TalkStructure.md

NINNES Talk

Introduction (5 minutes)

About the Speaker

About the Project

• This is just an excuse to talk about Roslyn

What the NES is going on? (5 minutes)

What?

• Allow the NES to be programmed with C#
  • Visual Basic is outside of the scope
  • Running C# on the NES CPU is a far-away target

Why?

• Showcase Roslyn's flexibility
• 1337 Internet points, of course
• Exemplify tailoring Roslyn to a extremely specific business use case

How?

• Customizing Roslyn to restrict ilegal operations for the NES CPU
• Providing a NuGet Class Library that performs equivalent operations as the NES CPU, PPU and APU components
  • Desktop Direct2D/OpenGL/XNA backend
  • WebAssembly Canvas backend
• Providing software re-implementations of forbidden/unsupported operations on the NES with valid .Net calls
• Compiling C# to the NES CPU

Into the Machine

CPUs and other Arcane things (5 minutes)

• Circuitry
• Registers
• Memory
• Instructions
• Basic CPU Loop
• "Hardware Instructions" vs "Implemented in Software"?

From Visual Studio to F5, Modern dotNet Behind the Curtains. (5 minutes)

• C# Language,
• BCL, The Stage for the Actors
• Roslyn, Costumer Extraordinaire
• MSIL, Playwright
• RyuJIT, Director
• .Net Native, Anti-Director

The role of the Compiler (10 minutes)

• Tending the ASCII seeds
  • Lexeme extraction
  • Syntax analysis
• The Forest for the Trees
  • Code representation inside Roslyn, ASTs
  • Different kinds of Roslyn AST Nodes
• Preparing the shipment
  • Producing MSIL

From Roslyn to the NES (15 minutes)

What can't the NES CPU do?

Code diagnostics and Fixes

What will be lost in the way

• This is NOT dotNet, this is C#
• Garbage Collection
• Threading
• Possibly more?

Compiling down to the NES

• AST interpretation down to C or ASM instructions - C# Transpiler
• MSIL recompilation with LLILC
• Continuing the work of the .NET Micro Framework

Little Demo (5 minutes)

• Code analysis makes Roslyn reject valid C# code that can't run on the NES