Firefly Zero blog

Why we're staying on Discord

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Discord

Shortly after I started working on Firefly Zero, I registered a bunch of social accounts: Mastodon, Bsky, and Xitter. While I personally only use Mastodon, I want to provide everyone a convenient way to get project updates in their own favorite place. You can contribute to our projects from any OS and IDE, so why should I limit where you get you updates?

Discord followed shortly after, with the same motivation and purpose. I created two channels: #general where Discord would post a message for every new person joining (and others would send a “waving hand emoji” to acknowledge the fact) and #releases where I would post the same updates as on all other media.

Call for games

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re making a cool game console and we need you to make cool games for it.

Firefly Zero is a handheld game console, similar to Game Boy Advance (GBA). However, unlike GBA, it is modern (and easy to program), has same-room multiplayer (over Bluetooth), and uses a touchpad instead of D-pad for more precise controls.

Developer experience

Firefly Zero is a game console with the best developer experience. It is the first WebAssembly-powered handheld game console in the world. All you need to know about WebAssembly is that it is supported by almost all modern programming languages. And you can use any of them for writing Firefly Zero games!

Bringing WebAssembly to microcontrollers

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second and the last part of the series about the history of Firefly Zero. The first part: A brief history of fantasy video game consoles.

2017. WebAssembly

We already touched a bit on WebAssembly in the first part. It was released in 2017. I started to work with WebAssembly in 2019. At the time, the only thing I knew about it was that it’s a way to write frontend code in the Go programming language instead of JavaScript. And since JavaScript is somewhere at the bottom of my top of programming languages, that was enough of a reason for me to start using WebAssembly with Go.

A brief history of fantasy video game consoles

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post in the two-part series about the history of Firefly Zero. This post is dedicated to the technologies that inspired Firefly Zero, from early computers to modern programming languages.

Second part: Bringing WebAssembly to microcontrollers.

1977. CHIP-8

In 1977, Joseph Weisbecker released COSMAC VIP. It was a personal computer designed for writing and playing video games. The whole idea of video games was quite new. Tetris was created only in 1985 (8 years after COSMAC VIP). Pong was released in 1972, but it was an arcade game, and you would play it on a special big machine designed to run just this one thing. The idea of a computer that is designed for games and can be used to both write and play them was big.