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So, an entertainment center designed to sit at your living room and function as a combained DVD/CD/MP3 player, TiVo, internet set-top box and play-station is a great idea.

And you're endorsing a proprietary platform (i.e. Sony PlayStation (TM) (R) (C) (patented)) for the gaming part? Why not a more open platform like Famicom whose patents have expired?

why not make some device based around an atari on a chip or a nes on a chip that used a portable cdrom or compact flash or something and just loaded roms

A typical NES cartridge contained a program ROM, either a tile ROM or an 8 KB tile RAM, and "mapper" hardware that bankswitched the ROMs and often provided timers. Emulating the different varieties of mappers in an FPGA may be trouble, given that you have to take into account CNROM (for Milon and Tetyais (tengen's tetris clone) plus fallback for old games such as SMB1, Duck Hunt, and one of my favorites, Binary Land), UNROM (for Contra, Ikari, Mega Man 1, and the Codemasters games), MMC1 (for Metroid, Zelda, Tetris, and Dr. Mario), MMC2 (for Punch-Out), MMC3 (for SMB2, SMB3, TMNT2, Mega Man 3-6, etc.), MMC5 (complex monster used in Castlevania 3), and more.

Learn more about mappers from Firebug's document at NESdev

why not make some device based around an atari on a chip or a nes on a chip that used a portable cdrom or compact flash or something and just loaded roms

A typical NES cartridge contained a program ROM, either a tile ROM or an 8 KB tile RAM, and "mapper" hardware that bankswitched the ROMs and often provided timers. Emulating the different varieties of mappers in an FPGA may be trouble, given that you have to take into account CNROM (for Milon and Tetyais (tengen's tetris clone) plus fallback for old games such as SMB1, Duck Hunt, and one of my favorites, Binary Land), UNROM (for Contra, Ikari, Mega Man 1, and the Codemasters games), MMC1 (for Metroid, Zelda, Tetris, and Dr. Mario), MMC2 (for Punch-Out), MMC3 (for SMB2, SMB3, TMNT2, Mega Man 3-6, etc.), MMC5 (complex monster used in Castlevania 3), and more.

Learn more about mappers from Firebug's document at NESdev

according to your logic, the NES, SNES, and every other machine that is non-existent in the year 2001 is a flop.

Only half right. The NES and Super NES may have lost commercial significance, but both consoles still have strong communities of independent developers. Find proof at the nesdev site; you might want to try my GNOME vs. KDE game.

I've been looking for a dev kit for a system w/ 4 controllers for a long time.

Here's Allegro. If you use DirectPad Pro to plug two Super NES controllers into your parallel port and then you plug in two USB controllers, you have four pads, enough to make a Mario Party clone.

NES also supports four controllers through the Four Score adapter. Read More on how to develop for NES.

Personally i am looking forward to the new SEGA console much better.

Sega is developing for Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2 and is expected to sign up as a developer on the Nintendo GameCube.

The Sega Genesis's 68000 CPU was made by Motorola, who would later work with IBM on the PowerPC design. Macintosh and Amiga computers started out on 68K and ended up on PPC. GameCube has an IBM PowerPC Gekko processor. See the connection?

My biggest problem with nintendo is its policy against roms: "The only purpose of Nintendo video game emulators are to play illegal copied games from the Internet." Bullshit. Ever heard of open-source roms such as GNOME vs. KDE Bingo?

I know there is a compiler online for the nes and the snes

There are common assemblers for NES and SNES. NES's 2A03 is a 6502 (same arch as Apple II and C=64) with an on-die sound generator. SNES's 65816 is nearly the same as that of the Apple IIGS. Neither is C-friendly. The 32-bit 68000 in the Sega Genesis, on the other hand, has a version of GCC.

but their cart based so you couldn't just trade them

It's relatively easy to make an EEPROM cartridge for NES; start here. Edit, compile, emulate, edit, compile, emulate, ... burn on to EEPROM, test for bugs tripped up by emu inaccuracies. Just make sure you never use NESticle for testing.

