Someone built an old game console in Minecraft. A super-hacker created a slow Atari 2600 emulator inside the massively popular block-building game. It is the very first working game console emulator running in Minecraft. The hacker who developed the emulator is a YouTuber named SethBling.
He is known for his outrageous hacks of popular games. SethBling once built functioning BASIC programming within Minecraft. What he created is a virtual world within another virtual world. It must be noted that the emulator SethBling built is essentially unplayable.
The emulator is so slow that the only way to see games running is to capture the display using a time-lapse camera. The Atari 2600 emulator runs at 60 frames every 4 hours whereas the actual Atari 2600 ran at about 60 frames per secound.
According to technology website Ars Technica, SethBling estimates that the emulator can execute about 20 processor instructions per second. This is much less than the 510,000 per second (0.51 MIPS) that an actual Atari 2600 can handle. It is incredibly slow but since there is no controller, there is no way to play with it. The emulator does not have any practical use then.
SethBling's creation was only built to prove that it could be done. It is simply a creative feat, essentially, a work for art. Technology magazine WIRED reported that Minecraft has an item called a Command Block. This block enables players to enter and execute simple code instructions.
SethBling put together enough of these blocks to create a program that emulates the Atari 2600 game console from 1977. The command blocks read the data by scanning down each row of bricks and then executes the code. According to online magazine Motherboard, the emulated Atari 2600 is basically a field of soil with a huge screen hovering on one side and large walls of stone and soil at the other. The field stores the memory used by a 6502 processor of the Atari 2600.
The 4 kilobyte ROM cartridges that contains the game data are the gravelly walls. SethBling recreated the binary data of the ROM files of three Atari games, namely, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong, using standard inert Minecraft blocks. The dirt blocks are 0s and the stone blocks are 1s. The system is booted after a cartridge is loaded. The emulator sends the processor's screen-drawing functions to an automated builder on a giant vertical wall which represents the game screen.
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