Noteworthy: JSNES

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Ben Firshman ported a Super Nintendo emulator to javascript.

JSNES has a few games (ROMS) ported over too, included Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda 2.

legend-of-zelda2

That’s pretty cool.

Quite a few people grew up with the Super Nintendo. Some of us even looked into going to school to code for it.

The code was a form of assembly. It wasn’t abstracted behind a layer of nice language. But I suspect that quite a few shops had kits to make development easier. Developers usually had to manipulate memory directly. They had to. They only had a few memory busses and 21MhZ to work with. No clean garbage collection for them.

All of this can now run in a browser, a fraction of the power of a modern computer. In javascript. Which isn’t optimized at all for running graphics. No matter how hilariously dated the graphics may appear, it’s pretty incredible to see.