nesdev.org

Correct. But a mapper can make smaller background color areas (8x1 pixels instead of 16x16 pixels), and in theory, a mapper can even include a more sophisticated PPU that can fake more palettes through spatiotemporal dithering. I don't know what spatiotemporal dithering is, but it sounds like somet...

Yes, the NES has 4 background palettes and 4 sprite palettes. In theory, each palette has 4 colors, but there are some weird considerations about the first color (color 0) of each palette. And no mapper can increase the number of palettes, right? There are 28 colors in these 4 + 4 palettes: Backgro...

Unlike the GBC PPU, the NES PPU has only one color #0. There is space for 28 colors in CGRAM, I thought there was only 4 palettes for each the background and the sprites? which would in theory allow a separate color #0 for each separate background palette, but the PPU only ever uses the first backg...

There's the simple masking where the sprite goes behind everything in the background that's not color #0. Lots of games use this, including Super Mario Bros when you go through a pipe. So, this is the only way that the GBC can do it, right? (Other than what Tepples said.) Then there's another maski...

1) Yes, they can, if you set bit 5 of sprite attribute. Ah, I see. Thank you. I asked because I had this in mind: http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/3710/dragonwarrioriii05.png Notice how the lower part of the sprite is behind the wall, but upper part is in front of it. For a second I thought they ...

Don't use static variables inside functions. Initialize global variables at the start of main(), so that if you need to initialize them more than once, you can easily refactor that out. This covers the case of, say, returning to the title screen. Ah, that makes sense now. ----- Here's a couple more...

How well do you know C? It can sometimes be easier to explain ld65 concepts in terms of C, as that's what ld65 was designed around. Segment DATA contains what C would call the values of initialized statically allocated variables, be they global variables or local variables with 'static' storage. Bu...

Conveniently enough, NES tiles are stored in planes, 8 bytes for the fist plane followed by 8 bytes for the second, so if you open them in a tile editor an set the format to 1-bit, what you'll see is that each NES tile becomes 2 1-bit tiles (without any conversion necessary, the difference is just ...

I wasn't thinking of a proportional font though, but only a font that *seems* proportional, when in fact it has a fixed-width of 4. So a letter like 'i' would take up 1x2 (1 wide, 2 tall) 4x4 pixel tiles, but 'm' or 'w' would take 3x2. But this seems to be impossible since you said the smallest unit...

Me, misspelling DPCM. Delta Pulse Code Modulation. It is how the NES can play raw sound samples. The APU uses DMA to pull the samples from the high-end of the CPUs address space. Ok. The PPU uses two 4K banks, one for background tiles, one for sprites. The PPU can be configured to pull tiles and sp...

DCPM I have no idea what this is. The physical cart needs to provide the PPU with 8K of addresses that it can fetch from. But what does this mean? I would speculate that the variety of monster party encounters rules out the possibility of storing all of the monsters in one or two char-rom banks. So...

So "PRG-ROM" stands for program rom? Which means, like, the actual game code, while "CHR-ROM" means the stored graphics?

You will probably have many code segments. One in each bank, at least. Ok, but how do I decide what to put in each segment? How do I decide when to start a new segment? How do I decide what to put in each bank? How do I decide how large I want each rombank to be? How do I decide how many of them I ...

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 8:38 pm Post subject: One of the things that I was going to look for in your raw file was the inclusion of any non-printable characters. The parser for the linker will find them, even if your editor hides them. Maybe that was it; I can't check because I've already deleted/e...

On first glance, your linker config file looks syntacticly correct. If you wish, place a zip file (or tar ball if your on unix) someplace where I can download it (pm me if you want to keep the url a secret) and I'll take a really close look at it for you. There's nothing else to look at though. I p...