Sure, I own a real NES. Two, in fact. I also own a GBA Micro, Nintendo DS, and a Wii, with emulated versions of all of my favorite NES classics. And then, of course, there’s emulation.
But as a web developer, I just have to geek out on this: the very idea of a working NES emulator running entirely in JavaScript… wow. I’ve known about JSNES for a few months, but I hadn’t had the time and/or inclination to fire it up in Google Chrome (still Windows-only), the only browser so far that has a JavaScript interpreter efficient enough to run it at a decent frame rate.
The last time I tried running it was on the iPhone. Yes… it did run… at about 1.5 FPS. And, of course, there’s no way to access the controls. But in Chrome… it’s actually playable. A smidge slower than the real thing (which would be at 60 FPS), but as you can see, I got it up to 46 FPS. Not bad. Especially considering that I was running Windows 7 with Parallels Desktop on the Mac. Nice!
Not sure if these are in JavaScript but I have played a bunch of these before.
http://amog.com/tech/gaming/oldschool-videogames/?ref=rss
Check it out.
Most of that stuff is done in Flash. The appeal of JSNES is not that it is fun to play — it’s a technical proof of concept for JavaScript. I never would have imagined JavaScript could tackle something like this.
In light of some of the characteristics of the new Chrome OS Google announced yesterday, all I can say is… so that’s why JavaScript is so fast (and, therefore, JSNES runs so well) in Chrome.