Video: Working video game console built from the ground up inside of another video game

Freddie Mercury’s lyrics “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” in the rock ballad “Bohemian Rhapsody” might’ve been on to something. Maybe this really is a fantasy — one guy just constructed the world’s first functioning machine emulation of a video game console within another video game. Specifically, the machine-within-a-machine emulator renders Atari 2600 games inside of the popular PC title Minecraft .

Despite the technical accomplishment, games like Donkey Kong and Space Invaders aren’t playable; they render at a very slow rate and require sped-up time-lapse footage to animate in motion. What’s interesting about this is how project creator Seth Bling built the virtual machine from components within the game, exposing the system’s inner machinations in an easy-to-read way for programming newbies.

Minecraft ’sdirt represents zeroes; its stones are ones. Arranging both components into three giant fields of blocks creates the Atari 2600’s RAM, says Bling before reminding us that, while the console’s 6502C processor could support up to 64 KB of RAM, the Atari only addressed 128 bytes of it. 

Bling represents the whole mass of it virtually, and the far end of the field is where the 4-KB cartridge ROM is dumped. A separate portion of Bling’s Minecraft build contains an Assembly language breakdown of the system’s 6502C processor, built using Minecraft ’s command blocks.

A few sample cartridges can also be found floating around, which can be tapped to load their data into the emulator’s data field. Once loaded and the system freshly booted, the emulator begins functioning, sending the processor’s screen-drawing functions to an automated builder on a giant, vertical wall representing the game screen.

While a real Atari 2600’s processor completes about 510,000 processor instructions a second, Bling estimates that his emulator can only complete about 20. And that’s okay; the Minecraft Atari 2600 attempts pure machine emulation without any external mods to boost performance. It’s merely a way to understand how old consoles function in a deconstructed manner.

Curious to play around with the emulator yourself? Download Bling’s Minecraft instance from here .