Computing Pi on the NES
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- čas přidán 27. 06. 2024
- An NES game that computes the digits of pi.
Become a Patron - / neshacker
Buy my t-shirt (Amazon Affiliate Link) - amzn.to/3ksOPmR
Get the ROM - github.com/NesHacker/NesPi/ra...
See the Code - github.com/NesHacker/NesPi
Pi-Spigot Algorithm Paper (Rabinowitz & Wagon, 1995):
www.maa.org/sites/default/fil...
Music:
“Raintown (My Love For You) - Instrumental Version” by Alchemorph
“Maldito” by Family Kush
“Boiling Point - Instrumental Version” by Evgeny Bardyuzha
“Night Chase” by Raz Burg
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
2:20 Choosing a Mapper
3:16 Math Routines
5:22 The Spigot Algorithm
7:18 Coding the Game - Věda a technologie
Happy Pi day, everyone 😄
It got recommended to me on the right day. Happy Pi Day!
Piepi
mmmm pie
And here it is again 😊
I remember when I realized that game console were just special-built computers and not just "magic game machines" - so cool
I chose to become a software engineer as a kid the minute that realization hit me.
@@NesHacker Same here.
Here in the UK many of us started with a microcomputer instead of a games console, which was kinda cool, but I really wanted to play sonic.
This video is going to blow up on Pi Day. 🥧
He should have released it on Pi day.
I will share this all the places on Pi day. I am no one, so I don’t see how it will matter much, but this video is deserving of some serious Pi Day views, so I will do my part
I considered it, but I kinda thought it best to keep the release schedule consistent... otherwise it would have been a nearly a month and a half between releases :)
@@NesHacker Pi day is coming up in a couple of days.
No it won't. Video was uploaded too early. I agree with Kermit.
I would love to learn more about NMIs and graphics programming.
Got it, I'll start tooling around more with some ideas on the subject!
It's a tricky business. Essentially an NMI is a "ninja function" that can call itself even if your program doesn't. So it needs to leave everything the way it found it when it's finished.
@@williamdrum9899 No kidding. I've played around with it a little bit and oh boy the things that can go wrong if you don't use the stack
@@NesHacker ❤طططططج❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ض رب في ص🎉
😮 😢
I would love a quick tutorial along these lines in which you just show a sprite moving from left to right on the screen.
I was able to make the "HELLO" scroll across the screen by updating your example in GitHub, but I know there is a better way to do it.
I love the fact that the NES is asking "What is 'Flop'?". Just a nice touch. Also, 1:00
Super cool! Loved, "do you even flop bro"
So, when that joke came to me, I was like 10 hours deep doing graphics work. I was so tired I basically fell apart laughing and had to animate it in 🤣
Great video. The use of visuals on this channel to explain assembly and binary operations are very helpful.
When I was in school I couldn't *get* math or computer science stuff until I figured out a way to visualize, or *feel*, it in my head. So my hope with the channel is that I can help others do the same with the graphics and explanations.
@@NesHacker Omg, me too, the school methodology: "throw a bunch of numbers; ask students to figure out".
I began to understand math better when i began to mess with graphical calcs...
NES translations
1:03 「あのー、フロップは何ですか？」= umm, what’s a flop?
5:00 「そうです」= that’s right
素晴らしい、私も日本語が学んでいます。
its kinda strange seeing google translate the other side to be the exact same as eachother
I'm Brazilian and I study computer engineering, your videos inspired me a lot and I'm more and more interested in programming with the 6502. I would love to learn more about NMIs and I'm already following your playlist on basic assembly!
This video deserves 1000x the views it currently has. Thank you sir. This was Great!
That's a lot of views 😆
Man, never thought ill watch a 9min vid about PI in the NES, but how you explain it and how you put it graphically makes it very engaging. Thanks for this video even though i dont have any idea of it!
