A toy RTOS inside Super Mario Bros. using emulator save states

This is another post about programming, which I almost never write about. Click here to jump straight to trying this thing out for yourself. In my previous post on Threads, I made an offhand comparison: Threads are just emulator save states, coupled with a condition upon which they will be resumed. At the time, I thought this a pretty okay analogy — but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’ve been turning it around in my mind for a while. I think it has serious untapped potential as a pedagogical tool. So I added multithreading to Super Mario Bros. for the NES. The Thing Itself No buried ledes here. What It Is I should explain myself. What you just watched happens to be a multithreaded NES emulation, with Super Mario Bros. as the threads. There are three “threads” running, each a distinct instance of the game. Every so often, the emulator switches “threads”, swapping to a different instance of the game. Each “thread” is assigned a different color palette, which we apply whe ... Read full article.