Imagine nes games on atari lynx

[johannesmutlu]

Both the atari lynx and nes share the same type 6502 cpu and the similar PSG soundchip, so the only thing an emulator needs to do is changing those adress registers from nes games to line up with it’s own adress registers,

another thing the emulator needs to do is emulating those 4 soundchannels and ignoire soundchannel 5 and ignoire all audio stuff it cannot emulate,or it may could emulate nes audio trough software mixing with digitized psg recordings of it and also try to emulate soundchannel 5,since the atari lynx can also run in 4 channel 8bit pcm mode, backgrounds needs to be converted into sprite format but they also need to be filtered down to a lower resolution by skipping every 4th horizontal and vertical line while character sprites needs to be filtered saperately by only skipping a few lines within the upper part,middle and bothem parts of them,sothat you can still see if you are standing or next to a platform or you can maintain those character sprites in original form to preserve all details,

for nes games with advanced mappers ,the emulater needs to resamble those mappers by telling the lynx to do all the bankswitching stuff irq interrrupts instead,now aslong those nes games require 2KB or 8KB chr ram and aslong it could fit and run withing the lynx 64KB workram, it should work,also aslong games among with the emulator could fit aall within the 512KB rom limit,many nes games could work on it,now about the concerning speed thosr nes games maybe designed with Stram in mind and not with Dram,so in order to get around that,they may need to be slowed down to account for the Dram chip/s inside the lynx

and off course all buttons layout from nes games needs to be lined up correctly with those lynx buttons sothat you could play confortibly, trough start and select should be mapped to option 1 and option 2 button,

for 2 or 4 player support, the emulator needs to emulate it by usong the comlynx to act as a master or slave to resamble player 1 or player 2,

 

note; that ninja gaiden 3 was a nes port for the lynx and not a remake so am sure they used toolchains to convert that game into lnx format,

why i do believe it might be possible? Because the snes can emulate nes games as well since it also contains a 65X derived cpu or well a 65c05 chip albeit 16bit but it’s a slow cpu at 3,5mhz with Dram inside it,

while the lynx cpu is only 8bit but it runs at a whopping 4,19mhz.

 

heck even the less powerful gameboy dmg could emulate the nes with it’s Z80 cpu albeit very very slooooooow(it probably will take 100 years before it has fully processed an entire nes rom) ,it’s also zoomed in many things are missing or incorrect, but still, just the idea to have a portible nes in your hand especially in 1989 would,ve been mind blowing,just imagine a whole bunch of atari lynx cartrides with each their own individual nes games on it such mario bros,donkeykong,supermariobros and zelda 1 etc,, that would be really cool?

Edited August 31, 2021 by johannesmutlu

[turboxray]

On 8/26/2021 at 6:20 AM, johannesmutlu said:

note; that ninja gaiden 3 was a nes port for the lynx and not a remake so am sure they used toolchains to convert that game into lnx format,

 

It really is that easy! I have a lot of NES games converted to the Lynx with one of these toolchains ?

[+Stephen]

38 minutes ago, turboxray said:

It really is that easy! I have a lot of NES games converted to the Lynx with one of these toolchains ?

Sweet - I have some other ideas.  Let me just spew them out, and we'll get a dozen or so more games.  Who knew it was this easy!

[+madman]

Oh no, the fumes are spreading.

[agradeneu]

On 8/26/2021 at 3:20 PM, johannesmutlu said:

Both the atari lynx and nes share the same type 6502 cpu and the similar PSG soundchip, so the only thing an emulator needs to do is changing those adress registers from nes games to line up with it’s own adress registers,

another thing the emulator needs to do is emulating those 4 soundchannels and ignoire soundchannel 5 and ignoire all audio stuff it cannot emulate,or it may could emulate nes audio trough software mixing with digitized psg recordings of it and also try to emulate soundchannel 5,since the atari lynx can also run in 4 channel 8bit pcm mode, backgrounds needs to be converted into sprite format but they also need to be filtered down to a lower resolution by skipping every 4th horizontal and vertical line while character sprites needs to be filtered saperately by only skipping a few lines within the upper part,middle and bothem parts of them,sothat you can still see if you are standing or next to a platform or you can maintain those character sprites in original form to preserve all details,