Well, I am glad you enjoyed it, haha
@@NesHacker yes, i did enjoy it
It's not entirely true that the nes lacks multiplication and division, but that it's limited. There are 4 bitwise opcodes, ROL, ROR, ASL, and LSR which you can use to shift the bits left and right which can be used to multiply and divide bytes by 2.
Indeed, I more meant "general arithmetic multiplication and division" such as a "mul" or "div" operation.
I sold my stack of Megaman NES carts around 8 years ago... You just hit me so hard in the feels with your stack.
A complex, daunting process explained in a very understandable and concise manner. The visuals are very smooth and helpful and your speech has a nice, relaxing cadence. Exceptional video, can't wait for more.
Thanks! I am glad you liked it :)
「あのー
フロップは何ですか？」
*"EVERYBODY DO THE FLOP!"*
Haha
This is great stuff! Finally! A concrete, complete, and not too complex example of how to get an NES to do some actual work!
I'm glad you like it :)
@@NesHacker One of the first things I wanted to do as far as NES coding projects were concerned was to "simply" count frames since poweron so I could get an accurate idea of how my video capture device interacted with the console(s).
Which means having to deal with enough PPU stuff to be able to set tiles on the screen, and enough math stuff to be able to increment and display, at bare minimum, a 16 bit integer.
I figure there's enough I can glean from your code to muddle through it.... now all I need to do is find the time...
I mean, you *could* trade stocks on a Famicom ;)
czcams.com/video/Q9gbIZY1WY4/video.html
This is really cool. I'm loving your recent videos.
Thanks, I've been really happy with my recent ones too :)
Wow, I was once assigned to do this using the 8086 assembly and didn't even try, was too hard back then but definitely knowing that algorithm would have changed a lot
Great vid, awesome production quality and a super interesting subject all explained very well!
Thanks :)
I've been living in Japan and learning assembly for the past 8 months now, but I was very surprised to see your NES speak in Japanese xD
I mean- of course it speaks Japanese... it's from Japan 🤔
This was a really great video, very well explained. I’d love it if you could go into more depth on handling interrupts, I had no clue you could save the address of a register on an interior call. Could also do a brief tutorial on NES audio programming, it’s one of the more difficult concepts I’m trying to grasp.
APU programming is a big one to tackle. As soon as I have a good way to explain it all and have done more research I'll be sure to cover it!
@@NesHacker thanks! I really appreciate that.
This is very cool! Hasnt watched everthing but its sounds cool!
Hopefully you like it when you get to watch it all :)
@@NesHacker That was AMAZING very cool! Keep the good work man
Now I know, why a friend of my yesterday said he wants to make a NES-Pi calculator. He probably saw this video.
Epic! Did not know you could do so much stuff in the NMI
I was literally going to say that I liked your T-shirt and then you you just gave me the link to buy it😊
It's so cool to me there's a way to compute pi without floating point math... and digit-by-digit like that... what a cool algorithm. Math is so freakin' cool sometimes.
Yeah I was pretty stoked when I found the paper detailing the algorithm
A youtuber called suckerpinch made an NES slideshow app.
As a Pi loving mathematician who has written many forms of the Spigot algorithm, bounded and unbounded, for various numbers... Well.. I'm jealous.
You have no idea how happy I am to hear that a mathematician is jealous of my work 😂
+1 for NMI!
Haha, alright, I'll make sure to bump up the priority!
1UP!
Hey, thanks to the inspiration of this video I got a 10/10 in my parallel computing project, for university! Appreciated!
I have a video request: a video covering the ins and outs of scrolling on the NES.
From what I understand, you need to go through all sorts of hoops to be able to get scrolling in all directions. I've studied enough of the hardware to understand it can do general scrolling in one direction, but beyond that is a mystery to me.
What makes bi-directional scrolling so hard, how is it accomplished, and what are the limitations to it depending on the mapper you're using?
NESMaker is a good example of how this frustrated me a lot in the past. They released this tool allowing you to build your own NES games without needing programming, but anytime they were asked why can't they provide four-way scrolling, they pretty much just said it's not possible and those of us not in the know were left just wonder "But why?"
