That Arcada player is great for writing your own games in MakeCode Arcade or CircuitPython - but if you'd like to try homebrew Nintendo design, you can play NES ROMs as well thanks to a port of nofrendo to the ATSAMD51.
This emulator plays games from off the built in QSPI storage, at full speed and with sound as well! Play any ROM that's 256KB or smaller and save/restore game state so you can take a break whenever you like.
Try out some classic ROMs, or check out the amazing NES homebrew scene to try out the classic 8-bit gaming platform that defined a generation
Supported Hardware
In theory any board with Arcada support - but we recommend ones that have a gamepad + buttons:




Things it does:
- Emulate a large number of ROMs/games using the nofrendo core
- Play at full speed most of the time (if there's a lot of sprites from various parts of the ROM there may be a little slowdown)
- Play game audio through headphones/speaker
- Downsample for 160x128 displays (4-to-1 pixels), or 1:1 pixels if a 320x240 display
- Save and restore game state
- Support Adafruit Arcada boards like PyGamer and PyBadge
- Overclock the chip quite a bit
Things it does not do:
- Play ROMs larger than 256KB
- Play non-NES ROMs
- Some ROMs don't work - e.g. Dragon Warrior
- Support non-SAMD51 chips (for Teensy support, check out TeensyCEC)
- Support other hardware unless you've added support to Arcada (which you can!)
Page last edited March 08, 2024
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