LandyNES

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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Memblers
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LandyNES

Post by Memblers »

https://twitter.com/WaluigiBSOD/status/ ... 7538512897
Recently, twitter user WaluigiBSOD discovered a 1996 copy of the LandyNES emulator. It's among the first NES emulators (such as Pasofami, NESA, and iNES). This "public beta" was released by Damaged Cybernetics, but the file was long gone from the internet, and wasn't on the wayback machine either. Someone in 1997 made a CD-ROM with hacking/phreaking/virus etc info, and emulators, including this one. In 2020, an ISO of this CD-ROM was uploaded to archive.org. Finally, the file was located using the DiscMaster site. http://discmaster.textfiles.com/

I'd heard of the emulator back then, and was disappointed that it wasn't available, as well as iNES for DOS, which was said to exist but wasn't released for whatever reason. So it's really interesting to finally try it out. Back then, iNES and Pasofami were both Windows95. But I only had DOS and Win3.11 up until the year 2000. For a short time there, before NESticle and then loopyNES were out, NESA was the only emu I could run.

So yeah, this early version of LandyNES is hardcoded to load cart.rom for PRG and cart.vid for CHR. I bet this might be why that Nintendo test cart was often found named as cart.nes, was being used with a later version of the emu perhaps.
controls:
arrows - d-pad
q,w - B,A
tab - select
capslock (press it twice) - start
F10 - pause/resume emulation
F11 - reset
F12 - quit

Games I tested:
Mario Bros (PAL Classic Series version, 40kB NROM) - only the title screen worked.
Donkey Kong - fully playable.
Binary Land - playable, but graphics aren't cleared from the screen
Battle City - fully playable
binary.png
battle.png
I hope Landy doesn't mind it being reposted after all these years, it's an interesting bit of history. Really cool that it exists.
Pokun
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Re: LandyNES

Post by Pokun »

It seems it was the emulator that iNES was based on, definitely a big part of emulation history. It seems to take raw PRG/CHR dumps like Mame.

Hopefully it doesn't come with any "virii".
kmg
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Re: LandyNES

Post by kmg »

Thanks for sharing. I love stuff like this. Gotta try it out! It makes me wonder what other emulators I'll someday need to run in future emulators.
Pokun wrote: Sun Jan 08, 2023 4:27 pm It seems it was the emulator that iNES was based on, definitely a big part of emulation history. It seems to take raw PRG/CHR dumps like Mame.
The good news is I've got all these split NROM dumps from MAME to try throwing at LandyNES :)
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rainwarrior
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Re: LandyNES

Post by rainwarrior »

Neato!
Pokun
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Re: LandyNES

Post by Pokun »

I have no idea how to change controls, or what the default controls even are.

Heh, the NFO file has some historical people mentioned as members of Damaged Cybernetics, including DiskDude, Landy himself and our own Koitsu/Yoshi. I wonder if anyone else there is a member here.
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Dwedit
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Re: LandyNES

Post by Dwedit »

Ah Diskdude, his name still turns up on supposedly clean ROM images from time to time.
Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!
Landy
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Re: LandyNES

Post by Landy »

Hi, guys.

LandyNES and iNES was created by me from scratch almost at the same time.
One 6502 engine was written on pure C, other with x86 asm.
I keep in mind speed so it was highly optimized for it. Even CPU's ZCVN flags stored in x86 flag register, and converted every time when 6502 required to store in memory/stack.
So optimization was mistake. But at that time my PC was just 486 DX4/100. After Nesticle released I decided to stop that run.

Marat still keeps my copyright in 6502.c (EMUL8 package).

Best wishes,
Landy
Pokun
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Re: LandyNES

Post by Pokun »

Thanks, it's nice to see this coming directly from the original author. :)

I didn't know you made iNES too, Marat Fayzullin is said to have made the iNES ROM image format so I assumed he made the emulator too.
Landy
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Re: LandyNES

Post by Landy »

The first games were in PRG/CHAR format. And yes, .NES was Marat's invention. And initially the code used video/keyboard drivers for MS-DOS. I once ported fMSX to MS-DOS, so I used my old code. Later, vga X-mode was the best choice.

Best wishes,
Landy
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