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Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Emulator for ESP32
- msephton 4y agoGalaga is one of the most iconic arcade machines of all times. It has been remade and emulated many times. So far the cheapest and smallest system able to do a faithful emulation of the original arcade machine was the raspberry pi. But even the much cheaper ESP32 should be able to easily emulate a machine from the early 80's, shouldn't it?
- buescher 4y agoThe ESP32 is very roughly equivalent to a Pentium 90, right? So I would expect early 80s arcade emulation to be marginal to good. You could get DOS and Windows packages of emulated arcade games in the early-mid 90s.
- MegaDeKay 4y agoThe top level comment by msephton is taken directly from the first paragraph found in the link without attribution. Of course the text in the linked project goes on to explain further.
- msephton 4y agoI find it funny that I'm getting downvoted for quoting the article. I should have used quotation marks!
- pjmlp 4y agoMore like a beefed up PC 1512 due to its memory.
- SillyUsername 4y agoRealistically it'd be closest to an Amiga 1200 with small accelerator + extra RAM, that's about an order of ~5 times slower than a P90.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- TillE 4y ago> The galaga arcade was driven by three Z80 CPUs I'm not super familiar with arcade hardware, but it's always fascinated me how the Z80 and the 6502 dominated the market for reasonably-priced CPUs for about a decade. You'd just use one for everything. The 68k would eventually come into the picture, but even into the 1990s you still had a major console like the Super Nintendo using a 65816, which is essentially a 6502 with 16-bit extensions. Games were getting really big in the 80s, but it took a long time for hardware R&D to kick into gear.
- flatiron 4y agoMain reasons for SNES was its last minute scrapped backwards compat had it pick that chip. They made up for it having a great audio chip and PPU and a bus that you could just bring your own CPU (like sa-1 which is basically a snes 1.5 cpu)
- Bluecobra 4y agoThere is a emulator project to get NES games working on the SNES: https://github.com/Myself086/Project-Nested https://github.com/Myself086/Project-Nested So far they are up to 89 games that play perfectly.
- midoridensha 4y agoSo have they tried running NES games with this emulator, on an SNES emulator?
- Bluecobra 4y agoYou could use a SNES emulator on a computer or use a flash cart and play it on the real hardware.
- deaddodo 4y ago> but it's always fascinated me how the Z80 and the 6502 dominated the market for reasonably-priced CPUs for about a decade. Only a decade? I would argue they had at least 15 years of dominance and were being used en masse for ~20 (the Genesis, SMS, NES, Gameboy, etc were using them well into the 90s, as you mentioned).
- spoils19 4y agoAnyone else remember that very short Galaga scene in the first Avengers movie? Good times!
- benj111 4y agoThe /first/ avengers movie? https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118661/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118661/
- thangalin 4y agohttps://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/the-galaga-no-fire-cheat-mystery/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/the-galaga-no-fire-chea...
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoAn amazing story. Thanks! Here’s the PDF of the 1983 video game magazine he mentions http://arcarc.xmission.com/Magazines%20and%20Books/Joystik%20Magazines%20(10%20Issues)/Joystik_Vol2-SE_83_Oct_(replace_me).pdf http://arcarc.xmission.com/Magazines%20and%20Books/Joystik%2...
- unwind 4y agoVery impressive! It's weird for projects like this, that you become constrained by the modern hardware being "too good". The display, a fairly generic 320x240 LCD driven by the ILI9341 controller, is 16 or 18 bits per pixel. That gives 65,536/262,144 colors, and I guess Galaga would be fine with what, 16? 64? The display is interfaced over serial SPI at maximum clock of 40 MHz, which means sending one screeenful of pixels takes (320x240x16)/40e6 = 0.03072 seconnds. That is where the 30 Hz update rate comes from. I had to check the datasheet [1] but of course the display controller does not support any fewer colors, so you can't speed it up by scaling down. Too bad. :( Edit: add link, remove half-finished thought. [1]: https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/ILI9341.pdf https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/ILI9341.pdf
- CliffyA 4y agoThe display also supports partial updates, so you can just upload a few sub rectangles of what has changed onscreen. AKA "dirty rectangles". You can get over 60fps depending on how much is changing, and since these games are on a static background, that's not much.
- Tepix 4y agoIt's a pity that the Raspberry Pi Pico and the DVI sock together cost more than a Raspberry Pi Zero. Doesn't make a lot of sense to port Galaga to it other than to embrace the challenge.
- schwartzworld 4y agoA) can't get a pi zero yet B) Pico is more robust, easier to battery power, and can be hard reset without corrupting the storage.