That reminds me of this, a slightly bigger AVR emulating an ARM SoC running Linux:

http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.+Linux+on+8...

Emulate that system instead, and now you can theoretically boot a Linux system inside of TeX.

In the 1990s, when I was in college, I wrote a 6502 emulator in a text editor macro language (the text editor was QEdit, a DOS editor that was popular at the time). It was completely useless but a lot of fun.

There was a very low hard limit on the number of jumps (32, if I recall correctly) that complicated things. I eventually had to resort to a two step process, first translating 6502 code to a simpler virtual machine (using and abusing the find-and-replace command), and then executing that simpler code.

I wonder if this could be modified to control actual hardware? It looks the `\write18` command can be used to execute shell commands if LaTeX is run with the `--shell-escape` option. So in theory you could intercept all writes to the GPIO control registers and use a shell command to send bytes over the serial port to a physical MCU (or something like the SparkFun SPI Shortcut.)

Imagine a LaTeX document that, when processed, reads a series of measurements from a sensor over the serial port, then renders nice graphs directly to a PDF! :)

To be pedantic: this code is largely in TeX, not LaTeX.

This is mental and I love it.

Nice work, though I liked the dataref package even more!

We need more of this.

this is cool and you seem obviously intelligent, have you considered making something people want?

why?

"Are you insane? Not that anybody knows of."

hahaha that cracked me up, especially that i actually considered the possibility when i read the title.