Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
famicom.party
Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#2This 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:
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#3Anyone know what resources developers actually used for programming consoles back in the days of the NES/SNES (and even the PSX)?
Nowadays we have a lot of resources and open source games, but it's still pretty hard to make good homebrew. Was it just a matter of the mindset of the time that most programmers don't have anymore?
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#4"Super Mario Bros. is quite likely the most iconic NES game of all time, and it, like Donkey Kong, was produced by a team of five people, two of whom were programmers."
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#5Anyone know what resources developers actually used for programming consoles back in the days of the NES/SNES (and even the PSX)? Nowadays we have a lot of resources and open source games, but it's still pretty hard to make good homebrew. Was it just a matter of the mindset of the time that most programmers don't have anymore?
Here's some NES information: https://www.retroreversing.com/famicom-nes-development-kit/
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#6Anyone know what resources developers actually used for programming consoles back in the days of the NES/SNES (and even the PSX)? Nowadays we have a lot of resources and open source games, but it's still pretty hard to make good homebrew. Was it just a matter of the mindset of the time that most programmers don't have anymore?
Usually a simple 6502 assembler, debugger combination with an integrated editor on a dedicated PC, hooked up a cable into some kind of magic box on the target NES. In the UK at least a system called PDS was popular though it wasn't uncommon for development houses to have custom written development environments.
At that time, if you were lucky, you'd have a 20Mbyte hard drive on the PC and 600k or so of Ram.
In our case we had written a few custom graphics tools but in the main graphics were either hand drawn onto graph paper, or drawn in deluxe paint on the Amiga.
Some of the Japanese companies had very peculiar rules.I know of one well known company who kept their programmers and artists in entirely separate offices. Artists would burn their finished graphics onto an eeprom and the poor programmers would simply be presented with the rom images to do what they could with.
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#7This 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
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#8Anyone know what resources developers actually used for programming consoles back in the days of the NES/SNES (and even the PSX)? Nowadays we have a lot of resources and open source games, but it's still pretty hard to make good homebrew. Was it just a matter of the mindset of the time that most programmers don't have anymore?
Usually a simple 6502 assembler, debugger combination with an integrated editor on a dedicated PC, hooked up a cable into some kind of magic box on the target NES. In the UK at least a system called PDS was popular though it wasn't uncommon for development houses to have custom written development environments. At that time, if you were lucky, you'd have a 20Mbyte hard drive on the PC and 600k or so of Ram. In our ca…
> Kirby's Dream Land was developed by Masahiro Sakurai of HAL Laboratory. Much of the programming was done on a Twin Famicom, a Nintendo-licensed console produced by Sharp Corporation that combined a Famicom and a Famicom Disk System in one unit. As the Twin Famicom did not have keyboard support, a trackball was used in tandem with an on-screen keyboard to input values; Sakurai described the process, which he assumed was "the way [game programming] was done" at the time, as similar to "using a lunchbox to make lunch."
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#9"Super Mario Bros. is quite likely the most iconic NES game of all time, and it, like Donkey Kong, was produced by a team of five people, two of whom were programmers."
I remember game credit scroll screens, at the end of video games, back in the 8 and 16 bit era. I remember thinking"who were these gods, and how did they do this??"
Now, I know how they did it, but I'm no less in awe of them, because they did these things with development tools that were barely anything. Remarkable generation of developers, laying creative and technical ground work for an entire planet of gamers.
Re: Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
#10Enjoyed this guy’s recent talk: https://youtu.be/TPbroUDHG0s