Gamer makes Atari 2600 emulator in Minecraft

A Minecraft player managed to create an emulator of the Atari 2600 using an unmodified version of Minecraft. According to the creator, the emulator takes about four minutes to render a frame.

The creator, who uses the alias SethBling on YouTube, says that he has used more than two thousand command blocks to emulate the 6502 processor. Using blocks of stone and earth, he recreated the console’s 256Kbit ram, of which the console could only use 128 bytes in practice. SethBling shows three games that run on the console: Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Pacman. The games cannot be controlled, as there is no built-in controller and sound card.

What is striking about how the console is copied in Minecraft is that the contents of the working memory and ROM are visible. For example, you can see how the sprites of parts of Space Invaders come back into the memory. SethBling then demonstrates that he can adjust these manually, with the result that the figures in the final game also look different. The data of the games themselves also show how the sprites take up space on the roms.

The emulated MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit processor that was popular in the 70s and 80s because it was a lot cheaper than other brands. That is why it was found in the Atari 2600, but also in the NES and the Apple II, for example. In the Atari 2600, the processor runs at a clock speed of about 1MHz. In Minecraft emulation, the processor executes about twenty instructions per second.

SethBling has made the world publicly available. He has also created a program with which a ROM can be converted so that it runs in the game.