Dartendo lets you play your nintendo games in browser | Hacker News Reader

Dartendo lets you play your nintendo games in browser

dartendo.appspot.com

27 pointsDigitalghost15 comments

As the name implies, this is an NES emulator written in dart, running on app engine. The source can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/super-dartendo/

I've seen a few emulators implemented for HTML5 but I have yet to actually get one to work. For this particular emulator, I've tried the SMB3 rom available in Dartendo's repo at http://code.google.com/p/super-dartendo/source/browse/trunk/..., but I must be doing something wrong because nothing happens when I "load" the rom. Anyone know what the deal is? I'm using Chrome 17 on Windows 7.

How in the world does someone begin to write something like this? It's one thing to understand the language, but how does one gain insight into the underlying mechanics of a device like this, and given this insight, understand how to instrument a replacement?

I've been a developer for over a decade, and reading code like this still leaves me in awe...

Emulators are a dime a dozen, and almost every console from before the PSX already had at least one by 1999.

In the beginning it wasn't (usually) one person but an entire team studying every component of the console, dumping the BIOS and then coding something that (at first) could at least boot the game. After that it was mostly about working out the details like graphic glitches, slow framerate, certain graphical issues, etc...

But once the "core" was made other teams or individuals could use it to make their own versions, or port it to other OSes/architectures.

The NES is together with the Sega Genesis one of the most emulated consoles out there: you'll find emulators of these two for every computer, PDA, PMP, phone or tablet.

Seems to be based on vNes and JSNES (the repo in google code contains copies of both projects).

has anyone got it working?

I haven't. I dont see anything at http://code.google.com/p/super-dartendo/ either?

Hmm, controls seem a bit odd to me. Instead of the standard arrow keys or WASD, it looks like they are using the right side of the keyboard for some reason.

Does this work in Firefox?

It was pretty smart of the person that made this to use roms that you upload. Nintendo is pretty serious about rom sites.

Strangely enough, the repo appears to have some ROMs. Smart that he doesn't expose them to the casual user and that he doesn't advertise them, however.

Those look to be free/homebrew not commercial games.

The ROMs tab doesn't do anything for me

I couldn't figure out what to do either. One of the few flaws in HTML5 is I have no idea if everything is still loading or I'm just clicking in the wrong places.

Didn't work for me in Firefox but worked okay in Chrome. Even so, it was so slow and unresponsive it remained unplayable. But it's a good example of what still isn't really possible with current web technologies.

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