So. I have not been posting, but I have been continuing work and I plan on posting a little bit more about that this week. I hope to post more about what I've learned about the NES through my research, inaccurate though it likely is. However, for the moment just let me say that I am starting to work on the gui. The PPU is coming along and is just about ready to actually do something. I believe most of the registers are more or less working except for the scroll register. I am parsing the character tiles and am starting work on parsing the background tiles, which ought to go easier since it's not too terribly different than the character tiles.

The gui is a little bit fun because it involves working with swing, which I haven't had an awful lot of experience doing. It's also a bit frustrating because it's slow work as I'm having to do a ton of research in order to understand what it is I'm doing.

I received a comment from another guy who is also working on a java based NES emulator that recommended I not start my project based on emulating SMB. This is in many respects a wise bit of advice. SMB is a fairly simple cartridge, but there are simpler ones out there. There are a ton of test cartridges, for example, which test various parts of the system and can help me debug. So, this is what I'm doing currently. I've worked out a lot of bugs in the CPU and in the registers that simply isn't represented in the code in the repository at the moment. I will probably correct that in the next few days to weeks. However, I'm really more interested in getting the PPU at least partially displaying something in the GUI before I update the SVN.

I have begun researching the APU. On first glance it appears a little bit simpler than the PPU. We'll see, though.