Jonathan Peppers Unleashes Code Chaos: How .NET Meets the NES

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Show Notes

"When you program for the NES you deeply need to understand the hardware, right. And that's not a thing; like as a .NET developer you don't really know what a register is, or like or a bus, or like NES has a thing called a PPU"— Jonathan Peppers

Welcome friends to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. We are the go-to podcast for .NET developers worldwide, and I am your host: Jamie "GaProgMan" Taylor.

In this episode, Jonathan Peppers joins us to talk about something which is a little out of the ordinary for us here: programming the Nintendo Entertainment System but in C#. We talk about the process behind his (some would say absurd) idea for an AOT transpiler which can convert a subset of C# over to the Assembler required to write and publish a NES game.

"So you think about that example, what I described there on the NES side is actually very similar to what's on the IL side, is that in IL, you have a string, right? It goes and looks up in a string table, the contents of the string, and puts it on a stack, and then it calls vram_write, and then it's the runtimes job to actually like make that happen at runtime; or in the case of an AOT compiler it would emit, you know, native machine code that does the same thing."— Jonathan Peppers

Along the way, we talk about that Ahead-of-Time compilation is, have a brief intro to what IL is (that's what your C# code is compiled to before running it), and how all of that fits in with .NES—the wonderful name for Jon's AOT NES compiler.

Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

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Full Show Notes

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-7/jonathan-peppers-unleashes-code-chaos-how-dotnet-meets-the-nes/

Links:

• Native AOT Development
• System.Reflection.Metadata
• 8bitworkshop.com
• neslib
• BinaryWriter
• Retron5
• Flight68k
• .NES on GitHub
• .NES Discord Server