written by cail • posted in How-To • 1,002 views no comments

wow
all those games are so familiar
and they are in the browser now

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JSNES
A Javascript NES emulator. By Ben Firshman @bfirsh

A few months ago, I stumbled across Matt Westcott's excellent JSSpeccy. I had seen some pretty imaginative canvas creations, but Javascript emulators? What a perfect idea for a daft new project.

I got underway shamelessly porting vNES into Javascript. Although not the most efficient, it didn't have any of the pointer memory mapping magic associated with emulators written in lower level languages. As such, it was more or less a direct port, bar a few tweaks to compensate for the lack of static typing, and obviously a rewrite of all the I/O.

I highly recommend you use Google Chrome to play JSNES. Thanks to its high performance canvas element, and a clever optimisation by Connor Dunn, it runs at full speed on modern computers. Mac builds are also available. Otherwise, it just about runs on Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4, but it's hardly playable.

The source is available on Github, contributions welcome!

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