
NES Emulator on Arduino - ForHackernews
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/15/arduino-plays-nes-games/
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MayeulC
> Arduino Due

It's a 32-bit, 84Mhz cortex M3. So, not as impressive as I thought it would
be, but still impressive as a bare-metal emulator. Price is closer to the
RaspberryPi range, but in a much lower power envelope.

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0xcde4c3db
This reminds me of when the emulation scene originally emerged in the 90s and
a lot of people were still running 486 CPUs. Although they're mostly forgotten
now due to other emulators surpassing them in features and compatibility, at
the time the more heavily optimized emulators like NESA and NLKSNES were kind
of a big deal if you couldn't afford to upgrade.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Indeed. I remember running Playstation games on a Pentium 166Mhz with 64Mb of
RAM via Bleem. If one is dedicated and willing to sacrifice compatibility,
emulators can achieve some amazing things with paltry resources.

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soylentcola
Did it run on something that slow? I remember being amazed by the surprisingly
decent performance on my Pentium-based PC but it was like a 233 or 266MHz chip
if I recall.

Either way, it was great because I was a young guy without much disposable
income and while my previous roommate had a Playstation, I lost access to it
when we moved. I still had a handful of games and I could continue playing
them on my janky PC.

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xchip
An ESP43 can do the same, the only thing this is news is because we all
thought it was an Atmel chip and not an ARM one.

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gsliepen
I guess that's a typo, and you mean the ESP32. It's indeed an amazing little
chip, used in the ODROID GO to emulate several old game consoles:
[https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-
go/](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/)

~~~
pjmlp
To put ESP32 in perspective, it is much more powerful than this baby over
here,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re40EEKHAqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re40EEKHAqU)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uUPKMmXYTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uUPKMmXYTs)

ESP32 has enough juice to do everything we were able to do in MS-DOS and then
some.

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Retr0spectrum
If anyone else is wondering, the Due has an AT91SAM3X8E, an ARM Cortex-M3
specced at 84 MHz.

~~~
pjmlp
My first PC that I actually owned was a 386SX running at 20MHz....

~~~
chrisstanchak
Packard Bell?

~~~
pjmlp
Back home all we got were local OEMs doing their own brands, Topis.

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sitzkrieg
everyone pointing out the due specs isn't wrong. its not that impressive from
a specs standpoint, this is not an 8 bit micro labeling be damned. just a run
of the mill arm emulator. but there is merit in the sw

~~~
Retr0spectrum
It _is_ impressive, but the title led me to expect more. When I think Arduino,
I think 16MHz AVR. When I read the title, I was hoping someone might have made
a 6502 -> AVR static recompiler.

~~~
sitzkrieg
me too

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glouwbug
For what an AVR is actually capable of over VGA (with sound):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNCqrylNY-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNCqrylNY-0)

Its better than what most NES systems did at the time, even without a
dedicated video / sound system.

