hey.

As some of you know, I had mentioned that I was working on some NES projects relating to completely reverse-engineering the PPU (with potential for re'ing the CPU too).

This was almost a month ago now. So, first I want to tell you guys that I've been working my ass off on this project since I first mentioned it.

Basically, what the PPU RE project requires in order for the re'ing to commence, is an oscilliscope with some very custom features, only obtainable through designing it myself, and doing it through x86 software. Only then can all signals on the PPU be analyzed simultaniously, at any time interval in the frame, supporting multiple view windows of mutually exclusive time intervals, and features that let you display any and all data read off the PPU pins on every clock cycle during any time interval as ASCII, hex, bin, a barline (well, somthing like it, only better), and, you can even use that data to control the color produced for that display node at that time (so, make it red when a write occurs, and green when a read occurs, etc.). Character-based values can have a granularity of 8, or 1 scanlines (one means that the char value will be updated mid-char, if the PPU changes states at that moment). Oh, and one more thing- it's programmable. You can program the scope to issue out a write command at any clock cycle, to program external latches that control the PPU's control lines.

Really, it's a pretty damn complex project, but it's all neccessary for me to do before I can start work on other NES projects. Anyways, my progress so far in program completion, is about 50%. At 100%, which I'm hoping won't take longer than another month, I'm going to start my RE experiments on the PPU (since all the hardware is ready to go right now...), and *all* the data I'm going to be looking at will be coming from the scope software's display. Anyways, the experiments are going to take probably another 2 weeks or more on top of this, so if there are people here interested in using the scope software (I'm currently writing) within days of it's completion, along with the schematics/plans to interface the scope software (running on an x86 platform) to the NES's PPU or CPU integrated circuits themselves (with some easy-to-find parts required), then reply here, and I'll ask Memblers if he'll host it.

This is the most exiting NES project I've read about in years, how come nobody is commenting on this?

maybe just waiting to see what is found out

I dont know what to say. i am really hyped up.
and i also have a little nes project but i rather wait for the results to this :)

Would you be able to use this to find any hints about the sprite-DMA redirect to $2006 trick being able to work?

Something else I've wondered about, is if it's possible to stretch a sprite horizontally by updating SPR-RAM every scanline. It would be cool to know when, if ever, it's safe to write to $2004 during the frame.

Oops, I mean to stretch the sprite vertically