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SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

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Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#31

Post by cableshaft »

lostcolony wrote: post #20
cableshaft wrote: post #16

I really want to make a retro version of my turn based strategy game Proximity[1] (pretty simple game and I've mostly made a version in Pico-8 already, so it should be doable) for NES, GB, SNES, GBA, and/or something similar, but I'd like to do it with the smallest amount of time and effort necessary (because I really don't have a lot of time anymore). It seems like the new GBDK might be the easiest, especially since…

I can't speak to any of the low code approaches, but I do know it wouldn't be that hard for a GBA implementation once you learned the hardware (and the resources for learning it are pretty good). Each hexagon could be its own sprite (probably even with the text on them already, to make it super trivial), and then you can probably just DMA them into the appropriate place in memory during vblank. So then it's just the…

Thank you! I'll check it out.

I wasn't actually asking for anything low-code, I'm fine with coding, just hoping I can mostly stick with a C/C++ style approach without having to dig too deep into understanding the memory and registers and other things on a hardware level.

I've done some reading of materials on the hardware before (NES and GB mostly), and it's interesting, I just don't have the mental bandwidth at the moment to turn that casual understanding into usable code.

Maybe eventually I can get to that point, but for now if I can get by with mostly my game logic and some function calls to various wrappers for the hardware functionality, the better.

Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#33

Post by ant6n »

cableshaft wrote: post #16

I really want to make a retro version of my turn based strategy game Proximity[1] (pretty simple game and I've mostly made a version in Pico-8 already, so it should be doable) for NES, GB, SNES, GBA, and/or something similar, but I'd like to do it with the smallest amount of time and effort necessary (because I really don't have a lot of time anymore). It seems like the new GBDK might be the easiest, especially since…

That link doesn't work well, just says it's not compatible with my device. There's a link that goes to some seo spam. Name not very googlable. Do u have a link to some screenshots/play video?

Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#34

Post by cableshaft »

ant6n wrote: post #33
cableshaft wrote: post #16

I really want to make a retro version of my turn based strategy game Proximity[1] (pretty simple game and I've mostly made a version in Pico-8 already, so it should be doable) for NES, GB, SNES, GBA, and/or something similar, but I'd like to do it with the smallest amount of time and effort necessary (because I really don't have a lot of time anymore). It seems like the new GBDK might be the easiest, especially since…

That link doesn't work well, just says it's not compatible with my device. There's a link that goes to some seo spam. Name not very googlable. Do u have a link to some screenshots/play video?

I have a video for the sequel when I released it on Xbox 360, although that's not what I linked to at first. The first link is Newgrounds, an old flash animation/game website that I first released the original game on 17 years ago (oh man, it's really been that long?).

https://youtu.be/Yqe0hS7AvOE

I'm also currently working on a new version for desktop and hopefully eventually consoles that uses 3D models, larger maps, 8 team local support, map editor, hopefully either a campaign or challenge mode (eventually, maybe not on first release), and hoping to add support for up to 150-ish stream viewers to join various teams and play on one of the 8 teams (where they vote for moves kind of like in Twitch Plays Pokemon).

Here's a year old video when I was just starting the project, I desperately need to make a newer video (hopefully this weekend finally):

https://youtu.be/0IAx9fsBuus

But I still would love to have a weekend project at some point of making a retro version.

Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#35

Post by lscharen »

justanother wrote: post #9

If you decide you really enjoy 65816 development, just a gentle reminder: The Apple IIGS dev community would love to have you and we're seeing new hardware releases at a pace we haven't seen since the 1990s.

And if there are people specifically interested in console-style IIgs game development, I've picked up and significantly enhanced my old graphics engine that was used for the IIgs Super Mario Bros demo.

It's available on github at https://github.com/lscharen/iigs-game-engine

Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#36

Post by ant6n »

cableshaft wrote: post #34
ant6n wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link doesn't work well, just says it's not compatible with my device. There's a link that goes to some seo spam. Name not very googlable. Do u have a link to some screenshots/play video?

I have a video for the sequel when I released it on Xbox 360, although that's not what I linked to at first. The first link is Newgrounds, an old flash animation/game website that I first released the original game on 17 years ago (oh man, it's really been that long?). https://youtu.be/Yqe0hS7AvOE I'm also currently working on a new version for desktop and hopefully eventually consoles that uses 3D models, larger map…

This could probably work with GBA. One issue is the small 240x160 resolution, meaning the design has to be compressed. Also, you probably wont be able to use sprites for everything, it doesnt support that many. But you could probably use 8bit backgrounds. GBA allows multiple tile-based background layers, with mode 0 or mode 1 you could implement a lot of effects when using sprites on top (https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbalcdvideocontroller).

