Makers, developers and hobbyists that also enjoy playing Nintendo NES games might be interested in a new project by Andrew Henderson, that has transformed a BeagleBone Black mini PC into a standalone NES.
The BeagleBoard Black computer is a low-power open-source single-board mini PC produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14, and is fitted with 512MB of RAM and powered by a 1GHz processor with HDMI connection and 2GB of eMMC flash memory.
Henderson explains a little more about his project :
“Here is a work-in-progress of my emulator work on the BeagleBone Black. This is footage captured from the BBB running at 1280×1024, but it is downsampled to NTSC by my video capture device. I have finally gotten the pause/save state menu integrated into all of the emulators and have hammered out the details on merging all of the various emulators into a unified retro-gaming platform.
The BBB is running the TI 3.14 kernel with PowerVR SGX video support for hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0. The emulators used are modified versions of Nestopia, VBAM, and BeagleSNES (SNES9X) which have all been merged into my BeagleSNES GUI framework. Because of SNES9X’s non-GPL license, it must be externally launched as a separate process via fork()/execve() from the front-end GUI. The other emulators are directly integrated.
I render to a texture, map the texture to set of triangles, and then scale the triangles to the full size of the screen and render them. I use SDL 1.2 to initialize the framebuffer display target, audio, and gamepad input. Once the framebuffer is initialized, I use EGL to get an EGLContext for the framebuffer and then use that context for all GLES rendering.”
For more information on the new BeagleBone Black SNES jump over to the Hackaday website for details.
Source: Hackaday
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