Sprites mods – A tiny Pinball Fantasies table

spritesmods.com

88 points·rcarmo··6 comments

Really cool project, I didn't know x86 emulation was possible on the Espressif platform. I had a chuckle at this from page 2 regarding an earlier attempt to piece wise translate the x86 assembly to C:

> "Unfortunately, it turns out this is not that easy. First of all, while impressive, the code is a product of who wrote it and the standards at that time: it's a mess of global variables, macros, comments in Swedish, English and some German, labels that are in-jokes rather than descriptive... Don't get me wrong, this is not a dig at the good people from TSP; most of it was pretty standard at that time and as a demo group I can imagine them wanting to have some fun with it. Nevertheless, all that makes it a pretty complicated job to translate part-wise to C."

Sprite_tm is one of my favorite electronic hacker-bloggers, I recommend to check out the other pages on their site if you like this.

> I didn't know x86 emulation was possible on the Espressif platform.

It's probably possible on any platform given enough ram to fit the code. Years ago someone emulated Arm on a propeller chip and booted ubuntu (web log or private page so might be lost to time). Took something like 15 or 30 minutes to get to a prompt as the emulation was slow.

Possibly you are thinking of https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bi... but this is on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller, not a 32-bit Propeller.

Sprite_tm has been my all-time favorite hardware hacker, and he inspired me to pursue a hobby on electronics after witnessing years of superb hacks on SpritesMods.

Make sure to check out the rest of his site, you will not be disappointed!

Big pinball fan and collector. This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while

Ok, where can I buy this?

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