The Raspberry Pi Pico, a $4 microcontroller with a custom Raspberry Pi SoC has only been with us for a short time but eager hackers are already pushing this board to do much more than flash an LED. Ben Stragnell has used his Raspberry Pi Pico to emulate a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) including audio and VGA.
My viewing setup isn’t as neat as @kilograham5’s, but whatever. Here’s a @Raspberry_Pi Pico pretending to be a NES. The #RP2040 is an amazing piece of work – congratulations to everyone involved. pic.twitter.com/SF6kyivwLbFebruary 2, 2021
The Raspberry Pi Pico has an Arm Cortex M0+ CPU running at upto 133 MHz, and Stragnell has chosen it to be the base for his remarkable emulation project.
“This is a $4 microprocessor board simulating a 6502 plus all the NES hardware (PPU, APU) while bit-banging VGA signals and PWM audio. And it works when clocked at less than half the default speed!” Ben Stragnell via Twitter
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The Raspberry Pi Pico may only be a microcontroller, but the RP2040 SoC at the heart of the Pico has many tricks up its sleeve including a Programmable IO which can be programmed to support interfaces such as VGA and DVI. Stragnell’s emulation project is not the first time the Pico has emulated a classic machine. Within a week of the Pico being released we saw a BBC Micro emulator, a UK computer which heavily influenced the Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton, which was able to play full-screen video, audio playback and play games.
Right now Stragnell has just announced the project, but we hope that this will be made available for others to try out.
We have lots of Raspberry Pi Pico coverage for you. Our Everything You Need to Know about Raspberry Pi Pico page has all of our tutorials, reviews and more information on this excellent board.