I'd LOVE to see you cover this, and Vdubs also suggested teaching more about "NMIs and graphics programming." I think a video on scrolling and all the hurdles would be a great start.
It's definitely on my list. 4-way scrolling *is* possible, I mean look at Super Mario Bros. 3... So I kinda wonder what's going on with NESMaker where they can't support it...
@@NesHacker Yep, not to mention all those RPGs!
I'm almost certain I remember the main dev of NESMaker mentioning they sort of limited themselves due to the mapper they chose, but I think I've even seen a plain NROM demo with 4-way scrolling, so I'm still confused.
@@NesHacker actually 4-way scrolling *isn't* possible. iIRC there's an RGMechEx video on how smb3 cheats but the gist is that there's a load of sprites on the left side of the screen to mask the fact that the tiles wrap around (and you can see colour glitches on the right hand side of the screen because of how NES colour mapping works)
The NES has two scrolling modes: 2 screens vertically, and duplicated horizontally; or 2 screens horizontally, and duplicated vertically and SMB3 cheats by covering the left side of the wrapped tile
4 way scrolling is possible, whether by including extra RAM on the cartridge for 2 more nametables, or "cheating" like in Super Mario Bros 3 and a ton of other games
Great video. Not at all what I was expecting when I saw “NES Pi” in the vid title, but was interested anyways.
Amazing video! Visuals were amazing, and the breakdown of compilicated math algorithims made it easy to understand. Also cool because you pushed the limits of the NES!
Thanks! I'm glad you liked it, though I'd say I didn't push them too hard. You should see what some of the people in the demo scene do, haha
Why limits?
Really quality video! Very interesting, tnx!
Thanks, and you're very welcome!
I like the joke at 1:00 :) "What is the flop?" :)
Yeah I am not sure if it's technically correct Japanese, but it's what I remember from lessons... 😂
@@NesHacker it was good enough for Google Translate, I guess.
This makes sense considering 6502 is a general purpose CPU.
Chances are there are limitless options to expand this chip by retrofitting current code so it can understand it for low watt, unattended processing.💯
Great video! Very interesting!
i expected an other retro pie tutorial, good video
This was really cool!
ah yes , my videogame from my childhood. Pi for the NES. i especially loved it's requel/remake "Super Pi" fore SNES
Imho Super Pi was derivative and overrated :P
@@NesHacker D:<
to waaaaaar
How come your videos is so dope
Loved the video! Quick code note, when an interrupt is fired, the 6502 will push the current PC to the stack, and then will also push the current processor flags as well. This is why you use RTI as it pops both the processor flags and the PC. So anyway, all I'm trying to say is you don't need to do php/plp when an interrupt is fired since that is done for you.
Yep, another viewer pointed this out as well, my bad! Thanks for watching and letting me know :)
@@NesHacker awesome! Sorry for that then, I tried reading the comments to see if someone else caught this but I didn't find one. Anyway, thanks for responding, can't wait to see the next upload!
Cool way to bring in mappers to the series!
Oh wow, pleasure seeing you here! I'm a senior in college and I've had your albums on my phone since middle school!
Thanks! I've been searching for a way to approach the subject more that is interesting without being just an info dump.
@@AndrewGlitchMasterBalaschak That's wild, what a small world.
Whereabouts did you find my music way back then?
@@jefftheworld it was on Google play actually, I remember I didn't have a credit card or any way to buy stuff online so I just searched for all the free music I could find!
Awesome! Instant sub!
The little NES going "ano..." is so cute x3
That whole sequence had me laughing to hard when I was doing the graphics :D
happy 3.14 - i did run this on the everdrive. the screen was slightly cut off, but tons of fun !!
This is so sick!
Haha, appreciate it :)
Thank you for the great video
You're welcome :)
Yo, this is really good
Thank you!
Hey, thanks!
Love these videos bro!!
