Chipformer: a hand-compiled 32M transformer that runs 119 CHIP-8 games
RevealIndividual7567 · reddit · 2026-10-16
A Reddit user released Chipformer, a decoder-only transformer that acts as the game engine itself — no emulator involved.
- Runs Tetris, Pong, Space Invaders and 119 CHIP-8 games; swapping ROMs only changes the prompt, weights stay fixed
- Each generated token is a memory write; attention handles memory reads while ReLU circuits decode opcodes, do arithmetic and bitwise ops
- Weights are compiled from a circuit, not trained — only 139k nonzero parameters in a 18-layer, 42-head, 32M-param fp64 model
- Open weights on Hugging Face, plus code, live demo and a desktop app
Related event: Chipformer: A Transformer That Runs 119 CHIP-8 Games as the Engine Itself(2 posts)→
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