Story
Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64
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1 discussion
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Overview
A transformer model with approximately 25,000 parameters is implemented on an unmodified Commodore 64, utilizing hand-written 6502/6510 assembly. This 2-layer decoder-only architecture features real multi-head causal self-attention, softmax, and RMSNorm, and can be loaded from a floppy disk.
Summary from github.com.
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Community reactions
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Hacker News · github.com
Hacker News discussion ↗
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-04-21.
- Praise: The project demonstrates an interesting application of transformer architecture on retro hardware, showcasing creativity in utilizing limited resources.
- Praise: Running the model under enhanced conditions like SuperCPU with warp mode could significantly improve performance, making it more engaging for users.
- Concern: The model's output is criticized for producing broken and nonsensical sentences, raising doubts about the effectiveness of the architecture at such a small scale.
- Concern: With only 25K parameters, the model's capabilities are severely limited, leading to a lack of meaningful interactions and comparisons to outdated technologies.