25 6 / 2010
JSNES: A JavaScript NES Emulator
Ben Firshman has written an NES emulator in JavaScript. It is a port of vNES and runs on top of the HTML5 canvas element backed by a lot of JavaScript code to read the ROMs and emulate the CPU of the NES. Of course, these ROMs are binary, which adds to the challenge immensely, since JavaScript does not have the ability to natively work with binary data, let alone binary data designed for a totally different processor. For audio support, it uses a simple Flash player that communicates with the JavaScript, although it could now potentially start to use the Audio Write API that the Firefox team is working on.
JSNES runs the fastest in Google Chrome, as you might expect, and nearly as fast in Safari >= 4. It technically works in Firefox, but at a barely playable speed. You can check it out here (try out some of the various games), and get the code on Github. Amazing work!
