NES - Nintendo Entertainment System

Super Mario Brothers, running on xNESDavid McEwen has been manged to port xNES the NES emulator by Michel David and Richard Hamel (amongst others) to the Acorn. Unfortunately improved versions of the emulator are unlikely, since it is no longer in development but the emulator is up to a high standard, and quite capable of running many games properly. David has been busy doing some upgrades himself to the many mappers in the emulator, and seems to be improving the compatibility all the time.

The screenshot is of a very pre-release version, with a few graphical glitches, as those that have seen the original game (who hasn't), will notice. Since the emulator is written in C (allowing the port) the emulator is not desperately fast, but can still run on pre-RISC PC machines, although you really need something a lot faster. David has been working very hard on updating the emulator and has added many new mappers over those available previously in order to enable more games to work properly.

Poor compatibility is still something of a problem at the moment, the xNES archive contains a list of buggy files in the !Help file so I suggest you read that before you download a ton of games that don't work.

Speed Rating: ARM 600 - Slow, StrongARM - Perfect

Technical Information
CPU - NMOS 6502 running at 1.7897725MHz
Display- 256x240 pixels, 64 sprites at once, 26 from a palette of 52 colours
Sound - 4 channels + digital sound channel
RAM - 8Kb with infamous MMCs to get past the 16bit (64Kb) program counter boundary
VRAM - 8Kb
ROM - upto 512Kb
reference - NES documentation by Y0SHi (Jeremy Chadwick) revision 1.00

Emulators:
xNES v0.27
xNES page at emulation camp
xNES source code

NES world - loads of background info on the NES

ROMs:
GameSP Nintendo ROMs
Zero's MetaROMs
Cyberdome NES page
Underground Cities NES roms
Duoduo - NES ROMs in packs
EmU EvIsCeRaTiOn

Recommended ROMs:
Super Mario Bros. 1, 2 and 3, Zelda, Bomberman, Elite (one of the best versions).


The Acorn Emulation Page - David Sharp
© Copyright David Sharp 1997,1998