#6502 EMULATOR SERIES#

Yet, despite our over-ambitious nature, we soon realized that our original goals were simply unattainable due to the constraints of both time and processing power. We quickly jumped at this opportunity, and began to research the technical specifications of the system. In the short term, we want working emulation father off on the horizon, weвЂ™d like to add in some video generation and input capabilities to be able to play Apple II games.ДЄnd so, we begin our quest to emulate one of the greatest processors ever to walk the earth.ДЄs he stated above, when Jeff approached me with the concept of building a Nintendo out of the Atmel, I instantly thought back to the winter afternoons when I used to come home from middle school and spend hours glued to the gaming system.

#6502 EMULATOR SERIES#

WeвЂ™ve set a series of goals that increase in complexity, and plan to conquer as many of them as we can. This was the backbone of all the systems we examined, and so we figure it would be the right place to start. Finally, we settled on the unifying element of all these systems: the MOS 6502 processor. Once again, we needed to adjust the bounds of our project, or else risk certain failure. The emulation process usually degrades oneвЂ™s processing capability considerably, and there just wasnвЂ™t going to be enough cycles in the Stella emulator chip to render video and process input from the 6502. Due to some insane synchronization constraints between the AtariвЂ™s 6502 processing core and the proprietary Stella Television Interface Adapter (TIA) chip, we were pushing the limits of our poor little Atmel chips. Once again though, we were about to realize that we bit off more than we could chew. The result? вЂWeвЂ™re going to build an Atari 2600 emulator! Yeah!!вЂ™ This seemed more manageable, and we began work on it in zest, hoping to be able to relive our childhoods of playing Asteroids and Pitfall!. The systems integration would have probably taken us a year to build ourselves, so we decided to scale down the project a little. When Chris and I first started tossing around project ideas, I sputtered out: вЂHey! WouldnвЂ™t it be cool if we could emulate a Nintendo using some Atmel chips?вЂ™ Chris replied вЂOoh, thatвЂ™d be awesome, then I could play Ice Hockey and Final Fantasy 1 again!вЂ™ДЄfter looking over some documentation on the NES, we realized how impossible it was going to be to emulate not only its 6502 processing core, but also the separate Picture Processing Unit (PPU).

6502 emulator