nesv is a toy RISC-V emulator that runs entirely on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), written in C (compiled with cc65), demonstrates that a modern 32-bit ISA can be emulated on 8-bit retro hardware.
The fun idea of running a modern 32-bit ISA on an 8-bit 80s console.
Playing with RISC-V’s 32-bit address space while living inside the NES’s 2 KB of RAM is an absurd but educational exercise.
It’s a mash-up of computer history: late-70s 6502 meets modern 2010s RISC-V.
It’s completely impractical, but that’s exactly what makes it fun: seeing RISC-V assembly actually run on NES hardware.
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Supports core
RV32Iinstructions:arithmetic,logical,loads/stores, andbranches. -
Simple bus abstraction for memory access (NES RAM mapped as RISC-V memory).
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Debug text renderer: NES screen shows registers, PC, and instructions on
DEBUGmode. -
Runs test RISC-V binaries embedded in ROM.
To build and run, you’ll need the following tools:
cc65cross development toolchainNESemulator (e.g., FCEUX)
➜ ~ make ➜ ~ make DEBUG=1 This project is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. See the LICENSE file for details.