After weeks of building a 6502-based NES emulator in Zig, today marks a major milestone: Nyxx successfully renders the full Donkey Kong title screen — glitch-free, fully colored, and frame-accurate.

Boot up. Render clean. Bring on the ape.

The PPU core now passes:

• Nametable decoding
• Pattern table fetches
• Attribute table decoding
• Background rendering with palette logic
• Scroll unit synchronization
• VBlank + NMI triggering
• Open bus behavior with decay

This image below is not a PNG dump from an emulator — it’s rendered pixel-by-pixel using Nyxx’s custom FrameBuffer and written out in PPM format.

Donkey Kong rendered by Nyxx (Zig, headless backend)

PPU Memory & Timing Overview

The title screen renders cleanly because the PPU’s internal memory map and timing rules are now reproduced in Nyxx with cycle-level accuracy.