A couple of days ago me and Capt. Jordo decided to go back to maintaining separate blogs, so I'm back to blogging at good old NickMass.com, and Jordan is at jordanranson.com. Separating the blogs required that I make a new design which was a horribly HORRIBLY painful process but it's over now. I used SIFR for the first time to get the fancy fonts working in the headers, it’s a handy thing to have but an absolute pain in the ass to setup, I will be very happy when everyone can just use CSS fonts without worrying about them not being displayed in some browsers. I also disabled a lot of features that the previous blog had because they were just a pain to deal with, no more leaving comments, logging in, or any of that other junk. All the old posts are still in the database (viewable here) I just moved them off the front page to keep things tidy. My torrent site is still up and running despite the blog stealing its URL, you can find it over here.

I have continued working on my NES emulator, though I haven't been putting as much time in, and have made some progress. All the code was reorganized and is a lot more condensed and easier to read now, memory mirroring is functioning now along with being able to label certain memory addresses as read only. I also worked on the PPU so I can boot legitimate ROMs now without them getting stuck polling the PPU addresses over and over. I also wrote a bit of the SDL renderer to try and get some video output going and I was moderately successful. I can draw all the tiles and all the sprites but the backgrounds and palettes are royally messed, though I didn't spend much time trying to figure out what was going wrong.

Video of awesome sprite action.

Performance is looking to be an issue I'm only getting around 50 - 55 FPS (NTSC is 60FPS) when just straight up drawing the sprites and background without worrying about the palette or attributes, though the code is far from optimized and I am using the CPU to render everything instead of OpenGL. I have been using a game called Balloon Fight as my test ROM, it is apparently one of the easiest mainstream games to emulate properly, I had never heard of it before and it seems like a joust clone. I'm pretty tickled pink with how this whole project is turning out I anticipated myself giving up on it long before now; hopefully I'll finish it someday.

Edit
I found the silly mistake I was making that broke backgrounds and sprite colors and fixed it up.


OMG so amazing.