Firstly with regards to the article, this is a neat environment and simple project, but lacks niceties even basic hardware such as the Atari VCS featured, including sprite handling and collisions thereof. When I start developing 6502 games, I expect to start with the Atari VCS or NES/Famicom platform, neither of which I believe have a true framebuffer. One noteworthy and fundamental difference between these sets of environments that's particularly interesting is that this 6502asm is capable of modifying its own code, whereas the other two environments mentioned use ROM and so lack this. As for its age, it seems younger than twenty years and so certainly wouldn't qualify as a first.

Secondly, with regards to RodgerTheGreat, it's interesting to see one of your messages here. I'm not certain I'd mark CHIP-8 as the first, but that's due primarily to my not being aware of any older virtual machines used for games, discounting any games on, say, the DEUCE. I've participated in this game jam, as well as the last, so I expect my submission has been properly submitted; here's to at least one other game I submit.