HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Heh, it reminds me of this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 which does something similar... using a modern device to give old devices essentially capabilities beyond what they should be able to do.

Related: Reverse emulating a SNES (on a NES)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

⬐ bitwize

"Reverse emulating the NES" looks a lot like "forward emulating a cartridge". Badass technical trick though.

You will love Tom7/suckerpinch's stuff then, if you don't know him already. Here's a good one for the start, though really, they are all fantastic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

⬐ kibwen

"NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS" is my personal favorite: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5TFDG-y-EHs

⬐ hermitdev

Wow, that is amazingly absurd. I love it!

⬐ cbm-vic-20

"Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game."

⬐ tambourine_man

This was amazing, thanks for sharing.

Edit: his whole channel is awesome, what a great find. He also sorted all of StarWars dialog, manually, as one does:

“This is the Special Edition to troll Han-shot-first purists. Everyone knows the orig is the most legit.”

Someone who really invests in his trollage.

⬐ alexb_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

Harder Drive is one of my favorite videos.

⬐ naikrovek

that guy is amazing and i fanboy out a little when I think about what i'd talk to him about if I ever met him. he's not even famous, he's just everything I want to be. i'm not as smart as him, or as clever, or as educated, or ... etc.

⬐ 5-

tom7 is great!

his perhaps lesser known, but fantastic and way more interactive creation is his icfpc'06 work, http://www.boundvariable.org/

i don't know of any worthy english-language writeups, perhaps they will be posted in replies to this comment.

⬐ gffrd

I had no idea who Tom7 is, and now that I do, you're right: I LOVE this stuff. Thank you!

What an excellent example of using non-standard formats to explore interesting concepts and be exposed to different ways of thinking. This is what high school should be like. Actually, what am I saying: this is what it feels like to tinker with your pals in high school.

And now I'm looking at SIGBOVIK, Annals of Improbable Research, CMU's "ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL HERESY," the Ig Nobel prize … what a wonderful rabbit trail you've sent me down.

⬐ devenvdev

Came here to post this ↑ Tom7's Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [1] is one of the most entertaining (and educational) experiences I had lately

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk

Link for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

Tom7 is brilliant for anyone that hasn't seen him before. His Reverse Emulation video (https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0) and Weird Chess Algorithms (https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA) are a must watch. His dead pan delivery coupled with the ridiculous amount of effort he puts into things that don't _really_ matter is honestly inspiring.

⬐ davidfactorial

I think the Reverse Emulation was one of the most technically impressive hacks I've ever seen.

⬐ fps_doug

I'm anticipating his video every April 1st, and was already fearing he might have skipped this year when it wasn't uploaded in time. One of the people with the perfect mix of funny, smart and bat-shit crazy.

⬐ rrauenza

We first enjoyed his AI based video game players... they're also really good!

⬐ jrmann100

Stumbled upon his work on HN with "Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667852

What a great article.

If you liked this, you'll likely also enjoy https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0

I'm not giving a summary since that video is most fun to watch if you don't know the punchline in advance.

(No relationship to the video other than that I liked it.)

⬐ ec109685

Agreed. I always wondered how games got so much better through the NES’s lifetime and didn’t realize the extent of the hardware augmentation in those cartridges.

Brilliant move making the pins so powerful.

Well, that's been done also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

Also, commercial 3D SNES games sometimes had to bring their own coprocessors, so it's fully in line with tradition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX

⬐ sdenton4

Just to super-upvote: the reverse emulation video is my second favorite tech demo of all time. It is fantastic.

⬐ jgwil2

What's your favorite?

⬐ sdenton4

Monty Montgomery on analog-digital conversion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

⬐ EvanAnderson

That video is gold. Then again, anything Tom7 does is great.

⬐ bubblesorting

Reverse emulation is maybe my favorite (but I'm always looking for something to take the crown). What is your favorite of all time?

⬐ datameta

High quality without a doubt. His chess AI tournament is also a thorough nerd snipe.

I'm very much reminded of "Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!" [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

Well, then do I have the video for you: https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0

Bit of a spoiler to post it in this context, but still worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 Raspberry pi in a NES cart. No reason you couldn’t add netplay to this.

⬐ Andrex

That would be a fantastic place to start, thank you!

...I hope NES programming is similar to GB/Z80, since as far as retro gaming tools go that's all I know right now, haha.

In that case, you might like one of tom7's many wonnderful videos [0], "Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!" where he hacks a real NES cartridge with a raspberry pi with an emulator, then figures out how to map all of the data into NES sprites, etc. As usual for his videos, it's absolutely wonderful.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

⬐ farias0

This is one of my favorite videos on all YouTube. I know in retrospect it seems obvious, but when it showed that it was all running on a NES it blew my mind. This video felt like transforming nerd hackery into an art form.

This reminds me of this video of a "reverse-emulated" NES using a raspberry-pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 (you can skip to 3:35 if you're not interested in the jokes).

The author further explains how he did it in this "making of" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTlNVUmBA28

LOL... from "Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!"[1] (which is insa^Wbizza^Wa very creative hack):

"The cartridge is the dual of the Nintendo."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

edit: for a very impressive variation on the SMW "joke" in [1], I recommend this[2] video of TASbot streaming Skype realtime to [2xNES, SNES+SuperGameBoy] through the controller ports.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CgXvIuZR40

In fact, you can take it even further! tom7 (all of his pieces are amazing) put a raspberry pi into an NES cartridge, and manages to "run" Super Mario World on an NES.

