[HN Gopher] Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
___________________________________________________________________
Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly
Author : mariuz
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-11-01 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (famicom.party)
(TXT) w3m dump (famicom.party)
| dang wrote:
| I found one past thread. Others?
|
| _Famicom Party: Making NES Games in Assembly_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398038 - Feb 2020 (29
| comments)
| lushdogg wrote:
| 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/
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| 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.
| sircastor wrote:
| 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.
| veryfancy wrote:
| Enjoyed this guy's recent talk: https://youtu.be/TPbroUDHG0s
| deviaan wrote:
| 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
| bergesenha wrote:
| 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
| thoughtFrame wrote:
| Anyone 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?
| corysama wrote:
| Quite a while ago I wrote up a stream of consciousness
| impression of the development experience for PSX and later
| consoles. The PS2 section is probably most relevant to your
| question :)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/xddlp/describe_wha...
| bluedino wrote:
| Here's some NES information:
| https://www.retroreversing.com/famicom-nes-development-kit/
| yosser wrote:
| 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.
| mattl wrote:
| > 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."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirby%27s_Dream_Land
| flobosg wrote:
| Here's more info along with some images:
| http://sourcegaming.info/2017/04/19/kirbys-development-
| secre...
| pcwalton wrote:
| Not sure about the NES, but the official SNES developer manuals
| are on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/SNESDevManual
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The 8bitpeoples scene changed my life. Such great parties. Such
| great people.
|
| "Racing the beam" is a highly recommended book.
| cnasc wrote:
| 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
| Dowwie wrote:
| "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."
| dimator wrote:
| 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.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Tom Hall, John Carmack, and John Romero (Id Software) were
| another outstanding team
| Avshalom wrote:
| An interesting thing about doom is that they actually made
| really nice level editing tools when they built the game
| there's some throw away lines in a few of the documentaries
| to the effect that they marveled at the levels people made
| given how shit the tools the community had invented (by
| reverse engineering the WAD format)
| echoradio wrote:
| I came across this a while back and, wow, the rabbit hole I've
| fallen down since reading it.
|
| I don't have a formal CS/CE background and only work with
| computers on a high level. I know how computers work, but wanted
| to _really_ understand. The author's approach is very
| accommodating of beginners (like myself) and it inspired me to
| learn more. :)
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Reading this was a joy. Thanks you a thousand times, Kevin
| Zurawel.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-01 23:00 UTC)