NES emulator embedded in Qwen3.5-4B weights
Drew Breunig embedded a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) 6502 CPU emulator directly into the weights of the Qwen3.5-4B model. According to the announcement, it is now possible to run ROMs like Super Mario Bros inside the model, albeit very slowly. Drew Breunig drew inspiration from Divyansh Agrawal's qwenputer work and used conformance tests published 15 years ago by Christopher Pow to validate the implementation.
Shared on Hacker News, this project showcases an unconventional approach to hardware emulation through language models. While experimental and performance-limited, it opens avenues for integrating complex software functionalities into LLM weights.
This summary gives you the essentials. The full article, its figures and quotes are on Simon Willison's Weblog.
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