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Hacking the NES With Lisp
Andy Hefner has a detailed blog post covering his quest to program an NES with the assistance of Common Lisp. He developed a new 6502 assembler, a mini-language for composing musical sequences, and a neat demo (rom image).
on the one hand, this guy has re-implemented assembler with lisp syntax.
on the other hand, this guy has re-implemented assembler with lisp syntax.
I think that is the coolest thing I have seen in a while. Nothing like the king of all high level languages generating low level machine code.
But can it run Crysis?
Are you kidding?! There are probably more working NES consoles out there than N64 or Nokia N-gages.
May the Maths Be with you!
He benefited -- he had fun doing it.
And I benefited -- had fun reading about it. (Even I have no real nostalgia for the NES -- I played some when I was a kid, but was on more powerful hardware when I started hacking.)
So maybe the next project is recreating the hardware.
Exactly right. I can think of 10 different closets right now that have NESes inside.
Those NES boxes are quite comfortable with their sexuality, thank you very much, and just value their privacy. If they want to stay in the closet, who are we to disagree?
Bravo, Slashdot. This is the kind of stuff that the geek crowd finds interesting. Is it useful? Nope. Is it cool and borderline bizarre? Yep!
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
I truly extend my condolences that your pet project didn't get featured on Slashdot and that it has made you bitter and jealous of the work of others.
wow there killer, way to think outside of the box, you installed software on your pc and let nintendo tell you what you could do! we need more people like you and less of these retards doing interesting things with obsolete machines.
This is why I've always preferred computers to consoles because the DRMtastic nature of the consoles quickly make them worthless.
Except most people aren't willing to buy a PC and hook it up to a TV. The cases are too big, they don't come with a recliner-friendly remote, etc. For this reason (and greed), the Wii is still a lot more likely than the PC to get games capable of using multiple controllers.
What would happen if you built what would essentially be rom code toolbox routines to access the snes's hardware, and then switch execution to a more powerful/more modern low energy cpu, like an arm?
You'll have reimplemented Super Game Boy (for Super NES) or Game Boy Player (for Nintendo GameCube).
Does that C&C lathe play CNC Music Factory
Or is it a...
Command and conquer lathe controller?
I'm not vicious or malicious, just lovely and delicious. OSLT.
Cheers!
thith ith awethome!
I wrote a 6502 assembler in Logo in 1981 and we shipped it with the utilities disk.
That it had the key word defun. I guess I've got to complement them on their honesty that one of the goals of the creators of lisp was to remove the fun from programming.(Because it certainly did for me.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Just what I needed 35 years ago.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
send him a crate of beer ;)
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Fun! This 6502-assembler-in-LISP looks similar to Henry G. Baker's "COMFY" 6502 compiler (described in "The COMFY 6502 compiler", SIGPLAN Notices, 1997). You can check out the COMFY-6502 implementation that uses Common Lisp (sadly this appears to be entrapped in the ACM non-commercial-use-only license, though for 6502 code that isn't very limiting). One cool thing about the approach of using LISP as an "assembler" in general is that unlike many traditional macro assemblers, this approach can easily do stuff like choose the optimal instruction set for branches because it can determine if it's in range for a short branch and use them when available. You can do it other ways, of course, but it's pretty elegant in LISP. Those interested in this sort of thing might like my page on 6502 Language Implementation Approaches or my page on making LISP-based languages more readable (especially sweet-expressions).
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
If you`re curious about the idea of mixing new hardware with old, look into Amiga CPU boards. Folks have taken an Amiga that shipped with a 14Mhz 68020 (or in some cases even a 7MHz 68000) and added a 200+MHz PPC as basically a co-processor. Of course when you do this, the original hardware becomes a bit of a bottleneck, so next thing you know you`ve also added a separate video card, sound card, and SCSI controller.
But I think there have been at least a few demos that used an `060 or PPC CPU to render some fancy gfx and push it out the stock graphics hardware.
if you tried to do what this guy is doing for NES with a Sony Playstation or IPhone you would sued and threatened with millions in legal bills. If you don't believe me, ask George Hotz.
slashdot didn't move away from geeky stuff... certain corporate interests decided to attack the entire principle of DIY at its core. you can't expect slashdot to be silent about that.
I hope all the HTML-5 "coders" are taking note.
Art is about creative self-expression. If someone feels that writing an assembler for a 25 year-old console and making it 'go bloop' expresses himself in ways that modern technology cannot, what's the harm in that? It's neat. He obviously isn't trying to get rich or serve any other practical purpose with this.
Here is a interesting article about the design of the 6502, on archeology.org of all places.
But you already knew it was archeology.org, didn’t you?
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Somebody better call a waaahbulance for this guy
streaming raw data prepared for it through a cable from another machine
That would be Wide Boy, the pre-production version of Super Game Boy. Or it would be Super FX, a second CPU on a Super NES cartridge that renders graphics. In discussions about "super-mappers" on NESdev BBS, I've often mentioned a TV tuner for NES connected to an Xbox 360 as the hypothetical "upper limit" of what a mapper can do.
So, what you're really saying is, "I'm unhappy with my life because I've never known what creativity feels like"?
nintendo frankly doesn't give a flying fuck what you do with a 25+ year old NES dumbass.
Since doing something creative, if not actually constructive, takes your time away from playing and buying the latest Nintendo games, I'm sure they're actually against such anti-consumerist ventures.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Thounds thtoopid to me.
The GREATEST arcade video games EVER CREATED ran on EXTREMELY limited hardware when creativity and ingenuity ruled the day.
For example, the PAC-MAN program Toru Iwatani et. al. created in 1979 for NAMCO was only 8 kilobytes and could fit on two sheets of paper. It was copied into 100,000 game cabinents, and made well over ONE BILLION DOLLARS worldwide!
The graphics where laughably crude compared to today's games but it was FUN TO PLAY.
When STREET FIGHTER II came out in 1991, it heraled the end of these colorful, fun games with crude graphics and replaced it with graphics, graphics, and MORE GRAPHICS!
Before home game consoles got powerful enough to make video arcades essentially obsolete, all you could find in an arcade were fighting games, driving games, and shooting games, along with the cheesy ticket redemption games.
This is why old school gamers got together and created arcade game emulaters such as MAME to relive the experience of playing these earlier games. The industry response was to crack down on the ROM sites that provided the games MAME needed to run (rightfully so on copyright grounds) then create GAMETAP which is essentially MAME across the internet.
At least the industry has thrown a bone or two to the old school gamers by re-releasing early hit games in their arcade form or making a game pack of them bundled into a dedicated controller that can be plugged into the RCA jacks of your TV set.
Did anybody else read the headline and automatically think "N. E. Eth.?" Or was it just me?