clones quickstart

clones.md

Installing Clones

May need to brew install libsdl2-dev

brew install sbcl # or apt-get if you nasty playa
curl -O https://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp > quicklisp.lisp
sbcl --load quicklisp.lisp # and follow the prompts
git clone git@github.com:kingcons/clones.git ~/quicklisp/local-projects/clones.git

Running Clones

Start rlwrap sbcl and ...

(ql:quickload :clones)
(in-package :clones)
(change-game "roms/commercial/dk.nes") ;; this path is relative to the clones installation folder/git checkout
(step-frames 4)

Dumping Nametables

Make sure to do this on the mezzanine branch...

(ql:quickload :cl-json)
(defvar *nt* (clones.ppu::ppu-nametable (memory-ppu (cpu-memory *nes*))))
(cl-json:encode-json *nt*)

Dumping Images

Make sure to brew install libpng first and use my fork of cl-png...

git clone git@github.com:kingcons/cl-png.git ~/quicklisp/local-projects/cl-png

Then ...

(ql:quickload '(:zpng :clones))
(in-package :clones)
(change-game "roms/commercial/smb.nes")
(step-frames 30)
(defvar *image* (make-instance 'zpng:pixel-streamed-png :color-type :truecolor :width 256 :height 240))
(with-open-file (out "test.png" :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8) :direction :output
                 :if-does-not-exist :create :if-exists :supersede)
  (zpng:start-png *image* out)
  (dotimes (i (* 256 240))
    (let ((pixel (list (aref clones.ppu:*framebuffer* (+ (* i 3) 0))
                       (aref clones.ppu:*framebuffer* (+ (* i 3) 1))
                       (aref clones.ppu:*framebuffer* (+ (* i 3) 2)))))
      (zpng:write-pixel pixel *image*)))
  (zpng:finish-png *image*))

Instrumented ANESE today and found that it is subject to the same InitScroll writes as we are so it probably isn't a timing issue. I'm becoming more suspicious of how we approach Nametable Mirroring in general. I wouldn't be mad at double checking both mirroring as detected in ROM parsing and the VRAM reading code to make sure what it's doing seems reasonable. Provided it does, we're looking at seeing if there's something wrong with how we read the ScrollInfo to compute the NT bytes to read for the background and how that stacks up to the "shift registers" approach on PPU rendering.