NES Radar Tracks Flights at 9600 Baud

Air traffic visualizers seem to be having a bit of a moment right now, and now that moment has come to the venerable NES thanks to [k6lcm]’s NES Radar project, which is open-source under the GPL on GitHub. In spite of the name, there’s no Radio Direction or Range-Finding involved in this project– no radio at all, in fact, which makes this a bit interesting. It’s just an NES cartridge and a carefully constructed cable.

The cartridge is a standard ROM cart that holds the software — no hidden ESP32 or PicoW here, which is what we initially suspected the project would be. So how is it that when you start up the NES with the cartridge inside, you can input an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code, like, say, KATL, and get a visualization of the traffic? Well, okay, if you put in KATL, you won’t get all the traffic, since the software is limited to 8 sprites, and that’s the world’s busiest airport. Still, how does it know where those airplanes are?

The secret is in the carefully constructed cable mentioned above: this project is using the second controller port on the NES as a serial port, and getting the data that way. A handy Python script on a nearby computer is what actually fetches aircraft positions. It’s based on c64u-radar, also by [k6lcm], which does the same Python server trick but relies on the Commodore 64 Ultimate’s LAN port to get data rather than using serial. The NES has no such ports available, though, so the controller port it was. We saw a similar trick used for satellite tracking on the NES some years ago.

If you like the idea of tracking flights, perhaps you’d like to see it done on a real radar CRT, or projected directly onto the ceiling. Thanks to ADS-B and free APIs, it seems airplane trackers are everywhere; if an interesting one has come onto your radar, please send us a tip.

Speaking of tips, thanks to [Levi] for putting this one on our scopes!