nes260

NES260 - NES emulator for Xilinx KV260 FPGA board

This is a port of fpganes to the KV260 FPGA board.

Current status:

• Most of the small games works (<64K), like Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island, Gradius, Battle City.
• Video works well through HDMI.
• Audio is done through a separate PMod module (IceSugar Audio).
• Game loading and controller is handled through a python GUI on PC.

Running NES260

Download the binary release zip file. Inside there's a BOOT.bin image for booting the KV260 board, and nes260.py for running on Windows.

KV260's boot process is different from most FPGA boards. It always boots from on-board QSPI flash and there's no switches/jumpers for other ways. So easiest way to boot BOOT.bin is to program it to QSPI flash. Follow Xilinx's instructions to do it. (You will need an Ethernet cable). If you have Xilinx's Vitis/Vivado development tools installed, you can actually switch to SD bootmode. The MicroSD card preparation is as simple as formating it as FAT and copy the BOOT.BIN to it.

If you see a grey screen after boot, then NES260 is ready for loading .nes ROMs. Connect KV260 to PC with USB cable and run pc/nes26.py with python to load games (pip install pyserial itertools inputs kaitaistruct importlib, then python nes26.py). USB game controller should be connected to the PC (not KV260). My Xbox 360 controllers work fine.

To get audio, connect a IceSugar Audio 1.2 module to the PMOD port. It provides both a small speaker and a 3.5mm jack.

Interested in retro-gaming or learning FPGA programming?

You can,

• Read my notes on some technical details on how NES260 works, and compile/build the project yourself. The required Xilinx tools are free.
• Get the KV260 board. KV260 is currently available from Xilinx at $199. It is not cheap. But it is a powerful board with basically a Xilinx Ultrascale+ ZU5EV SoC. Similar boards sell for twice the price or more. You can learn a lot with it if you have programming experience.
• Check out the most mature FPGA gaming project Mister. You can find many Youtube videos on FPGA gaming. Mister supports a ton of consoles from Atari all the way to Playstation 1.
• Why make NES260 when there's already Mister? Actually Xilinx KV260 is much more powerful than the board Mister uses (Intel DE10-nano), and at roughly the same price. So it has potential for FPGA retro-gaming. The board was just released in 2021 and I haven't seen an emulator built with it. So here it goes.
• Also check out another FPGA project of mine, neoapple2.

Video demo

Feng Zhou, 2022-7