Now before I start, I know I'm really grasping at straws here, and I certainly don't expect what I'm proposing to be even remotely possible.
It should be clear to anyone with a brain in their head that the hardware differences between a Tamagotchi and a NES are immense, but I saw that Tamagotchi's use the 6502 processor.
Does this mean anything? Probably not. But the question's been gnawing at me; could it be done? Is there even an inkling of a chance? Please lay my curiosity to rest.
No, it cannot be done, for the same reason that software for the Atari 2600, Apple IIe, and Commodore 64 are not interchangeable - while they all happen to use a 6502, they also have different I/O hardware (video output, sound output, controller input) which are totally incompatible with each other.
I thought that this'd be the case, thanks for the reply.
It makes me wonder what the most ridiculous thing you could NES games on is though
Has anyone ever run custom code in them for that matter?
Natalie Silvanovich's CCC presentations demonstrated arbitrary code execution...
I'm still hoping that one day someone will convert (i.e. port) the Tamagotchi into an NES ROM.
zeroone wrote:
I'm still hoping that one day someone will convert (i.e. port) the Tamagotchi into an NES ROM.
There was an official Game Boy Tamagotchi game. You could run that on a Wide Boy.
Aren't Tomagotchi's just 1-bit black and white? I don't remember.
Depending on how insane you are, you could write a 6502 emulator on a 6502. It would be nowhere near playable, but would work.
Kev did just that for a debugger in the CopyNES system software.
I'm definitely not talking about playable here, if someone got ANYTHING to run smoothly on a Tamagotchi I'd commend them.
From what I can tell, there seems to be a very clear distinct lack of anything that looks like PPU on a Tamagotchi, so any attempts to draw to the screen will crash and burn immediately (I'm sure this isn't the only blaring issue with attempting this, but it's the biggest one I can see).
Going the route of an emulator seems viable, though I suck at assembly (let alone 6502 assembly) so I guess I'll have to leave that for now.
One obvious problem, without even looking at the other hardware components, is that the Tamagotchi runs in a very low resolution (black and white even, I think later models may have a colour display but the resolution is still probably very low), so how can we display something on the Tamagotchi that somewhat resembles the output of a Famicom is questionable.
On the other hand, I think it's much more possible to have a Game King running a (possibly hacked, like those FC --> PCE conversions) Tamagotchi firmware though (but possibly not the other way round).
I guess you could modify an NES game replacing all hardware accesses (controllers, PPU, APU) by Tamagotchi equivalents or calls to emulated versions of these systems that would generate something the Tamagotchi can use, based on the original data. For example, you'd most likely have to render the screen in software, since the Tamagotchi probably doesn't have a sprite system. The problem is that not only this would be really slow, but the specs of the Tamagotchi are too low to do anything of this kind. If the information I found is correct, it has only 1.5KB of work RAM, plus 0.5KB of LCD RAM, and for an NES game you'd need at least 2KB of work RAM, 2KB for the name tables, plus whatever is necessary to maintain the state of the simulated PPU and APU.
Yeah, the screen resolution would certainly to be a big problem, it looks to me like the Tamagotchi has 1 pixel for each NES tile, or close to that. It seems it uses a 4-color LCD though, so you could maybe draw the background with lower contrast than the sprites, so that the player has a better chance of identifying game objects. Depending on how busy the backgrounds are, it may be impossible to distinguish solid blocks from empty space. Also, forget about text!