nesdev.org

Are you familiar with command-line tools? Vaguely. I grew up using DOS but never really did more in it than directory switching and running applications. My attempts to use Linux as an adult never produced much more than frustration. For example, you might have a script called a "makefile"...

I'm really glad you're doing this. If there's anything I can do to help with the project, I'd be happy to do so. If the pace ends up feeling too fast, you could always break up the lessons you have planned. I'll throw out a few ideas in no particular order: Disambiguation of the flags and the operan...

If I had a total of 64KB of program data between all of my banks, would the answer be 07? A 65536 byte PRG ROM would be $04, as it is measured in 16384 byte units. My mistake. I got the CHR and PRG mixed up. It's actually stricter than that. Existing MMC3 boards require the size of CHR ROM to be a ...

This is pretty much the exact behavior of Super Mario World . What darryl.revok mentioned is similar to what Yoshi's Island does. I think each style is probably best suited to their respective games. Super Mario World would require you to move to the left in almost any instances that would put your...

This depends on the design of your actual game, but my first thought: Delay the camera pan based on time. (or NMI counts to be more precise) If your game is designed to have enemies on either sides of the player, the player could turn around to fight enemies on the left, and still desire the camera ...

I could swear I saved the draft I typed earlier. Ugh. I'll get back to the off topic things later. You guys did actually answer my questions, as convoluted as they were. Thank you for taking the time to help a confused n00b. So, I'm just going to see if I can break down what I need to get MMC3 funct...

But if I'm gonna have player objects separated from the other objects, it's gonna be hard to run the physics code for them because I would have to use different addresses. You can use indexed addressing so that your program doesn't actually end up looking at the same address. LDA $80 Loads the valu...

Right on! Thank you for that! So are blank tiles in the metasprite just 0s until the next metasprite begins? Something that I figured out, that may be helpful to others, is the way NES ST translates 4-bit grayscale to 2-bit NES palette colors. It seems almost random at first, but it assigns them lik...

Wanted to post an updated version of this in case anybody wanted to check it out. There's a .NES file as well as the source, and the CHR. I think I forgot to add the CHR last time. I'm probably going to do a full rewrite of the way data is stored and integrate CHR bank-switching, so I figured I'd po...

If you have a PNG to CHR converter, anything that can export to a PNG file can export to a CHR file. Then it's just a matter of telling your build system to rebuild the CHR file from the PNG file whenever the PNG file is newer. Are you familiar with GNU Make, Python, or both? When you say a PNG to ...

The extent to which we must explain this depends on the extent to which you understand memory-mapped I/O. Well I understand that things like the CPU and PPU have two-byte addresses that are exposed for the program to send instructions to the hardware. I don't know if I need to understand it too muc...

Aseprite lets you switch frames with a keypress, use several layers each animated separately (GIMP is using layers in lieu of real frames, preventing this possibility), easily change speeds and partial loops, onion skin to trace over previous frames, etc. etc. Asesprite looks pretty neat. It looks ...

Thank you for the instructions on bank switching. The MMC3 doesn't seem near as confusing at least when it comes to that. So, the CHR-ROM part seems pretty simple. You write the number of the bank you're switching out, 0-8, to $8000, then write the bank you're switching in, 0-FF, to $8001. When I se...

I don't think it's too worth thinking about mappers until your game is about to be larger than 24 KB. At that point you can still make it larger without a mapper, but if you plan to use a mapper that's when you have to being to plan how you'll lay out your banks so you don't end up relying on too m...

Not bad; dude's torso looks pretty beefy. Mind if I ask how long this took? The reason that I ask is that I feel like you may be trying to make every pixel you lay down just right the first time. I feel like that's the biggest reason you're having trouble making progress. Everybody's got their own s...