It's the weekend, so I relax from spending all week programming by writing a hobby project.
I wrote the framework of a MOS 6502 CPU emulator yesterday, the registers, stack, memory and all the opcodes are implemented. (Link to source below)
I can manually run a series of operations in the debugger I wrote, but I'd like to load a NES rom and just point the program counter at its instructions, I figured that this would be the fastest way to find flawed opcodes.
I wrote a quick NES rom loader and loaded the ROM banks into the CPU memory.
The problem is that I don't know how the opcodes are encoded. I know that the opcodes themselves follow a pattern of one byte per opcode that uniquely identifies the opcode,
0 - BRK
1 - ORA (D,X)
2 - COP b
etc
However I'm not sure where I'm supposed to find the opcode argument. Is it the the byte directly following? In absolute memory, I suppose it might not be a byte but a short.
Is anyone familiar with this CPU's memory model?
EDIT: I realize that this is probably shot in the dark, but I was hoping there were some oldschool Apple and Commodore hackers lurking here.
EDIT: Thanks for your help everyone. After I implemented the proper changes to align each operation the CPU can load and run Mario Brothers. It doesn't do anything but loop waiting for Start, but its a good sign :)
I uploaded the source:
https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=cpu6502
If anyone has ever wondered how an emulator works, its pretty easy to follow. Not optimized in the least, but then again, I'm emulating a CPU that runs at 2mhz on a 2.4ghz machine :)
The opcode takes one byte, and the operands are in the following bytes. Check out the byte size column here, for instance.