- bmonkey325 457 days agoI would think you would still need some sort of microVM or container that would act as the runtime. I get that MAME is probably too large now serving so many masters.
- bmonkey325 457 days agoI would think you would still need some sort of microVM or container that would act as the runtime. I get that MAME is probably too large now serving so many masters.
- Very cool! I loaded it up and played around with it a bit.
Huh, I didn't know about that GEOS book back when I was a kid trying to figure out how to make GEOS programs. I wrote a letter to Berkeley Softworks asking for information about how one could develop GEOS programs, and I guess someone felt sorry for me because they sent me a huge binder with a printed version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to GEOS:
https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/geos/geos-manua...
I still have it today. Needless to say, as a kid, I had a great time reading it, making programs, and learning lots of new things. :)
- My C=64 childhood consisted of BASIC, Simons' BASIC and a Finnish translation of this:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32184/Commodore%2064.../
Trying things out without any preconceptions of how programming should work was quite an adventure.
- I love this site! It was set up by the daughter of a MOS program manager to honor the memory of her father. I've bought some t-shirts and other merchandise from the site to remind me of the microprocessor on which I learned machine language programming (and how computers really work) as a child. The designs really capture the essence of MOS, and were clearly made from love.
However, there is potential for tooling that makes it easier to generate a crafted solution for a particular game/program. NES games may be too complex for a crafted solution. But if a program's execution can be characterized in a way to make most of it machine translatable, leaving only a few trouble areas to patch up (and implementing I/O integrations), then a recompilation could be practical.
Some categories of program are likely even harder than most NES games. For example, I've seen C64 games with self-modifying 6502 code. But in one case, the self-modification technique is applied consistently throughout (possibly a compiler optimization) and can theoretically be characterized and taken into account.
I occasionally tinker with the idea of recompiling a particular 8086 game. But I sometimes feel that it's almost cheating to pick it as a target, since it's so ridiculously suited for such an endeavor. :) It's tiny (far smaller than any NES game), has very simple I/O needs, and was apparently compiled in Turbo Pascal without any sort of optimizations, thus producing machine code that is immensely straightforward. Maybe someday I'll get around to it.