I made an NES emulator – What I learned about the original Nintendo
If you're into this kind of thing, just dig in and give it a shot! Old systems are surprisingly understandable after a few hours' research and fooling around.<p>There's a community that looks for unused content that remains in games. The main wiki for this community is <<a href="http://tcrf.net/" rel="nofollow">http://tcrf.net/</a> >, which contains a fascinating amount of material. If you don't see your favorite old game on there, why not dissect it and try to find some unused stuff?<p>I did this for a favorite old game of mine called M.C. Kids. I reverse-engineered the game's level and graphics data formats and managed to create a level dumper for the game. Then, I did the same for a leaked prototype version of the game. I took the dumped images and made a page on TCRF comparing them:<p><a href="http://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids" rel="nofollow">http://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids</a><p>It took a few months on afternoons and weekends. It was very challenging, but I never felt overwhelmed by the details. There's really only so much you can do with three registers and little more than adding and branching instructions. If you're curious to see what a reverse-engineered level dumper looks like, the code is available at <<a href="https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c</a> >.