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Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly

famicom.party

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Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly

#21

Post by tenebrisalietum »

lushdogg wrote: post #2

This has been posted a few times but a cool resource nonetheless. I played around with NES/assembly last year and just about got a scrolling engine fully working. Couldn't get the last 2 tiles to render before the NMI interrupt ended. Some other cool resources for NES: https://wiki.nesdev.org/w/index.php/Nesdev_Wiki https://fuzzytek.ml/tutorials/nerdynights/

You don't have a lot of time in the VBlank to decide what tiles you're moving to VRAM.

I haven't developed an NES game before but I would assume you'd need to decode your game's map data into a buffer out of VBlank then stream it in after updating OAM. Unless you have the luxury of being able to just read it directly from ROM and write it to VRAM without a lot of intermediate processing.

I think most NES games had various schemes to represent the map data (compression schemes basically) with Metroid/Kid Icarus being a particularly elaborate one (a game editor "MetEdit" out there explains it). Not sure how they split the unpacking/VRAM writing workload.

Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly

#22

Post by cnasc »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #14

The 8bitpeoples scene changed my life. Such great parties. Such great people. “Racing the beam” is a highly recommended book.

I’ll second the recommendation for Racing the Beam. Highly engaging, just technical enough, and a fascinating window into the gaming world a few (console) generations before my time

Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly

#25

Post by nefitty »

deviaan wrote: post #16

Oh what a coincidence, I just watched this guys talk yesterday and it was very interesting! Here it is if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/TPbroUDHG0s

YouTube recommended this to me and I actually watched it... When he got to the end and talked about his site I realized it was on the front page! I was confused because I'm not into game programming, but I watched it anyways. I was surprised that it was more about system design, which I am actually into!

I'm just a little weirded out that YouTube knows me a little better than I know myself.

Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly

#26

Post by Tcepsa »

sircastor wrote: post #20

I wrote an NES game for my senior project for school. I used this site a little. What I’ve found is that after you get the initial setup complete and the basic concepts of sprites and blanking, you’re kind of on your own to figure out how to make your game engine. Interestingly, you can see the same engines used across titles from the same company. Or at least close variations on.

My favorite example of that kind of code reuse can be seen in the 3/4 perspective views in Sunsoft's Fester's Quest (most of the game) and Blaster Master (the extra-vehicular room explorations)

Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly

#28

Post by joe__f »

bergesenha wrote: post #7

This is one of the few well written and enjoyable tutorials on the topic. There is a lot of older texts out there with inaccurate and inconsistent language, ascii-diagrams etc… but this a joy to read and follow

The writing is great, I enjoyed "If you read a program and follow the instructions yourself, congratulations! You are a computer!"
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