My short description really does it a disservice - I strongly recommend watching the video explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

⬐ benj111

To be fair 'Super Mario World' already runs on the Nes.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TEZ3vZIi71g

Along these lines, Tom7 invented* 'reverse emulation' which effectively uses a Raspberry Pi as a co-processor, allowing him to run [spoilers ahoy!]an SNES emulator on an NES.[/spoilers]

The talk is brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

* - as far as I know...

Note that some of these features require special hardware support in the cartridge. The NES cartridge connector exposes CPU and PPU (picture processing unit) pins, and the simplest games ("NROM") connect ROM chips directly to them. More advanced designs add an additional memory management controller (commonly called a "mapper"):

https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/MMC

The animated backgrounds are accomplished by the mapper bank switching the character (tile) memory. The parallax scrolling is accomplished by the mapper counting scanlines and generating an interrupt when the correct scanline is reached, so the CPU can change the PPU scroll registers mid-frame with the correct timing. Later mappers like the the MMC5 could precisely time mid-frame bank changes to support more than 256 tiles on screen at once, and to support 8x8 attribute blocks instead of 16x16.

The ultimate mapper feeds arbitrary data to the PPU to simulate having a bitmapped display with 8x1 attribute blocks (the PPU only reads attribute memory once every 8 pixels, so that's a hard limit). Tom Murphy implemented this with a Raspberry Pi (which isn't ideally suited to the task, so there are timing imperfections causing graphical glitches, but theoretically it could be done without them):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

People still run Commodore 64s. There are demo scenes, old hardware enthusiasts that squeeze crazy performance out of old hardware, even a guy who use a Raspberry Pi to emulate an NES cartridge and get his unmodified NES to play SNES games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

Old hardware can often be repaired. If you told a C64 user back in the day his machine would break in two years, he or she wouldn't shell out the $$ on it, but today people buy $400~$800 cellphones that turn into garbage.

⬐ Octoth0rpe

> If you told a C64 user back in the day his machine would break in two years, he or she wouldn't shell out the $$ on it, but today people buy $400~$800 cellphones that turn into garbage.

I wouldn't put money on that. A C64's starting price was $600 in 1982 dollars. For $154 in 1982, quite a few people might have been willing.

⬐ freehunter

When was the last time a Commodore 64 received a vendor-issued software upgrade? Because that's what we're talking about. Not how long will the hardware last, but how long will the manufacturer release software updates.

⬐ micmil

"If you told a C64 user back in the day his machine would break in two years..."

That was pretty much expected. Hardware upgrades were just as fast and furious as they are now, if not moreso. Backwards compatibility with years-old systems at the consumer level was a byproduct, not a plan.

⬐ Zancarius

Exactly.

Unsurprisingly, there's even a few hacks out there for upgrading old C64s with newer/better components, too, if you want to get another couple decades out of it. There's even new manufacture C64-compatible enthusiast boards being produced [1], although I believe you may have to supply your own SID chip. The latter doesn't count much for this topic, but it illustrates there's some interest. Further, the parts that are likely to break over time are fairly trivial for someone with soldering skills to replace. I know of at least a couple people who preemptively replaced capacitors on old C64s they bought and refurbished.

[1] https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/produkt-details/product/c64-r...

From Deconstruct:

Nabil Hassein: Computing, Climate Change, and All Our Relationships https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/nabil-hassein-computing...

Tom 7: Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

⬐ jeklj

Yes! I also loved both of those talks, especially Nabil’s.

⬐ acobster

This. I was at Deconstruct too, and Nabil's talk got a standing ovation. It ran way over time, and I didn't notice. Tech people need to hear this. Tom's talk is also amazing in its own right.

Let's Program a Banjo Grammar was also one of my favorites. :D

https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/ryan-herr-lets-program-...

Edit: I just looked at your username...that you, Ryan? :)

⬐ rrherr

Yep, that was me — thank you for the kind words!

Gary Bernhardt had a creative concept for selecting speakers. Half were invited, internet famous people like Tom 7 and Julia Evans. Half were people who'd never spoke at a conference before, like Nabil and I. For the call for proposals, we submitted 2 minute videos instead of abstracts. Gary invested a lot of time mentoring the new speakers, which I'm so grateful for!

In September, I did another, kind of similar talk at Strange Loop, called "Picasso, Geometry, Jupyter." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYJ77F_8kq0

The topic and ideas were good, probably better than my Deconstruct talk. But my execution and presentation were uneven and unpolished, so I'd like to try it again at another conference. I'm submitting to PyCon — we'll see!

⬐ acobster

Hey, that's great! Even if the execution wasn't up to your standards, I'm looking forward to watching! I heard from someone at the conference (maybe it was you even?) about how Gary curated the talks. I'm really glad he did that, because all around it was my favorite tech conference I've been to and I'll definitely be back. :)

Some more recent work from the same person Tom7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

⬐ skywal_l

Very impressive. But can you plug that to an alien space ship? independence day style.

⬐ RobLach

Similar to how time travelers have to interface with our devices.

⬐ Rychard

The "making of" video for this is also cool. It's linked from this video, but here's a link just to let everyone know it exists:

https://youtu.be/hTlNVUmBA28

⬐ palmm

A longer form technical explanation from Tom7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTlNVUmBA28

⬐ crtasm

One unmodified NES, one modified game cartridge, some very impressive results.