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WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

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Re: WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

#21

Post by softawre »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #18

Curious to see how it would handle Dragon Warrior 1 - I bet the dark dungeons probably don't use the scroll registers at all. Also Ultima III: Exodus would be interesting. I suspect it's "black out tiles behind walls and in trees" effect is done through the attribute table but don't really know what it does when elements scroll offscreen.

In DW1, when you moved into a wall, it made that "bump" sound, and there were a couple different torch widths, so I would guess you are actually moving around in the room. Interesting thought though.

Re: WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

#22

Post by JoshTriplett »

This looks really impressive!

I wonder if this could snapshot the state of the game, use spare CPU capacity (including other cores) to simulate in the background and feed in various inputs, and try to give a preview of the upcoming map? It wouldn't have to get very far; trying a few common input patterns would suffice.

I also wonder if this could apply some heuristics to see if the sprite layer scrolls consistently with the background, and if so, provide a preview of upcoming sprites too. If they consistently spawn at the same point, render them at that point.

Re: WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

#23

Post by monocasa »

ArtWomb wrote: post #12

This would make a cool art installation. If you can get access to one of those giant screens that you see demo'd at E3. You can visualize the entire Land of Hyrule from Lengend of Zelda. With a tiny Link navigating his way through the world ;)

The lost woods might confuse the algorithm pretty good.

Re: WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

#25

Post by glaberficken »

jklehm wrote: post #16
glaberficken wrote: post #5

Which brings to my mind an interesting question: Could a ml agent be used to auto-explore with the intention of visiting all parts of the game world? There has been recent focus on ML research trying to win or beat games. What if the goal was merely to have an agent that would manage to explore the largest game "area" possible? Has that been done before?

It has been done[1], I think even posted here but can't remember the title. Edit: Found the Mappy post from last year[2]. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.03908.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15026399

brilliant! thank you

Re: WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

#26

Post by arantius »

ArtWomb wrote: post #12

This would make a cool art installation. If you can get access to one of those giant screens that you see demo'd at E3. You can visualize the entire Land of Hyrule from Lengend of Zelda. With a tiny Link navigating his way through the world ;)

If you just want big maps, that's already been done (by hand):

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=legend+of+zelda+map

Re: WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

#29

Post by daniel5151 »

tanishalfelven wrote: post #28
daniel5151 wrote: post #27

Hey, I'm the author! If you've got any questions, fire away!

This was really awesome! Do you have any resources for how you got started creating an nes emulator? Definitely something I'd like to play around with...

Thanks!

The Nesdev wiki is the bible for writing NES emulators. It has all the technical documentation you'll need to implement the various aspects of NES hardware. It also has plenty of test ROMs, which are incredibly useful for verifying implementation details!

http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/NES_reference_guide

Fair warning, while it's pretty easy to get a half-decent 6502 emulator up and running, implementing the PPU is incredibly tricky. If you don't have a lot of experience writing emulators, I'd recommend starting with a simpler system, like the CHIP-8, before tackling the NES.

Re: WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

#30

Post by tanishalfelven »

daniel5151 wrote: post #29
tanishalfelven wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was really awesome! Do you have any resources for how you got started creating an nes emulator? Definitely something I'd like to play around with...

Thanks! The Nesdev wiki is the bible for writing NES emulators. It has all the technical documentation you'll need to implement the various aspects of NES hardware. It also has plenty of test ROMs, which are incredibly useful for verifying implementation details! http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/NES_reference_guide Fair warning, while it's pretty easy to get a half-decent 6502 emulator up and running, implementing…

thanks! keep up the awesome work :D
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