emu-ram-art ✨

Create nice looking diagrams from emulator rom and visualise its content.

Example image of the Onyanko Town ROM at frame 10000.

Run npm install to install needed deps. Use Node 10 and make sure that you have cairo installed on your system!

WARNING! This repo contains extreme ugly code! no refactoring, no cleanup but spaghetti code at its finest! Main purpose of this code is to generate an art print - once this is done there is no reason to touch the code anymore ;)

NES

Some facts:

• has 2kb onboard ram
• has 2kb video ram - this is however pretty boring to visualise

Good example ROM's for RAM images:

• Contra (U) [!].nes

Good example ROM's for VRAM images:

• ZZZ_UNK_Bo Jackson Baseball (Bad CHR 02ef4f34).nes

GameBoy

Some facts:

• has 8kb onboard ram
• has 8kb video ram - this is however pretty boring to visualise

HOWTO

Step 1: Dump ROM

Dump a new ROM:

node ./lib/dump-nes/index.js Mario\ Bros.\ \(JU\)\ \[!\].nes 18000

Step 2: Visualise Dump

node lib/visualise/index.js ./dump-Mario\ Bros.\ \(JU\)\ \[!\].nes-17999.json

Note: you can run the script in debug mode by using

DEBUG="*" node lib/visualise/index.js ./dump-Mario\ Bros.\ \(JU\)\ \[!\].nes-17999.json

Batch process

Process a bunch of rom files (serial) with for f in ./ROMDIRECTORY/*; do node lib/dump-nes/index.js "$f"; done

.. or parallel: find ./ROMDIRECTORY -name '*.nes' | parallel -j 8 node lib/dump-nes/index.js {}

Then run ./_build.sh

TODO

• RAM DUMPS: support more emulators (Sinclair, C64)
• NES: load optional cartridge memory
• more flexible visualizer (layout, framelength)
• the current selection of interesting diagrams is rather primitive (filterSlots function), lots of other improvements possible
• bells'n whistles build process (moar tests, CI integration)

FAQ

• Where can I find ROM files: Official answer "dump the cartridges you own"