NES hardware internals – how super mario bros fits in just 32KB.

The Nintendo Entertainment System is an iconic video game console from the 1980s,

and the first console to feature games like Super Mario, Zelda, Contra, Final Fantasy, and Megaman.

In this talk, I'll share everything I learned while building a software emulator for the NES with the Zig programming language.

Nez, the emulator, has a 100% spec compliant implementation of the MOS-6502 CPU, Video card, Buses, and mapper circuits.

We'll cover:

• Architecture of the NES hardware (CPU, PPU, APU, Cartridges).
• Limitations of the 8-bit gaming consoles.
• How retro games could run on just 32KBs of disk space and 2KB of RAM.
• Optimizations used by first generation game-devs.

The Nez emulator runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Users can burn ROMs into digital images, then play any NES game on the PC.

Here's a video of me playing Mario on the emulator: https://injuly.in/assets/video/mario-nez.mp4