Either use a clever way to map your game board to 8x8 tiles, or use a large number (4/8 bit paletted color) tiles so that you can just draw arbitray images (like a bitmap, but its set up in tiles). Or just give up on trying to exactly match the hardware and just draw the hole thing using a bit map mode (e.g. mode 4, with 256 color palette and double buffering) - but that also means implementing the parallax effect by hand (since theres only one layer).

Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#37

Post by nyanpasu64 »

tadfisher wrote: post #25
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can bass be fixed to remove this design flaw? Is xkas/asar worse than bass? A lot of SMW-adjacent romhacking tools use xkas/asar which preceded bass (the author discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11720057 ). Some alternatives I've come across include macro packs for ca65 to make it assemble for instruction sets it doesn't understand natively, and I hear tass64 has macro packs too.

Unfortunately the author passed away recently. If there is a community fork of bass that would make it easier.

Yes there is a community fork: https://github.com/ARM9/bass

Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#39

Post by Salgat »

new_stranger wrote: post #23
jsd1982 wrote: post #21

I've developed quite a few SNES-related things for fun, mostly using Go and C++, with some 65816 ASM sprinkled in. https://github.com/alttpo/alttpo - A Link To The Past Online. Lets multiple players see and interact with one another in the same game world and synchronize their progress through the game. Exclusive to a customized fork of the bsnes emulator which provides a scripting language and PPU-integrated drawing…

Great idea, there are so many games that would actually be played with even a basic co-op support like this. It's okay it's just an overlay with no shared-game state, still really fun!

I developed a modded emulator for Pokemon Red/Blue that allowed multiplayer (as in, multiple people walking around in the world, all interacting with the npcs and being able to battle each other) but unfortunately when I asked around there seemed to be no interest. I still have it on github, maybe some day I'll get back into it.

https://github.com/Salgat/PokeSynch

Re: SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started

#40

Post by nyanpasu64 »

teeray wrote: post #18
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #5

Personally instead of Mesen-S, I'd use the fork at https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/Mesen-SX , which contains a fix for saving settings on Linux Mono 6.12 ( https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/Mesen-SX/commit/c374ca8b9ed3... ). I'm more interested in SPC700 development for SNES music. Mesen-SX has a SPC debugger separate from the main debugger, but I'm not sure if it's more or less useful than bsnes-plus (I know the Mesen…

A friend of mine from high school is working on a SNES tracker[0]. He’s deep into this space and could probably answer your questions if you catch him on stream[1]. He also authored many of the sections on the SNES development wiki linked by the article (under “bazz”). [0] https://github.com/bazz1tv/snestracker [1] https://www.twitch.tv/Bazz1tv

The README says "the latest version of SNES Tracker is available exclusively via Patreon a few weeks before it becomes available on github". In https://github.com/bazz1tv/snestracker/releases, v0.2.0 was released in 2020-09-29 and says "the next version, v0.2.1 is already released to Patreon!" In reality, v0.2.1 was released publicly months later on 2021-02-19, with a tasteless notice saying "Note: the next version, v0.2.2 and v0.2.3 is already released to Patreon! This includes a critical bugfix (app hanging)."

The public Github repository you linked hasn't been updated in 11 months (v0.2.2 source and releases last updated in 2021-03-15), and v0.2.2 actually dates back to 2020-11-08 on Patreon. The Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bazz1) was last updated in 2021-03-14 with v0.2.4, yet continues to take money for the past 11 months of silence. I've heard that he's stopped supplying builds to Patreon subscribers, and only giving them to Twitch subscribers.

This is my first time looking at his Twitch, and wow that's a lot of livestreaming uploads. I don't know if SNES Tracker is still being developed or not, and if Twitch subscribers receive newer builds of the tracker. In any case I'm definitely not subscribing.

I tried cloning the repo to view the current publicly released state. It has over 100 MB of files previously in history but deleted in a more recent commit, polluting non-shallow clones. I couldn't get it to build easily, so I downloaded the prebuilt Windows v0.2.2. The user interface is bare-bones and written in SDL, though I didn't poke around very deeply.

In any case I'll consider checking on his Twitch streams, and see if he can help me, though I prefer interacting with other people who don't behave in ethically dubious ways. I've already figured out how to make the S-DSP output sound. I'm currently working on learning S-SMP/SPC700 programming, writing/picking a hardware driver, (if I write my own driver) picking efficiently-implementable behaviors while remaining musically useful, or (if I pick an existing driver) learning the driver and build system. Eventually I want a characterization of the SNES's analog frequency/phase response (DAC impulse response plus analog filtering) so I can implement it in software. I feel eliminating unneeded audio latency, and implementing aliasing-free hardware-accurate resampling/filtering, are aspects that most emulators (even accurate ones like bsnes/higan) get wildly wrong, which I can improve with effort.

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