I have a feeling the TAS stuff isn’t going to be as useful as it seemed on the surface, since it’s really all about step sequencing standard controller input very precisely. A realtime NES debug tool would probably be more useful (but a lot harder to get usable results from, maybe).
But completely unrelated I discovered this about 15 minutes ago and it looks like it has potential:
http://www.breatharian.eu/Petr/en/index.htm
It’s a visual programming language for Windows 95/98 aimed at children that was released in Czech back in the late 90s, and now officially freeware with English translation. From the look of it there’s enough depth to it that you could probably use it to make live performance tools with a late 90s PC budget gaming aesthetic (and I bet it runs well under WINE, so maybe you could even use it on a Raspberry Pi). Plus it’s open source, so someone more skilled than me might be able to add, say, simple MIDI control. There’s already a fork that lets you directly capture the output window, up to 4k.
The fact that it’s buried on a Czech language Breatharian site of all places is just the icing on the cake, really.
- The sprite technique makes it possible to create moving and overlapping animated objects.
- Multimedia support of music, multichannel 3D sound playback, MP3 files, audio CDs, mixers.
- All numerical operations are carried out with the double-real accuracy (15 digits, exponent +/- 308), mathematical functions (sin, log, int, …).
- Rich graphical functions, pictures overlapping, transparency, shadows, multi-layer animation, height levels.
- The program created together with all data is simultaneously an EXE application of Windows. It can be started immediately without the compilation.
- The entire developmental environment is one compact whole including the picture, sprite, icon, and text editors.
- A constituent of the installator is a big quantity of example programs, pictures, sprites, sounds, and musics.
- Easy data portability from other applications thanks to standard formats ICO, BMP, JPG, MID, RMI, WAV, MP3, TXT, RTF, clipboard.
- Possibility of creating the console programs, Windows dialog boxes, full-screen mode.
- Control of the created programs with a mouse, a joystick, a keyboard.
- File, folder, and disk management, modification of attributes, easy saving data into files.
- Easy numerical operations with date and time (addition and subtraction, conversion), local and world time.
- The DirectPlay network support of the games enables to play games in the Internet and a data transfer between computers, communication ports support (COM), UDP packets.
- Multilingual programs creation, filename ALIASES support.
- Easy using of external DLL libraries and Windows API functions.
- Powerful 3D graphics (interfaces OpenGL 1.0 and 1.1, DirectX 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8).
To run it, a 486 computer using Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.5 with 10 MB disk space is sufficient.