tutorial

When to avoid

• you need a production-grade or full-system emulator
• you want a VM for a modern ISA like x86 or ARM
• you need a maintained library with a license for commercial reuse of the article (text is CC BY-NC-SA)

Facets

learning-resource · maturity stable

interpreter simulation developer-tools education tutorials programming-languages cross-platform cli windows lc3 virtual-machine emulator literate-programming assembly c tutorial computer-architecture linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="justinmeiners/lc3-vm")