nesdev.org

My personal recommendation is to first start out by learning 65816 assembly. Play around with basic operations and store results of arithmetic in RAM, then look to see if it's the value you expected. Use a debugging emulator like bsnes-plus. Having a memory viewer is going to be very useful because ...

The thing about "engines" is that the Super NES probably isn't powerful enough for something as generic as, say, Unity or Unreal. Feel free to prove me wrong, but though an RPG, a platformer, and a vertical shmup could share a large set of hardware libraries, their engines would probably ...

So, like most Kickstarter projects then? You also neglected to mention that they said they were building the engine from scratch. Which, yeah, is going to take longer. This really just highlights the importance of having engines available for people to use.

A few issues I am noticing with the posted code: - This looks like one large function that is doing a lot. Separation of concerns is a key principle here. Of course for performance reasons it may be good to bundle many actions together, but if this is only getting called for maybe 16 objects a frame...

you can literally make all sorts of new games using the smw game engine. It's just unfortunate, because SMW is a really shitty base. :? I have to agree. Just looking at a RAM map of SMW is enough to make me want to shake my head. You're going to get more mileage out of a homebrew engine or even wri...

I'm pretty sure both Classic Kong and Christmas Craze were written in C and they seem to run fine. I wouldn't use C for stuff with large object counts but I think the option is there for quite a few different kinds of games.

upload different background tiles depending on where the camera is, make characters larger and have more animation frames, and shrink the dumbass giant black bars. If you ask me, the elephant in the room is the game's framerate. This is precisely the sort of thing I mean when I say that even the la...

Possibly it was ineptly programmed but it just looks like assets were cut out to make it run with the animators begging for a more powerful platform. It could be the implementation was poorly planned all around, but it comes off like biting more than the system could handle. I've just been staring ...

While some of the best games we'll ever play are on the 16-bit consoles (including MD/Gen and PCE/TG-16), I think they're the worst targets for homebrew dev because for all the complexity they're quite middling in what can be accomplished. This sounds rather defeationist to me, and Unholy Night as ...

Hand-optimizing pixel art that was designed without tile limitations in mind is probably easier said than done, especially if you're trying to squeeze as much as possible out of available VRAM.

are you sure the major blocker in "stepping up" from NES to SNES isn't simply a lack of thorough and properly organized documentation (such as the Nesdev Wiki) I mostly rely on Fullsnes nowadays. There's also SNES Development Wiki . The former is thorough but not properly organized. The l...

As far as I know, "the vast amount of pixel-art-themed indie games that have shown up on virtually every modern platform" are made on an existing engine. That is what I'm getting at, yes. People want to be able to sketch out ideas quickly. Lack of developer convenience is a deterrent. A t...

But the problem remains of producing original assets with which to test an engine. The complexity just doubles or more on the Super NES because of two layers, four times the tile space, and five times the colors per tile. This seems largely nonsensical to me - the world certainly has no shortage of...

Ideally, whoever is programming their game won't have to touch that code unless they want to modify the engine. You should provide either a function interface or a data format or maybe even macros so that new animations can be plugged into the game relatively easily.

The people who know how to program in some assembly language, and the people who know how to or want to spend time programming a game engine from scratch are not necessarily one and the same group. We spend a lot of time discussing how to make DMA queues, do metasprites, etc. but not really going th...