3 hours ago · Tech · 0 comments

This is a very quick follow-up to my Mac emulation hacks from a couple of weeks ago, and worth noting for the fun value and a little bit of AI. I love old arcade games (especially some NeoGeo titles), so it was only natural that I gravitated to them while I was trying to get Mac color rendering to work on an ESP32–if there’s a piece of software that was extremely attuned to its hardware, it’s arcade games, often written to map directly into hardware. And I love R-Type in particular, so even though I originally thought of getting Metal Slug to run on the ESP32-S3 because of its shared 68000 heritage with the Mac, I ended up wondering how fast I could make that run. Turns out the M72 boards Irem did for R-Type ran an 8086-like CPU (the NEC V30, which has a few extensions) and a Z80 in tandem, and that the emulator wasn’t at all hard to recompile if you stubbed out things like audio (which is done by the Z80). The Output, So FarI decided to start with the hardest/smallest target (the…

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