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I made a NES emulator in 15 minutes

Bisqwit · 389.3K views · 2011-12-05 · 15:04

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Overview

Bisqwit writes a NES emulator in C++ in about 15 minutes of tool-assisted, sped-up coding, narrated with captions. It shows an accurate emulator built with a compile-time generated 6502 instruction table. Part 2 covers compiling and running it.

On Hacker News

HN programmers admire it as a clean, clever demonstration of emulator design and as the standout of a favorite programming YouTuber.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2013–2022

Topics

Demoscene & retrocomputingC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesSoftware practice, open source & careers
Search by tags
nes6502c++emulationlive codingopcode dispatch

What people said

petercooper · 2019-01 · Strong recommendation

Agreed. My favourite programming YouTuber by a long stretch. If anyone is unfamiliar with him and wants to watch some of the "classics" I'd recommend these: His "cracking videogame passwords" series: [LINK] Creating a Doom-style 3D engine in C: [LINK] Creating a Rogue-like game in C++11: [LINK] Creating a PIC16 emulator and NES music player: [LINK] Creating a NES emulator: [VIDEO] Creating a DOS VGA raytracer: [LINK]

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molticrystal · 2022-10 · Recommendation

Those who enjoy this might also enjoy "Creating a NES emulator in C++11" [0] [1] [2] while not short in bytes of code(space) there is a nice video series short in minutes(time). Bisqwit takes you on a 30 minute tool assisted coding journey of making an NES emulator and also provides a 15 minute followup Q&A video explaining different aspects. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]

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petercooper · 2016-10 · Recommendation

[LINK] is by far my favorite and I've spent many hours watching him. He does things like create a Doom-style engine from scratch: [LINK] .. create a NES emulator: [VIDEO] .. work back from a C++17 example to show why new C++ standards are needed: [LINK] .. and even building a Tetris clone in GW-BASIC: [LINK] .. Right now, he's doing a series on cracking 80s videogame passwords: [LINK] Sirajology - [LINK] - is another interesting one. He moves a bit too quickly for me, but does things like explain machine learning in 5 minutes or how to generate music with systems like Tensorflow.

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Sources

Video by Bisqwit, played through YouTube.

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