ESP32-NESEMU, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator for the ESP32

This is a quick and dirty port of Nofrendo, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator. It lacks sound, but can emulate a NES at close to full speed, albeit with some framedrop due to the way the display is driven.

Warning

This is a proof-of-concept and not an official application note. As such, this code is entirely unsupported by Espressif.

Compiling

This code is an esp-idf project. You will need esp-idf to compile it. Newer versions of esp-idf may introduce incompatibilities with this code; for your reference, the code was tested against commit 12caaed28063e32d8b1fb13e13548b6fa52f87b3 of esp-idf.

Display

To display the NES output, please connect a 320x240 ili9341-based SPI display to the ESP32 in this way:

=====  =======================
Pin    GPIO
=====  =======================
MISO   25
MOSI   23
CLK    19
CS     22
DC     21
RST    18
BCKL   5
=====  =======================

(BCKL = backlight enable)

Also connect the power supply and ground. For now, the LCD is controlled using a SPI peripheral, fed using the 2nd CPU. This is less than ideal; feeding the SPI controller using DMA is better, but was left out due to this being a proof of concept.

Controller

To control the NES, connect a Playstation 1 or 2 controller as such:

=====  =====
Pin    GPIO
=====  =====
CLK    14
DAT    27
ATT    16
CMD    2
=====  =====

Also connect the power and ground lines. Most PS1/PS2 controllers work fine from a 3.3V power supply, if a 5V one is unavailable.

ROM

This NES emulator does not come with a ROM. Please supply your own and flash to address 0x00100000. You can use the flashrom.sh script as a template for doing so.

Copyright

Code in this repository is Copyright (C) 2016 Espressif Systems, licensed under the Apache License 2.0 as described in the file LICENSE. Code in the components/nofrendo is Copyright (c) 1998-2000 Matthew Conte ([email protected]) and licensed under the GPLv2.