Just this summer, the Nintendo Entertainment System had its 35th release anniversary, and even after years of discontinuation, it is still going strong in the hacker community. Exhibit A: [Matthew Earl]. For one of his upcoming projects, [Matthew] needed to get his hands on the background images of the NES classic Super Mario Bros. Instead of just getting some ready-rendered images and stitching them together, he decided to take care of the rendering himself, once he extracts the raw game data.
Since there is no official source code available for Super Mario Bros, [Matthew] used a disassembled version to get started looking for the image data. To avoid reading through thousands of lines of assembly code, and to also see what actually happens during execution, he wrapped the game’s ROM data into py65emu, a Python library emulating the 6502, the CPU that drives the NES. By adding a simple wrapper around the emulator’s memory handler that tracks reads on uninitialized data, [Matthew] managed to find out which parameters he needs to feed to the parser routine in order to get the image tile data. After an excursion into the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) and its memory arrangements, [Matthew] had everything he needed to create the Python script that will render the game background straight from its ROM data.
Even if extracting NES game data is not your thing, the emulator concept [Matthew] uses might be still worth a read. On the other hand, if you want to dig deeper into the NES, you should definitely have a look at emulating an SNES game on a NES, presented on the NES itself.
People love books, and if you’re anything like [tjaap]’s girlfriend, you may easily devour your eighty books and more a year. Maybe to keep better track of time during her reading sessions, her wish was to get a clock for the living room, so [tjaap] stepped up. Being a maker at heart, he decided to skip the ready-made options, and instead build one in the most fitting way imaginable: by displaying the time as literary quotes on a jailbroken Kindle.
Unlike your average word clock, [tjaap]’s literary clock displays (almost) every minute a different sentence that, in one form or another, contains the current time. Thanks to the internet, he didn’t have to compile the whole list of book quotes for each and every minute of the day by himself, but it still required some work to put it all in the form he needed. Eventually he had a script that converted each quote into an image, and a shell script on the Kindle to display them according to the time. As a bonus, the origin of the quote is displayed only optionally, turning the clock into a simple trivia quiz along the way.
It shows that themed, personalized clocks are always a great subject for a gift, just like the one made from analog meters we saw around Father’s Day.