Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#2IOCCC entry? Tiny emulators seem to appear there semi-regularly, e.g. this one was memorable years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18198374
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#3Sometimes I think I'm good at programming, then I find something like this and I'm put back in my place.
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#4If you want to understand how a NES emulator works, I highly recommend javidx9’s videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrOv9FMX8xJHqMvSGB_9G9nZZ... I personally got more joy watching that series than out of HBO shows.
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#5Well, 5000 bytes of C++ plus the SDL library.
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#6you got me, though using SDL doesn't seem quite as fair if you use that title :P
nice work though. I have been writing a compile-eval NES emulator in multiple languages, C++, Rust and such, it was a lot of fun. Still haven't managed to get it working with Rust, I still have hope.
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#7Well, 5000 bytes of C++ plus the SDL library.
The emulator receives keyboard input from SDL and generates a framebuffer which it passes back to SDL. SDL is only used to handle the grunt work of reading keyboard input and displaying the framebuffer in a window, which is not the interesting part of writing a NES emulator.
It's also not a necessary part of an emulator -- it's actually easier to write an emulator that reads controller inputs from a TAS movie file and writes its output to a video file. Making it interactive is just more fun.
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#8Those who enjoy this might also enjoy "Creating a NES emulator in C++11" [0] [1] [2] while not short in bytes of code(space) there is a nice video series short in minutes(time).
Bisqwit takes you on a 30 minute tool assisted coding journey of making an NES emulator and also provides a 15 minute followup Q&A video explaining different aspects.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y71lli8MS8s
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#9Well, 5000 bytes of C++ plus the SDL library.
SDL isn’t the emulator. It’s the hardware.
Re: Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++
#10Well, 5000 bytes of C++ plus the SDL library.
Even IOCCC allows SDL (for example, 2005/jetro [1] is the only entry that used SDL_Audio as far as I know), so it is not that significant.
[1] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2005/jetro/j...