[HN Gopher] MetalNES: Transistor Level NES Simulation
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MetalNES: Transistor Level NES Simulation
Author : ingve
Score : 121 points
Date : 2022-02-26 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| aliswe wrote:
| iirc this is what they said would never be possible with any
| computer, whatever the specs (at real life speed).
| gary_0 wrote:
| Reminds me of GateBoy, which was posted a while back:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28396927,
| https://github.com/aappleby/MetroBoy
|
| GateBoy runs surprisingly fast for a gate-level simulation.
| pubby wrote:
| MetalNES is by the author of NESticle. Like Visual2C02 and
| Visual2A03, presumably it runs at such a slow speed that games
| are unplayable. Like, it may have taken hours to reach the SMB
| menu screen, but I would love to be corrected :)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Absolutely sick. Chip community is so rad.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| 0.5% of realtime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30482633
| DarylZero wrote:
| is this allowed for speedruns
| danaris wrote:
| Allowed? Maybe, maybe not.
|
| Helpful? Extremely not.
|
| I just ran this on my high-end M1 Max, and it rendered 2 frames
| in roughly 3 minutes.
|
| Hardware-accurate emulation is, generally speaking, _not_ fast
| emulation.
| rl3 wrote:
| Hardware-accurate emulation in _software_ is typically not
| fast. FPGAs however can achieve low-level emulation with a
| high degree of hardware accuracy:
|
| https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
| monocasa wrote:
| The 6502 unfortunately relies on some effects that can't be
| described in FPGA synthesizable logic. You might get a lot
| of speed up over the extremely simplified spice style
| simulation you have to do that still might get you to real
| time, but it's not the slam dunk you might think.
| russdill wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Any citations where I can read more
| about those effects?
| comex wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what effects are you talking about?
| monocasa wrote:
| The internal buses are basically true highz buses with
| multiple drivers and latches hanging off of them.
| theogravity wrote:
| Would be really cool to see a video of this in action.
| danaris wrote:
| I don't really pretend to understand much of what I'm seeing,
| but I've recorded a short video of it running and uploaded it
| to my server [0].
|
| From what I can tell, this 3-minute video shows the process of
| generating 2 and a bit frames.
|
| [0] http://topazgryphon.org/metalNES.mp4
| loeg wrote:
| ~9000 cycles/sec (displayed in the video), wow! For
| comparison, the NES ran at 1.8 MHz, or about 200x faster.
| From the number of frames drawn and time, I'm guessing this
| simulator is actually averaging much lower than 9 kHz.
| Scuds wrote:
| go lil' electron beam, go!
|
| 9000 cycles/s / 1.79 MHz = 0.5% of realtime. The only time
| you ever see rendering a line at a time is single stepping
| through an emulator.
|
| I wonder if this is how FPGA developers working in
| VHDL/Verilog see the world?
| https://www.patreon.com/posts/37038491 here's a short clip of
| the VRAM of a PSX rendering about half of a completed frame
| of Final Fantasy 7's battle screen.
| hedgewitch wrote:
| That it would. I don't have access to a Mac or time to get it
| building elsewhere, so a video would be great.
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(page generated 2022-02-26 23:00 UTC)