Right on :D
today i learned that by overloading my brain with such complex algorythm and sophisticated math at a faster pace
i can go sleep faster
I thought from the title you would be making a mini NES out of a raspberry pie but this was cool!
I subscribed!
I hope the algorithm bumps your video with March 14 around the corner.
Awesome stuff right here
Glad you like it :D
Yes, I want to learn more about using interrupts to do graphics programming on the NES 🙂
These motion graphics are so impressive
Thanks, they're a lot of work but really fun and satisfying to make :)
Checked the whole video… didn’t understand anything 🙈
Imagine how I felt making it ;)
@@NesHacker atleast you know what youre talking about :)
Amazing!!!
Nitpick: You talked about floating point with a graphic of stock quotes ... Due to rounding errors, using floating point for currency or stock shares is bad bad bad! You would need to use an integer math representing cents or even fractional cents.
That's true, and my bad. Mostly just needed some basic b-roll to fill in some space xD
Great video
Glad you enjoyed it
can anyone pls explain to me why I end up watching this type of videos with so much interest from start to finish without understanding a thing of what is explained in this video :)))
btw, you have a great voice/narration
nice vid , I always try to stay away from floats and these type of stuff with 6502 since its always harder than on modern day processors . also not sure if you know this but you dont have to backup the Proccesor flags at the start of an interrupt , thats done automaticly . Otherwise RTI would be exactly the same as RTS
I thought it might be the case that the interrupt handler auto stored the status register, but I was like five days into deep hacking on the game, very tired, and figured a couple extra cycles wouldn't matter so I could be "safe" and just throw stack push and pop in there.
Fully computing all 960 digits takes quite a while even on the highest speed settings I could get on Mesen, and even minor issues were causing all sorts of havoc with the final digit results. So I was definitely being over cautious when handling the rendering here, haha.
I subscribed because of this video ❤
For some reason I assumed this would be about using a Raspberry Pi with a NES, like what suckerpinch did a few years back to implement custom video via MMC/PPU shenanigans.
A very cool video. You may not have planned this but I got a chuckle out of the NES "speaking" in Japanese as the NES was not released in Japan, the Famicom was.
Everyone knows that the NES' true home is Japan and that its an expat, jeeeezeee ;)
ACKCHEWALLY
Omg You have 3.14k subs rn!!
Mmmm, 31.4k I think, but yeah really close to getting 10*pi on pi day, haha
I haven't programmed 6502 assembly since the 90s on my C64, good memories. I had to do it on all on paper then poke all the bytes into memory with some C64 basic via the programmers ref guide, then call it with SYS xxxxxx. Hah, all that to make the text wiggle about on the screen or change char sets, make sprites. Fond memories.
Not gonna lie, I thought this video would be showing a raspberry pi built into an NES cartridge that had multiple games on it.
nice video! i love the idea of using old game consoles as general use computers. i wanna make something like this on the gameboy
The Z80 is for real, give it a shot :)
Of course the algorithm recommends this to me today
great video!
Thanks!
I would typically click on "like" but it is currently sitting at 314 and I just can't bring myself to break that perfection...
😂
you just couldn’t wait 10 more days to post this at pi day 😭😭
I mean I could have... but then by the time anyone knew about it it would probably be too late.
you missed a big opportunity to name it PI-NES
I think it's more like I *dodged* that opportunity :P
@@NesHacker nah definitely missed XD
Love this, it's very interesting!
Right? I was thrilled when I found the algorithm and even more so when I "got" it, haha
@@NesHacker Yeah, it's even more frustrating when it comes to assembly. Good job!
Wow this is awesome
No, you are :)
Honestly i would love to see the debugging process on nes, i have some problems with updating backgrounds and its like no one else had anything like that before, you should collect similar bugs and cover them
cool video!
awesome video.
can you make a series where we can build a entire game? sprite, animations etc... i would pay for it.
I very much would like to do that, but it's a really big undertaking and takes quite a bit of planning :)
You use the stack to store the values of the registers during an NMI interrupt, but isn't it better to store them into the zeropage ?
