Google Maps for NES – an April Fools’ prank becomes reality
What started as an April Fool’s joke nine years ago has been turned into reality by a resourceful hacker – Google Maps for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
A resourceful hacker has created an 8-bit version of Google Maps – for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This was made possible thanks to two other projects by NES modders and also aided in part by the games Zelda and Doom. The idea came from an April Fool’s Day prank played by Google in 2012, where it presented an NES module with Maps and an integrated modem.
Google even provided an online demo version of 8-bit Maps at the time. Still, the NES module remained but a dream. A dream that Youtuber Ciciplusplus is turning into reality. He draws on work by Alastair Aitchison, who converted aerial photographs from Bing Maps into a map of the world in the style of The Legend of Zelda. But Ciciplusplus is using Google Maps as the source. He converted the material into a 16x16 grid and then assigned a matching colour value to each of the 256 generated tiles. As a final step, he replaced these with matching Zelda map tiles.
To implement the Maps port as a hardware module, he relied on the idea of Youtuber TheRasteri, who had created a Doom port for NES:
And here is the 8-bit Google Maps NES implementation by Ciciplusplus:
Google Maps for NES is not yet complete. The NES port still lacks a search function. You can, however, already move around and zoom in the map. Or rather, you’ll be able to just as soon as Ciciplusplus finishes his work and releases Google Maps for NES as open source software. But before doing that, he plans to improve the rendering of the maps and fix bugs. Most importantly: the hardware – consisting of a Raspberry Pi, FX2LP microcontroller and an official NES module board – comes in a cartridge, so Maps can be «played» like a normal game.
I find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.