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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.