It would use less clock cycle.
Yeah that would be more optimal, thankfully in this case it didn't matter much... But with more complex rendering routines it certainly would!
fixed point arithmetic would've also been an option, as it's functionally the same as floats but a lot easier on the hardware (and easier to implement).
a lot of NES games actually use fixed point math to keep track of characters/enemies and their speed/acceleration and such!
and honestly it did hurt my pride a bit that you didn't consider it because i made a fixed point library for cc65 (a 6502 C Compiler designed for these systems) for exactly these kinds of projects. :(
Oh, sorry about that, no offense intended at all! I don't know why but I had it in my mind that there just *had* to be a way to compute the digits using only integer math, so when I found the spigot algorithm I kinda just went with that :)
@@NesHacker no worries, important part is that you got something working at all!
@@proxy1035 Right on, and honestly this is all bound to come up in a future video, so I'll definitely give your library a spin when I get to covering the topic again :)
I honestly thought this video was about stuffing a raspberry pi into a nes cartridge
From the thumbnail I thought you were going to make a cart with a raspberry pi inside
Yeah a lot of people say that, I should totally do it now xD
Family computer.
Close to pi day!
NGL, based on the title, not where I thought we were going.
Hopefully it wasn't misleading. I thought since it's March people would be thinking about the constant.
Someone get standupmaths over here, he always does a special video for pi day
I think he's behind most of my favorite numberphile videos :)
The Ricoh 2A03 and Ricoh 2A07 (those were the CPUs in the NES) are just 8 Bit CPUs with MOS 6502 instruction set running at 1.79 MHz. Oh boy, those CPUs used a technology node of 6 μm, today CPUs are below 6 nm (that's a factor of 1000 smaller). And the 6502 was just a stripped down version of the Motorola 6800 and it's the CPU also used in the Atari 2600, Apple II, Commodore 64, or BBC Micro, so of course it is capable of doing way more than running console games. It is a general purpose CPU even though a pretty limited one by today's standards.
Well stated :)
PLEASE YES GRAPHICS
Rgr o7
Awesome, I've been meaning to do some non x86/non-desktop programming at some point, console is not a checkbox I've ticked yet, though I'm not quite sure I want to dive into assembly just yet, I'm working my way backwards. Though I guess the benefit of something like this is that its more pure, you won't have to disentangle some proprietary API such as what an xbox might have. Historically c wasn't used because it was slower? Is this still the case, how is c programming for something like the NES nowadays? Is inline assembly a good way to have the best of both?
You can do NES programming in C or Assembly, choice is yours. But some of the rendering stuff and advanced techniques requires precise cycle timing, so you have to break down into assembly to do that. I mostly teach assembly on the channel cause I think it's fun and a more natural way to program NES games.
In our language the word "nespi" mean "don't sleep" 😀
That's a pretty accurate description of my life when I was editing the video :P
@@NesHacker 😀
Great to see coders using assembler and struggling with little RAM. Back in the late 70s I did the same and resorted to using the video memory directly as storage. It’s been a while, but we have come a long way since 4k was total RAM.
Working in a more limited environment can be really fun because you often have to get creative. I didn't exist in the 70s, but I probably would have had a blast programming back then :)
If I remember correctly there is a fantasy console that has 1 kb of RAM.
(Tropic Thunder vc) "What!!?.. You been talkin na' ME THIS WHOLE TIME???" 🤯😵💫
This makes me wanna learn assembly
It's pretty fun, ngl
cool pi nes
Great video! Looking for a video on state machines
You may get your wish in the near future ;)
the in real time showcase was so short, or is that bit at the end real time?
cool math bro
thanks bruh
I wonder how much CPU went for rendering and how much for computing? Would be interesting to see video side by side where on one side your current code fills screen and on other side entire number is calculated first and then everything is printed once and with no animation.
I'd love to see the video on state machines!
I have one now called “How NES Games use Stare Machines for Everything”