4 ms·

Seems like a good followup post. I'd read that. I mean essentially it would make NES games running natively in the browser with no emulator right?

• AndyKelley 13y ago
  It's not quite as sunshine and rainbows as that. For one, I had to embed an interpreter runtime in the generated code to handle some dirty assembly tricks that programmers can do. Further, the Picture Processing Unit and Audio Processing Unit must be emulated. Even worse, there are some things that fool the disassembler that many games do. And finally, this project never even attempted to support mappers, which means that there are only about 8 or 9 notable games that this could even potentially support. As is, it supports Super Mario Bros. 1 only.
  • boomlinde 13y ago
    There was a NES emulator for the Game Boy Advance that performed with a surprising level of accuracy at full frame rate. I guess the CPU emulator was a simple state machine, but the interesting thing in this context is how it did the graphics and sound. Having a pretty advanced "PPU" of its own, with the same basic types of features (sprites, tile indexing background layers), it translated the PPU register writes (with appropriate scaling, I guess) to native register writes. I'm not sure how things like collision interrupts were handled, but presumably the GBA has similar functionality. For a javascript emulator or static recompilation, similar methods could be used to set up a bunch of shaders dealing with the basic functionality of the PPU (sprites, tile layers etc). Certainly less accurate and probably missing a bunch of corner cases, but it would definitely be the fastest approach to dealing with graphics emulation.