It would be nice if they did opensource their development tools.

Standard "why don't they just free the software" response: For one thing, they might have licensed technology and not licensed the right to sub-license it to the community. (This may be much of why NVIDIA hasn't freed the drivers for its video cards.)

For another thing, game companies sell software. They don't want competition from software designed to run on their older consoles. This is why Nintendo is going after not only ROMs but also emulators, even when such emulators are used to develop free software for old consoles.

Also, there are trademarks and copyrights on the games' content itself. If you have a devkit, you can rip graphics from Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon and use them in your own games.

the great thing about consoles is that the programmers can't just throw in a little extra and say "Oh, they'll upgrade".

But that's exactly what Nintendo did for the Super NES. The programming model for the Super NES CPU and picture generator wasn't that much different from that of the NES. Even though the sound was radically different (NES had 20 registers in CPU address space; Super NES had a mini-DSP in the space of a separate processor with an extremely obscure instruction set), most game publishers just used Nintendo's sound driver from Super Mario World (it was provided with the dev kits). In fact, backwards compatibility with NES games was planned but later dropped.

If all we need is running games on linux, why don't we emulate consoles?

TuxNES, DGen, and SNES9x (both available from Zophar's Domain) are console emulators ported to GNU/Linux + X11. Those consoles are from back in the day when games were games and not merely interactive movies. Want shooters? Lifeforce for NES and Zero Wing for Genesis are still as fun as it was when it was first released (and still more fun than modern shooters such as Q3A/UT/Tribes). And yes, software is still being developed for NES.

This has been done on the original GB too (with quite bad results...) All of these methods require CPU power though, the GBA has sound hardware that can read directly from the cart.

Actually, it only requires CPU power on the NES because the sound DMA hardware is on the same die as the CPU. Write to memory locations $4010-$4013 to set up a sound DMA and $4015 to set it going, and it plays without any intervention from the 6502 until either the sound ends or is halted, stealing a 6502 cycle every so often to fetch a byte of compressed sound data. Here's some more information about NES's sample hardware.

What the hell platform are you writing code on that doesn't have a debugger???

In some environments, the only debugger you have is printf() or the equivalent. How do you run GDB on an embedded system such as a cellphone or a game console? How do you debug a fullscreen application (game, media player, etc.) if you can't see GDB's window?

To find more MIDIs on the net, you could try Midifarm or Cowdance.

But look at the difficulty in making MIDI's (or NES music, or .ST3 .IT .MOD etc).

All you need is a background in music, software (Modplug Tracker for MOD/XM/S3M/IT, the NT2 tools for NES music (email Memblers at the NESdev site to obtain them), or Jazzware for MIDI), and a sound card, and you can cover any song.

although there's a 99% chance the RIAA made them just as illegal

Pretty close. Re-performance rights in a musical work, live or in studio, are managed by composers' and publishers' organizations such as ASCAP, SESAC, BMI, and Harry Fox Agency.

To sum up my point is that no politician could justify a tax if their was no sample coding. It would be like imposing a guitar tax, since you're probably going to play songs you didn't write.

And ASCAP/SESAC/BMI will probably go after that next.

The NES uses a modified 6502 processor that loses the binary coded decimal instructions and adds on-die sound hardware. The SMS (and its portable cousin Game Gear) uses the Z80 processor, which has a set of rollback registers remarkably similar to the Crusoe CPU's. But it still wouldn't be hard for One80 to port the 8-bit JVM to other 8-bit CPUs.

Remember back when consoles were milked of all their power before abandoning the system.

Fifteen years, and the NES console is still being milked. Download an emulator and head over to NESdev and get some of Chris Covell's NES software, or try my GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops for the NES.

There is still a hard-working nesdev community developing NES software. I am a member of this community, and I have developed some NES software myself.

You can find a prototype ROM image of GNOME vs. KDE along with the rest of the NES development effort.