for nes games with advanced mappers ,the emulater needs to resamble those mappers by telling the lynx to do all the bankswitching stuff irq interrrupts instead,now aslong those nes games require 2KB or 8KB chr ram and aslong it could fit and run withing the lynx 64KB workram, it should work,also aslong games among with the emulator could fit aall within the 512KB rom limit,many nes games could work on it,now about the concerning speed thosr nes games maybe designed with Stram in mind and not with Dram,so in order to get around that,they may need to be slowed down to account for the Dram chip/s inside the lynx

and off course all buttons layout from nes games needs to be lined up correctly with those lynx buttons sothat you could play confortibly, trough start and select should be mapped to option 1 and option 2 button,

for 2 or 4 player support, the emulator needs to emulate it by usong the comlynx to act as a master or slave to resamble player 1 or player 2,

 

note; that ninja gaiden 3 was a nes port for the lynx and not a remake so am sure they used toolchains to convert that game into lnx format,

why i do believe it might be possible? Because the snes can emulate nes games as well since it also contains a 65X derived cpu or well a 65c05 chip albeit 16bit but it’s a slow cpu at 3,5mhz with Dram inside it,

while the lynx cpu is only 8bit but it runs at a whopping 4,19mhz.

 

heck even the less powerful gameboy dmg could emulate the nes with it’s Z80 cpu albeit very very slooooooow(it probably will take 100 years before it has fully processed an entire nes rom) ,it’s also zoomed in many things are missing or incorrect, but still, just the idea to have a portible nes in your hand especially in 1989 would,ve been mind blowing,just imagine a whole bunch of atari lynx cartrides with each their own individual nes games on it such mario bros,donkeykong,supermariobros and zelda 1 etc,, that would be really cool?

I don't think it's easy (different graphics processor and legal issues) , but I would love to see reimagination of games like Castlevania for the Lynx!

Edited September 9, 2021 by agradeneu

[johannesmutlu]

On 9/8/2021 at 1:16 AM, turboxray said:

It really is that easy! I have a lot of NES games converted to the Lynx with one of these toolchains ?

If you are really serious about your toolchain software ,well how about releasing it sothat we could convert nes games on our own to the lynx in order to enjoy games such as supermariobros 3 ,kirbys adventure among other nes games on the lynx,if??

 

 

note:that nested is a sort of toolchain/emulator wich patches nes games to run on snes by lining up for instance those adress registers from the nes 6502 cpu with those adress registers from the snes 65c816 cpu among other things to enable nes games to run on snes??

multiple versions of nested emulator are already released for performance improvents and higher compatibility,there’re more to come??

[Nop90]

I don't know how much serious is the OP but I'm answering seriously because this section is for coders (that use to be serious people as long as they stay away from beer).

 

From wikipedia (bold is mine):

 

Quote

Project Nested is a NES emulator running on the raw power of the SNES. Inspired by the SNES originally designed to be backward compatible and wanting to code a JIT compiler.

 

Lynx has almost the same CPU power of the SNES in 8 bit mode, but has a completly different architecture. Both Lynx and SNES haven't enough CPU power to emulate the HW of the NES. Thanks to 3 years of work of a talented coder the SNES can use its custom hardware to behave like the HW of the SNES, but the graphic chip of the Lynx (Suzy) can't reproduce the features of the NES GPU (e.g. the NES GPU has internal RAM and can handle sprites).

 

It's not a matter of mapping register position to different locations, they work in a completly different way.

 

Not to say that they use different CPU. Yes both are derived from the 6502, but both are customized, have additional hardware and probably their illegal opcodes works in different ways (and we know that game coder love to use the illegal opcodes to create nice tricks ?). 

 

I learned how hard can be adding retrocompatibility to old HW trying to run VCS code on the Lynx, obviusly in the end I failed (but... ?).

 

So there is no hope to emulate the NES on the Lynx.

 

If someone can prove I'm wrong, I'll be really ... really ... really happy!