Flappy Bird on the Sega Dreamcast VMU
If you remember the Sega Dreamcast, you might also recall their innovative Visual Memory Units (VMUs). Unlike most storage devices, instead of simply storing files that you could interface with using the game system, they had a small LCD panel and controls that allowed you to interact with it as a sort of a mini gaming system. Though officially available for only a few years circa 2000, VMUs can be obtained today for a paltry $3.
This price piqued Grinberg’s curiosity, and after receiving the unit, he set to work reverse engineering the system, resulting in a visualization of a Mandelbrot set, as well as a port of Flappy Bird.

To accomplish this, Grinberg developed an ARM emulator for the tiny, under-powered device. While the Cortex-M0 would’ve been a good target, it lacked some of the instructions that he liked; rather, he chose to write an emulator on the Cortex-M23, equipped had all the missing features he’d wanted.
He documents the entire process here, an amazing feat of finding and applying knowledge from older documentation (including this 778 page PDF file), in order to explore this older technology.
[h/t: Gizmodo]