• The memory devices and other componenets used on consoles are patented; only the console maker can authorize production of console software. For example, there wasn't an NES demoscene until the NES patents expired.
• Console makers are suing manufacturers of cartridge and disc dumping hardware (such as Bung) out of existence.

I've programmed in 6502 assembly on both Apple II and NES, and I've looked at a Game Boy ROM (Game Boy uses a Z80-compatible CPU, and only once have I ever seen a string written backwards. It was "DISK VOLUME BARSBAIT" in the old Apple II DOS 3.3. Try editing some legal NES ROMs with a hex editor.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

• Many of the games at the Allegro Games Depot recompile fine on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and UNIX® systems, provided you install the Allegro library.
• Want Tetris®? You won't get it, but you will get an exact clone along with six other games in freepuzzlearena. (This also needs Allegro.)
• Head over to Zophar.net for an NES emulator to run on your GNU, BSD, or UNIX system. Grab some free(beer/speech) software here and here. If you're not satisfied, get some i11ega1 ROMz at Tobbe's.

No$GMB is another good emulator to use, deeply ingrained with a debugger; it also allows you to run multiple gameboys simultaneously (on a 486 at that).

Get it and many other emus's at:

Archaic Ruins

The site mentioned in the article that clearly states 'Nintendo' only actually has Super Famicom/SNES information, and that seems quite outdated as it is. If you're looking for actual original NES information, nesdev.parodius.com is far more useful.

The only things I _couldn't_ find throughout it all were entirely accurate cpu timings of the thing. I've been trying to get something remotely close to accurate, and just haven't been able to dig anything up. (240 lines, 3 for reset despite having vblank bit(NOT interrupt) go off, and then 19 of vblank. The opcode timings are textbook, and I'm running on 113 cycles/line ... I get the feeling that there's something special about the opcode timings for the bloody thing, though. Something isn't adding up right here.)

Does anyone know where to find any such information? I have had no end of dead ends in the process.

If you follow the instructions in this guide , you can rip your own original music tracks from all those NES roms your *cough* friends *cough* have lying around on their computers. Why settle for a clean remix with proper instrumentation when you can relive the original cheesy 4-track goodness?

This just means that Sega is going to step up its anti-piracy campaign. (get paid) Nintendo of America Inc., for instance, doesn't even want players having ROM images of cartridges they own and even discredits freebeerware ROM development by claiming "emulators only support piracy."

Nintendo of America Inc., for instance, doesn't take kindly to amateur third-party development on its consoles:

Does Nintendo Think Emulation Companies Promote Piracy? Why?

Yes. The only purpose of video game emulators are to play illegal copied games from the Internet.

Nintendo's argument assumes that there are no legal copied games on the Internet, that no Nintendo-console-compatible games are free software or freebeerware. Nintendo also is indirectly slamming Sun's Java technology, an emulated platform commonly integrated into Web browsers.

ObTopic: Will Technopop be the same? Probably not. I assume that the standard GNU tools shipped with Free "BeerOS" 5 will be enough to make software for the Tight system. Is that right?

Looking at pictures of software in development now there isn't the same sort of generational leap between DC and PS2 as there was between SNES and PSX. Compare Street Fighter EX3 to Soul Calibur, for example. There are some games that are clearly prettier on PS2 (Armored Core 2 or Legion, anyone?) but it's certainly going to be a while before PS2 clearly outshines DC - bear in mind that DC developers will be on to their second generation of software by the time PS2 is released.

Believe it or not, Squaresoft isn't the be all and end all of gaming, either. And that's an estimated price only slightly higher than the tag on Sega's Shen Mue, which looks remarkably pretty itself.

I'd buy it for $370 (or probably considerably less when it finally makes its weary way over to Europe). But if it's competing against an established Dreamcast at half the price (that is, if Sega ever get their European launch together) then a lot of people won't be that interested. Yes, you get DVD capability out of the box. But you don't get a modem. DC is just the other way round.

As for PS2 running a PC emulator, as always, check out this emulator.

You mean like this one?