A Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator written in C++
As this is just a pet project, don't expect a full-featured emulator. There is no GUI, many typical features are missing, and only a few mappers have been implemented. However, the code is pretty clean and straightforward, and I think can be useful to learn from. Of course, if someone wanted to fork this code to write a full-featured emulator, that would be cool as well :)
| Input | Keyboard Key(s) |
|---|---|
| D-Pad | arrows |
| A | A |
| B | S |
| Select | Tab |
| Start | Enter |
|
Open Rom | Ctrl + O Reset | Ctrl + R Quit | Alt + F4
As with most pet projects, the purpose of writing this emulator was mainly to learn. My background is not in hardware, but I have always had a keen interest in computer architecture, so part of my goals was to learn more about how a console works at the hardware level. The NES is simple enough in that respect, although it has enough quirks to make it interesting to emulate.
To further my learning, I challenged myself to write this emulator without looking at any other emulator code. So the implementation is completely my own, and I suspect parts of my code may seem strange or inefficient as compared to other implementations.
Although I did not look at other emulator source code, I did get a lot of information and help from other sources:
- The awesome people on the #nesdev IRC channel (huge thanks!)
- Excellent documentation on the nesdev wiki
- Other excellent emulators I used to compare output, trace, and debug: