I've been looking through some old posts about NES emulators, and from what I can tell, it seems like a reasonable project (albeit with like 2 fps max). I know this idea has been brought up several times and nothing has really come of it, but according to everything it's definitely possible. I've tried compiling some old projects and none of them really compile too well (or I might just be stupid; they're equal possibilities). There's one by Ordelore based on an emulator made in C called Agnes (https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17953&start=0) and it looks pretty good from the screenshots, but from the description it's really slow since it's in C. The other one in Asm (https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15375&start=0) doesn't really work and would be harder to make, but has a lot more potential for actually running well. Both seem like they could have used a lot more optimization but nobody really advanced them much. I don't know nearly enough Asm or C to write anything good, so, uh, anyone got a spare weekend? Or if anyone is aware of a working download or a way to compile one of the previous projects, that would be appreciated as well. In the end, I legitimately do not care about the fps as long as it updates at least once per like 30 seconds. A simple draft is all I'm looking for and it can be improved on and optimized over time.

(In hindsight, this post makes me look super needy; that's my bad, I'm just a humble newbie and I don't really know anything. It would be nice to respond as soon as possible, but I don't want to intrude on any of your other projects/daily life. I have no authority or anything like that.)

I am pretty sure it is feasible on the CE since the Sega Master System appears to be feasible (isn't the Master System more powerful than the NES?) to a certain extent, but of course the performance won't be as great as TI-Boy CE.

It's worth noting that the Master System used a Z80 CPU, which (like the Sharp SM83 used on the Game Boy) is substantially easier to emulate on a eZ80-based CE than non-Z80 architectures.

If you're willing to take shortcuts in emulation, it's definitely possible to get individual NES games to run on a CE at a playable frame rate. Of course, shortcuts that don't matter for one game are going to make another completely unplayable, which defeats the point of a general-purpose emulator somewhat.

Well, this seems as good a time as any to sort of officially announce it . I'm working on a NES emulator, and its in the early testing phases. CPU emulation is at the moment functional(however, unofficial opcodes are not supported beyond what shows up in official game). Expect to see a thread about around the end of the month, hopefully by Halloween. Otherwise, you can see some of my progress over in the #z80-ez80 of the Cemetech discord

That's great news, Zaalane! I can't wait to see the early results when you post a Your Projects topic, based on your successes that I see in #z80-ez80.

Thanks guys! Very convenient timing Zaalane Glad to see that I'm not crazy and it's feasible. I've seen grubbycoder's port of 8-bit Sonic and it runs well enough to be playable. It could be a good approach to try and port a single ROM like he did just to see how difficult it would be. If I'm not mistaken, I believe this is also what was done with Super Mario 64 on the Nspire CX (which I never did get to run and funnily enough is how I accidentally upgraded my Nspire's OS too high a while back )

Anyways, good to see you're already working on something, Zaalene. In the meantime, I'm trying to learn assembly better so I'm gonna try and see if I can come up with anything. If EzCE releases ez80 Studio anytime soon, that would be neat.

On the scale of processing power, the GBC is way more complicated then the NES, but the GBC is just a lot more compatible with a calculator since it uses a z80 processor. If calcs used a Ricoh 2A03 like the NES for some reason, an NES emulator would be way easier to make than TI-Boy CE was.

I've attempted to work on one, but ran into problems getting stuff to render, as scanline rendering is way too slow to work on a calc. Unfortunately, even after dumping a nes games tileset to ram, I can't tell if it works due to being unable to read ez80. If anyone could help run tests on my version (or help teach me how to read ez80) and tell me what instructions are executing and where the instruction pointer in the code goes, I would appreciate it. PM me if you want to help.

Yeah, yours is one of the projects I was looking at. From what I could tell from the discussion, it seems like you got it working to a degree. I couldn't get it to run on my calculator (IDK if it was my calc, me, or the files that didn't work) but it sounds like it was doing pretty well. I'm actually in the process of learning z80 right now (as a step on my way to ez80). If you want, here's the guy I'm learning from on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChibiAkumas/featured
The theme is kind of cringe and it's more so general purpose z80 rather than just for calculators, but I've found it pretty helpful. I believe he also has ez80 tutorials if you already know z80. I just got myself to dump like $30 on a TI-connectivity kit for my 83+, so I'll be able to really start learning better in when it arrives in a bit.

Oh... did it say your missing a file called NESTEST? That is a rom file, I can tell you how to make them.

No, my bad. I just went to the forum and figured out how to get it running. So far I ran nestest on both my calc and CEmu about a minute ago and they're still on a black screen, so I'm not sure if it doesn't work or if the fps is just ridiculously slow (probably the latter) but I did compile the rom. It started on a white screen and went to a black one so it did do something.

It is incredibly slow rendering. I need to fully test the cpu however.

I finally just checked out Zaalene's Famicalc (I don't really use Discord much) and it runs Nestest pretty well (except the SAX test crashes the calc). I've tested a few other roms, and so far, (not super) Mario Bros, Balloon Fight, and Clu Clu land run (all 16kb). Neat.