Emulator Project Starting

I have decided that I am going to attempt to allocate a few hours every Wednesday to work on a homebrew project. While going back to my NES RPG would probably be a popular choice, the 2600Dragons.com project that I did for university has me interested in creating my own emulator. I know that there are many emulators available for pretty much any old system that you can think of so the work here is not really needed. Moreover, the emulators available tend to be pretty well written. Still, creating an emulator from scratch would be a very entertaining project.

My choices for target platforms would obviously be the Atari 2600, the NES, or a custom 8-bit console that I created just for the sake of creating an original emulator. Depending on what happens with my Masters degree, a variant of the third choice may be what ultimately happens but for now I am thinking of writing a JavaScript 2600 emulator. I have already created a rough simulator for the TIA chip, though it does need more work. It is the easiest of the three options to work on, and much of the work here can be translated to the other two ideas if it ever proves successful.

JavaScript is not the best choice of languages for creating an emulator but does have the advantage that it works on the internet. For this reason I am also considering writing the code in C and using an asm.js  compiler. Writing the emulator core library in C and compiling to JavaScript would allow me to use the core library in other C projects if I decided to go that route. I haven't used asm.js yet so this would be an interesting experiment.

The project would then be broken down into getting a memory subsystem for loading cartridges working, getting a disassembler working for disassembling the 6502 code on the cartridge into readable assembly language. Once I can get code disassembling then I can implement the emulation of the processor. Get the TIA chip emulated and add some interface code and I will have a rudimentary emulator. This sounds easy but I suspect the path will be a lot harder than I anticipate.

And yes, I do plan on creating a CoffeeQuest2600 game for the 2600 which would run in my emulator.