Heh, possibly not for everyone, but behold (please don't judge my terrible Octo code, I'm trying, I'm trying):
Somebody has written an Emacs lisp CHIP-8 emulator so I can just work inside there where I'm most happy. Next steps would be to set up Flymake for on the fly compilation and error checking and then just hook it up to rebuild and rerun on every save, and seems like a nice productive environment. At the very least, I can't lose anything anymore.