Silly Programming Fun

I guess I should make this a private post, because I don’t really want people to come around and think I’m one of those hoaxers who post up fake screenshots of their programs and act badass for a few weeks before falling off the face of the planet. However, I don’t really care quite that much, so I’ll just leave this post up…

Anyway, something I’d fiddled with since I was a wee programmer in middle school was the idea of emulating one machine with another. That’s led to my current project, trying to emulate the original Nintendo (NES) on the Nintendo DS. I’ve spent the past few days working on a CPU core, and it’s more or less done and runs at nearly 4x the real NES CPU. What that means is that it’s taking up about 25% of the processor power, so I have the rest of the processing time for the PPU (the graphics processor) and the APU (the audio processor). Of course, I plan on putting most of the APU on the DS’s second processor, so I have a little more processor time for the graphics. Also, I figure once I fill out a few other things on the CPU (it doesn’t handle the special writes for I/O ports yet), that’ll take up a little more as well.

I still need to do a lot of reading on the PPU, so there won’t be working demos or screenshots or anything anytime soon. If you come across this post and get all excited about an NES emulator on the DS…just calm down. Use nesDS or nesterDS or something.