Since the dawn of time I have been interested in making an emulator for some sort of old console, and this week I finally started giving it a shot. The system I picked to work with was the NES, I figured it would be one of the more documented systems with low performance requirements which is pretty important because I hate optimizing my code and am using C# which can be a bit slow compared to lower level languages. Yesterday I finished the first part of this grand project a 6502 CPU emulator. The 6502 was a widely used processor back in the day used in the C64, Atari 2600, Apple I & Apple II, and of course the NES. This meant there was pleennnty of documentation for me to refer to although many systems had slightly different implementations of the CPU with some differing features their docs were still extremely useful. There are around 55 different operations the CPU can perform and like a gazillion addressing types for each one do making this CPU involved a ton of typing though it was quite straight forward for the most part. Actually coding the majority of the opcodes didn't take too long but debugging them to behave with all the subtle nuances and finding out what some obscure NES opcodes actually did seemed to take years. To assist with debugging I found a NES ROM called nestest.nes and a log from a fully function emulator running nestest.nes to compare against. Nestest.nes is an excellent tool that doesn't require video output to work, it runs through most operations the NES needs to support and the edge cases for using them to make sure your CPU can handle everything. But now my 6502 emulator passes nestest.nes so I consider this portion of my grand project pretty much complete, though the CPU cycle counting I'm doing needs a little fine tuning and I wouldn't mind polishing up some code.


My emulator's log in all its glory
It is pretty hard for me to measure the mhz of my emulator at the moment but I think I am crushing the 1.79mhz the NES required. Next I plan to implement the NES PPU so I can get some sort of graphics output from this beast though I am dreading working on it as it seems far more intricate then the CPU. After that I just need controller support and some support for loading the large variety of differing ROM types and hopefully I'll be able to start testing it against actual games instead of test ROMs.

This was a dose of sad news to find in my RSS Reader this morning, FileFront shutting down March 30, this is almost as bad as when Stage6 went away. :(

Edit: Turns out some people have acquired FileFront and will be keeping it running wooooo

Oh wow a real blog entry! This is madness!

Okay so, here I was, minding my own buisness, coding some HTMLz for a client. I started getting a lil bit drowsy so I decide to crack open a Rockstar. Now, I usually have this LED multicolour lamp on while I code at night so I can see around my desk. I have it on blue most of the time because I find it bright enough to see objects lying on my desk but dim enough that it doesn't cause crazy eye numbing contrast. Anyways, as I was cracking open the Rockstar I noticed something very strange. The liquid inside was opaque and kind of pukey coloured. At first I thought it had gone bad or something, so I turned on the light to look at it. I poured some out into a cup and it looked normal.

That left me wondering why it had looked so strange before. Being the clever person I am I decided to shine the light on it and see what happened.

Oh god what the fuck.




Seriously, what the fuck.

I'm jordan I suck cocks

Fix BBCode so it doesn't break W3Validator with Strict dtd kay? Thx.

So my laptop overheated last week and I believe it fried its video card, forcing me to switch onto my much less powerful desktop. I ordered a new video card for my laptop off EBay a few days ago, and I'm expecting it to arrive this Monday, hopefully it will fix the problems I was having but if it doesn't I don't see myself replacing the laptop for at least a month. My desktop really can't handle WoW so I have had a lot of time to waste doing other things, and I ended up spending most of that time working on the website. I added a search tool to the Admin section, it was my first time playing with the MySQL full-text search tools which really simplified things compared to how I made the search tool by hand in PHP on the old site. User management is in for the admins now so no more messing with the DB, and the new rank system has been deployed which is pretty much the biggest feature addition so far over the old site. The new ranks allow us to give users permission to make front page post while not making them fully powered admins. We have already started being targeted by spam bots again so I put in a quick anti-spam math question in for guest comments, and we are able to ban specific IPs again. All the random site settings, like the page titles and posts per page, are controlled by the admin page now. I also setup the RSS feed for the new site which is available Here. BBcode is back, although I haven't setup quite as many tags as we used to support I stuck with things I deemed important.
Here's the list of supported tags
[ b]text[ /b] - Bold Text
[ i]text[ /i] - Italic Text
[ u]text[ /u] - Underlined Text
[ img]URL[ /img] -
[ url]URL[ /url] - http://malandaven.com
[ url=URL]text[ /url] - MalAndAven.com

Code:

[ code]text[ /code]

Quote:

“[ quote]text[ /quote]”

NickMass posted:

“[ quote=name]text[ /quote]”
With all the above complete there really isn't much more for me to do on the site, besides add new features, so I'm considering the rewrite of the old site pretty much complete which is a nice thing to have done.