Imagesource: https://github.com/henrikpersson/

The next fun project sounds like old hat ... but what in the retrocomputing world can't adorn itself with this predicate? 🎩

Henrik Persson – at home at github as henrikpersson – is a friend of the MOS6502 CPU and has written his very own emulator in Rust. But because that wasn't enough for him, he implemented a NES emulator called Potatis on top of it. And although it is not yet complete, it really looks good.

Besides the emulator there is an SDL based version, a WASM port for the browser, an embedded version for the RasPi Pico and a version for Android.

But especially cool is the cloud version - NES-as-a-service. How does it work? Quite simply with the help of netcat, Sixel and a little magic, instructions are executed remotely, keystrokes are sent to the cloud, and graphics data is sent back.

Honestly, the cloud variant is (at least in our tests) too slow for serious gaming fun - but what counts here is the concept.

Nice thing, that.