Do you think we are playing games here?
Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2015 5:31 am
Because, well, we are. We have a Sega Master System emulator running on the ESP31 (which, as you all know, is the beta version of the ESP32), as a demonstration of the power inside this little processor:
And some (unfortunately slightly choppy) video (Youtube link)
So yes, this is basically an older version of SMSPlus running on a single core of the ESP31 chip. It has been trimmed down a bit to fit the memory that's available, and some tricks are used like stashing the video RAM in the 2nd cpu's IRAM segment. Video is output to a 320x240 LCD using the SPI port. Unfortunately, the LCD can only accept about 15 frames per second over SPI, and in the current setup pushing bytes out over the SPI interface takes some time anyway, so the FPS is a bit low, but it's still very playable. Audio is output over the I2S port to an I2S codec. This emu still uses only the first core of the ESP31.
Ah, you also want to play? Good thing we released binaries and sources then. Get them on Github.
And some (unfortunately slightly choppy) video (Youtube link)
So yes, this is basically an older version of SMSPlus running on a single core of the ESP31 chip. It has been trimmed down a bit to fit the memory that's available, and some tricks are used like stashing the video RAM in the 2nd cpu's IRAM segment. Video is output to a 320x240 LCD using the SPI port. Unfortunately, the LCD can only accept about 15 frames per second over SPI, and in the current setup pushing bytes out over the SPI interface takes some time anyway, so the FPS is a bit low, but it's still very playable. Audio is output over the I2S port to an I2S codec. This emu still uses only the first core of the ESP31.
Ah, you also want to play? Good thing we released binaries and sources then. Get them on Github.