Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Mon Feb 06, 2012 11:55 pm

Interesting project and demo, didn't see it on here so I thought I'd share. http://ahefner.livejournal.com/20528.html

Karatorian · Post by **Karatorian** » Tue Feb 07, 2012 3:41 am

I like the resulting demo. It's pretty impressive and the graphics are sexy.

Shiru · Post by **Shiru** » Tue Feb 07, 2012 7:45 am

This is certainly fun and interesting. Too bad that not many people know Lisp these days, so Lisp on NES probably won't have much use.

rainwarrior · Post by **rainwarrior** » Tue Feb 07, 2012 1:41 pm

Intriguing.

Post by **tepples** » Tue Feb 07, 2012 5:56 pm

Quite a few people who read the Slashdot story about this project left comments amounting to "Why not put a whole computer on the NES cartridge board and have it fill a frame buffer that the PPU reads?" They were saying pretty much the same thing I've been saying for years whenever the idea of a "super-mapper" comes up: make a TV tuner cartridge and plug a Wii or a modern smartphone into it.

slobu · Post by **slobu** » Wed Feb 08, 2012 11:05 am

tepples wrote:Quite a few people who read the Slashdot story about this project left comments amounting to "Why not put a whole computer on the NES cartridge board and have it fill a frame buffer that the PPU reads?" They were saying pretty much the same thing I've been saying for years whenever the idea of a "super-mapper" comes up: make a TV tuner cartridge and plug a Wii or a modern smartphone into it.

I think the people at AtariAge have figured out how to access the ARM inside their Harmony flash cart. I could see putting a cheap co processor into a cart and somehow addressing it with the NES CPU. It could be cheap like the RBox:
http://rossum.posterous.com/20131601

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Wed Feb 08, 2012 12:26 pm

I don't see much use for a co-processor on the NES... Yes, more processing power is nice, but the NES would benefit much more from visual upgrades. I don't think you can do much better than the MMC5 in that area with the signals that are available to the cart, unless you make a cart with its own video output (like the Sega 32X I believe). But then the NES will be there pretty much for nostalgia only, since it will hardly do more than provide a connection between the controllers and the super cart.

Using the NES as a TV tuner is a bad idea IMO, considering the graphical limitations of the system. Even if you connect an XBOX 360 to it, it will look like crap once the palette and attribute limitations come into play.

Shiru · Post by **Shiru** » Wed Feb 08, 2012 12:59 pm

I also don't think that co-processor in a cartridge is a really good idea. It would be not much of NES there - if you want more processing power, there are lots of other platforms, why not just code for N64 or something?; NES is not that limited in CPU power anyway, not as much as it limited with, say, spirites per scanline; it is also not emulated - debug problems.