NES emulation- correct me if I'm wrong

I have several famiclones that utilize the NOAC design that fail miserably on certain Tengen carts like Gauntlet and Gauntlet 2. Their video is sometimes garbled, but worse, the levels are inconsistent. Think walking through walls. I've had severe graphics glitches on Wario's Woods. More pirate carts than not don't work and sometimes crash as well. And you can't dismiss them just because they're pirate carts. The fact remains that carts that work one way (I never said 'work well' on the NES work differently on a famiclone.

It's naive to think that you'd need a Hydra and their SRAM card to acheive similar results for cheaper with the same chips. Just buying a Propeller and some cheap RAM chips will get you the same result if you're willing to DIY. I also think it's naive to dismiss MCUs. If not in the present, the near future will bring cheap and flexible chips that can provide more flexibility for NES emulation than ASIC solutions. Perfect emulation, sure, but you could also implement options to raise the sprite limit and remove flicker or built-in game genie functionality just to name a few possibilities. Also, such a system would be infinitely more valuable for homebrew development and debugging than ASIC.

 

DISCLAIMER: Please note I searched long and hard and could find no rule against cat macros and found no caturday precedent.

 

But it ISN'T the NOAC's fault, it's the Famiclone's fault for not wiring the cartridge correctly. Gauntlet uses "4-screen mirroring" which requires signals configured in an abnormal way, games with it are rare and the maker obviously never came across a cart with it.

I didn't say it was cheaper to get the Hydra, but if that's what the guy is designing his emulator on, that's your option; if you don't buy the Hydra, you don't get their library/kernal. "Cheap RAM chips" (I don't call $15/MiB cheap, and you'll need 1 MiB to play all games) by themselves will use all your I/O, so you'll need a better interface. It won't take many chips before a CPLD is more cost effective, just like their card.

If by ASIC you're arguing against hardware emulation again, sorry but this is not close to true, FPGA are flexible enough to implement entire Propeller chips, Propeller chips can't implement FPGA.

FPGA are reconfigurable, even moreso than MCU are programmable. Not only can a FPGA implement a NES, it can implement a debug mode for homebrew, a backup unit, a game genie, every mapper, 1080p video and digitally filtered audio all at the same time. My particular FPGA can actually implement 5 NES simultaneously (disregarding I/O) or even a SNES! Oh yeah, it can render all 64 sprites per line or just about any other gimmick you can think of...

 

I'll take two then! It would be sweet to see a NES hardware clone with additional features like more than 8 sprites per scaline, perhaps a faster clock speed for the CPU, more RAM mapped from $0800 to $1FFF.