
Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong - dogichow
https://www.michaelfogleman.com/plotter/
======
fogleman
Woah, hey, it's me! I wanted to share this on HN but wasn't sure if it was
kosher. I guess someone else did it for me!

I just started working on these last week and they were very well received on
Twitter. Then, to my astonishment, Edward Tufte retweeted it!

[https://twitter.com/EdwardTufte/status/954537749234765825](https://twitter.com/EdwardTufte/status/954537749234765825)

I have one of his books but didn't realize he was on Twitter until that
moment. I was blown away.

A lot of folks asked to buy one, so I made the page that this HN post links to
on Sunday night. Within hours Tufte reached out to buy 3 of them! :-o I have 6
other buyers so far as well. So I've been busy fulfilling these requests and
trying to figure out shipping and stuff.

Interestingly, about half of the buyers so far are in neuroscience.

[http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268)

~~~
leggomylibro
Cool, you wrote your own NES emulator for this? This is off-topic, but I've
been meaning to write an emulator for ARM Cortex-M platforms as an
introduction to the idea, but haven't had much luck finding good beginner-
friendly resources.

So...thanks for writing up and collating so much information about the NES in
one place!

~~~
fogleman
Nah, I had already written the emulator a couple years ago.

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mattbierner
Very cool! I did a something using bitmaps a few months back (
[https://blog.mattbierner.com/nes-memory/](https://blog.mattbierner.com/nes-
memory/) ) but I really like how he visualized changes here.

If anyone is interested in exploring something similar, here's the simple
fceux script I used to sample the memory of a running NES game:
[https://github.com/mattbierner/NES-Memory-
Visualization/blob...](https://github.com/mattbierner/NES-Memory-
Visualization/blob/master/collector.lua)

~~~
matthewwiese
Your blog post is fascinating and I'm tinkled pink I found it, as I was
planning on doing a NES memory visualization project myself for a design class
this semester. Your idea of representing the bits as pixels is exactly what I
was cooking up in my preliminary notes. It's awesome to see that I wasn't
alone in my idea; your write-up and code will be a great starting point -- a
valuable citation for sure.

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mrkstu
What is going on with Mega Man? The other games look relatively atomic but
Mega Man has obvious dependencies spanning memory locations...

~~~
pubby
It's shuffling the order of its 256-byte sprite buffer each frame to implement
sprite flicker, which is done because the NES can only render 8 sprites per
scanline.

~~~
fogleman
Nice! I knew about sprite shuffling and wondered how it would look here but
didn't realize that was what was going on in this particular case.

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octorian
This actually makes me think of a project I'm currently neck-deep in working
on... Taking captured audio hardware register writes (in the form of a VGM
file) and having a modern microcontroller actually replay them on an actual
NES CPU. In other words... A hardware-based NES game music player. (Of course
I'm not actually visualizing much, yet.)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97jic_WRrwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97jic_WRrwY)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eafaFr9Q_rU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eafaFr9Q_rU)

~~~
khedoros1
These are all variants of NSF players. When looking for them, my requirement
was that they generate audio with an actual NES CPU.

This one I think is especially cool. Instructions to build a cartridge to run
on an unmodified NES:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170319202533/www.nullsleep.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170319202533/www.nullsleep.com/treasure/nsf_cart_guide/)

And these two both use an NES (or Famiclone) CPU, along with some other
hardware:

[http://kevtris.org/Projects/hardnes/](http://kevtris.org/Projects/hardnes/)

[http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=5957&view=next](http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=5957&view=next)

NSF is a cool format, itself. It's basically a specialized ROM format for
encoding game music and sound effects for playback, usually in an emulator.
And since it relies on actual CPU code rather than recorded register writes,
it can include loops and such programmatically.

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makmanalp
This is wonderful! This is kinda like a project I'm working on where we're
instrumenting memory accesses across each memory cell in a data structure to
be able to visually profile how the data structure is being used.

Plotting each cell individually over time had never occurred to me, and I'll
definitely try this!

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evanb
I could listen to the plotter go for hours.

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ukulele
Late to the party, but just wanted to comment that I appreciated the namesake
spelled out by social media icons in the footer. Some people put thought into
all angles :)

~~~
fogleman
Haha, everyone says that but it's totally coincidental - they're just in
alphabetical order. (GitHub looks like an O)

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neilcarpenter
Really cool! Reminds me of distellamap by Ben Fry (co-creator of Processing) -
[http://benfry.com/distellamap/](http://benfry.com/distellamap/)

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taude
In reading these comments, I'm surprised about the naivety of typical HN
reader with their relationship with the price of art.

I mean, a photo only costs like $10 to print an 8x10, why would the artist
dare charge $200 or more?

~~~
detaro
So which one is the typical reader, the one wondering about the price or the
one explaining to the first one why it shouldn't be surprising? (Or the ones
discussing what typical readers say or do?)

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tomc1985
$200 per print from a pen plotter?

I'm sorry but unless each print is hand-drawn or something, then $200 is a bit
much. Especially if there's masters sitting on a hard drive somewhere.

~~~
fogleman
No masters, each one sold is unique! If you buy one, I'll play another round
of Donkey Kong. haha

~~~
ortuna
It's totally worth $200. Same person has probably splurged on something they
deem is worth $200.

~~~
tinus_hn
Chances are most people are reading this story on a phone that costs $200 to
make and sells for $700.

