Milestone #1: Basic graphics

Last updated: 2026-06-19

The first milestone is to pull the art straight out of a cartridge and put it on screen — before any of the emulator components are implemented.

It's nice to see something — anything — early, instead of taking it on faith that the guide will eventually get you to pixels. A cartridge carries its graphics as plain data, so you can decode and display them without emulating a single instruction.

What it takes

Three things, each its own chapter:

• Cartridges and ROM files — what a .nes file is and how to find the graphics data inside it.
• Pattern tables — how that data encodes 8×8 tiles, two bitplanes per tile.
• Checkpoint — decoding the tiles and writing them out as an image.