Lightweight but complete NES emulator. Straightforward implementation in a few thousand lines of C++.
Written from scratch in a speedcoding challenge in just 72 hours.
Intended to showcase low-level work, processor and instruction set work, 6502 emulation, basic game loop mechanics, audio, video, user interaction. Also provides a compact emulator, fully open and free to study and modify.
No external dependencies except for those needed for interfacing:
- PortAudio for sound (http://www.portaudio.com/)
- GLFW for video (http://www.glfw.org/)
If you compile GLFW yourself, be sure to specify shared build ('cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .') or you will enter dependency hell at link-time.
Fully cross-platform. Tested on Windows (MSVC) and Linux (g++). Makefile provided for the latter case.
Fully playable, with sound! Full CPU, APU, PPU emulation.
6 of the most common mappers are supported (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7), covering roughly 80-90% of all NES games. Get a .nes v1 file and go!
Written from scratch in a speedcoding challenge (72 hours!). This means the code is NOT terribly clean. Always loved the 6502 and wanted to try something crazy. Got it fully working, with 6 mappers, in 3 days.
I tend not to like OO much, especially for speedcoding, so here it's pretty much only used for mapper polymorphism.
Usage: KNES <rom_file>
Keymap (modify as desired in 'main.cpp'):
| NES | Keyboard |
|---|---|
| Up/Down/Left/Right | Arrow Keys |
| Start | Enter |
| Select | Right Shift |
| A | Z |
| B | X |
| Turbo A | S |
| Turbo B | D |
Emulator keys:
| Keyboard | Action |
|---|---|
| Tilde | Fast-forward |
| Escape | Quit |
| ALT+F4 | Quit |
The display window can be freely resized at runtime. You can also set proper full-screen mode at the top of 'main.cpp', and also enable V-SYNC if you are experiencing tearing issues.
I love the 6502 and am relatively confident in the CPU emulation but have much less knowledge about the PPU and APU and am sure at least a few things are wrong here and there.
Feel free to correct and/or teach me about the PPU and APU!
Major thanks to http://www.6502.org/ for CPU ref, and especially to http://nesdev.com/, which I basically spent the three days scouring every inch of, especially to figure out the mappers and PPU.