> Interestingly, about half of the buyers so far are in neuroscience.

They reminded me immediately of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of brain activity.

https://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/data/json/doc/tutorial/_bui...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johannes_Knaus/publicat...

Cool, you wrote your own NES emulator for this? This is off-topic, but I've been meaning to write an emulator for ARM Cortex-M platforms as an introduction to the idea, but haven't had much luck finding good beginner-friendly resources.

So...thanks for writing up and collating so much information about the NES in one place!

These are so cool! I think you may have inspired me to buy a pen plotter! I also read your Medium article about programming for the plotter. Great stuff, thank you for sharing the knowledge and for making such a cool project!

Author of that PlosCB paper here, I love these plots! This is such great work, and I've been telling everyone I know to check it out.

Saw this going around #plottertwitter. Very lovely work - congrats!

If you want to try running this in a big robotic whiteboard, let me know.

Your blog post is fascinating and I'm tinkled pink I found it, as I was planning on doing a NES memory visualization project myself for a design class this semester. Your idea of representing the bits as pixels is exactly what I was cooking up in my preliminary notes. It's awesome to see that I wasn't alone in my idea; your write-up and code will be a great starting point -- a valuable citation for sure.

Most NES games have separate program and graphics data, stored in 2 physical ROM chips on the cartridge. The CPU and Picture-Processing-Unit (PPU) have separate memory maps; one chip will be mapped into the CPU's area, and one into the PPU's. Some games (like MegaMan and Legend of Zelda) have RAM connected to the PPU, instead of a ROM chip, and the graphics are stored with the program data. This lets the developer store (or generate, like in the game "Elite") images alongside program code, and transfer to the PPU as needed.

So I'd wonder if a pattern like that is characteristic of the game switching transmitting graphic tiles to the PPU.

It's shuffling the order of its 256-byte sprite buffer each frame to implement sprite flicker, which is done because the NES can only render 8 sprites per scanline.

It looks like perhaps it has some sort of scene graph that it re-scans on every frame - probably not to redraw the screen because games have been pretty smart about that for a long time, but perhaps to check collisions between objects / particles. Then again, this is NES, so who knows!

I don't see Mega Man on the linked page -- is it somewhere else?

These are all variants of NSF players. When looking for them, my requirement was that they generate audio with an actual NES CPU.

This one I think is especially cool. Instructions to build a cartridge to run on an unmodified NES: https://web.archive.org/web/20170319202533/www.nullsleep.com...

And these two both use an NES (or Famiclone) CPU, along with some other hardware:

http://kevtris.org/Projects/hardnes/

http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=5957&view=next

NSF is a cool format, itself. It's basically a specialized ROM format for encoding game music and sound effects for playback, usually in an emulator. And since it relies on actual CPU code rather than recorded register writes, it can include loops and such programmatically.

Haha, everyone says that but it's totally coincidental - they're just in alphabetical order. (GitHub looks like an O)

So which one is the typical reader, the one wondering about the price or the one explaining to the first one why it shouldn't be surprising? (Or the ones discussing what typical readers say or do?)

As the creator, I feel this comment best reflects my mindset behind the pricing. In particular, at a lower price I'd be overwhelmed with fulfillment and I'm not interested in that.

> I'll play another round of Donkey Kong.

Can we get platinum editions with famous computer scientists (besides yourself, of course) playing Donkey Kong? I want the Don Knuth edition!

It's totally worth $200. Same person has probably splurged on something they deem is worth $200.

The recurring exception to this HN maxim is when the work is artistic. Then it's not possible to price it low enough to avoid the scorned cries of, "overpriced. my kid could do this."

People here seriously overvalue their work. How much effort put towards peoples' countless "Show HN" projects would have been better spent contributing to similar, more-developed open-source projects?

If this is the bazaar, maybe cathedrals ain't so bad...

Art is subjective, of course, and an artist is free to ask whatever they want for their work. I am unimpressed and probably not the target audience (as other comments allude).

The market is indeed pretty small. However, I have several rich rich friends who live for this sort of unique item.

They'd probably buy several, frame them nicely and put them in an obvious place in their house. Then when they're entertaining a large VC or banking crowd someone will notice them and ask WTF they are and he'll have a nice story to explain them and how unique they are. Golf claps all around and my buddies will enjoy having something their other rich friends don't; and of course the short lived adoration of his dinner guests, which is almost better than money.

it's a great conversation starter

As a lifetime student of art I consider the art world and its notions of 'intrinsic value' to be bunk. As I said before he is free to price his art at whatever rate he wants, and I am free to object to whatever price I want.

The paper he is using is 53 cents per page according to the provided link. Ink cost is a bit harder to determine without knowing how many prints per pen. He is including free shipping, could easily be $5 to $10. There is also the matter of the time taken, the overhead of space and electricity and that doesn't even acknowledge any creativity. I'd estimate the break even point to be around $20-25. Much less than that and it would be more sensible to not bother doing anything at all.

HN never fails to disappoint on the "let's read his comment as the most extreme possible version it could be, nevermind subtlety, nuance, or reading!" front

I'm sorry but I do not consider experiences pursued to create art to have any intrinsic value for the final piece.

Cool, he has an instrumented emulator, but really, does playing a retro game for five seconds have ANY intrinsic value beyond worthless nostalgia?

In art all that matters is creation and output. A piece of art should not have to come with an explanation or hidden information in order to justify its worth. While it is important to fuel inspiration and artistic experiences, it's a fucking joke that I am expected to pay extra for the "experience" that lead to producing the work when it has no value to me, and especially when said experience isn't as unique as it is being made out to be.

Out in the real world people will judge art way more harshly than I. Real artists don't mind that.

Aesthetically they are nice posters and art-pieces. It's just that some of us are unmoved by the accompanying story.

I now kinda want a plotter art drawing of the invisible hand of the market creating a/b testing prices for itself. The HN way!

I won't, thanks for the extremely useful information. My life was absolutely incomplete until your reply!

same reaction here - neat idea, but too costly. does make me want to instrument some games I've created to generate art of this kind...