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A slightly less complicated, but also less effective way to "get more colors" is to use the PPU color emphasis bits . It's not nearly as useful as an actually changed palette, but it lets you get a few more tones (or a few washed-out colors by combining them with the grayscale bit) out of...

Finally, the second $2006 write works as I explained before. Even though X and Y have already been set, the scroll is still in a temporary PPU internal register, and the second $2006 write has the important task of copying that to the actual address register, otherwise the new scroll won't take eff...

I really don't advise you do mid-screen palette changes in your first project. It's harder to pull off correctly than most other things on the NES. Even most experienced programmers prefer not to do it due to the inherent complications. You're probably right, but I must say the idea is still tempti...

Since you're messing with mid-screen palette changes, let me warn you this is a notoriously hard thing to get right on the NES for a few reasons: ... My goal is to use this to change the palette for a top-screen status bar in a non-scrolling (so far) 2 player death match game. I have an idea of int...

Thanks for the help, everyone! I now have the sprite-0 detection branching consistently on the same scanline. Now I have another problem and that is that the scroll gets messed up after I follow my sprite-0 with some palette updates. I try to correct it by writing twice to $2005 and once to $2000 bu...

A hit only happens when an opaque sprite pixel overlaps an opaque background pixel. That might explain the scanlines between the top of the sprite and the actual hit. I haven't looked at your ROM because I'm on my phone, so I don't know what the graphics look like. I've made sure the sprite is alwa...

Hey! Sorry if this is a redundant post. I've found some other posts covering this topic but I was not able to dissect an answer to my problem. So I'm trying my hand at sprite-0 hit detection but I instantly run into a problem. It seems my loop for detecting the hit only branches on the correct scanl...

IF_GE ; Is the value above 127? [Shouldn't that say "above 61"?] I think my reasoning was that at that place in the code we don't know which direction we've offset in. It could probably be reworked a bit, since I'm checking for direction twice, but I've left it that way for now since it w...

I sort of follow what I'm used to from other languages just because it makes things easier for me to read and wrap my head around. I'm not super consistent with it but for me that's not really the point. I just want to be able to read and understand what I'm doing with the code, so with that I usual...

... I insulted you personally. (Later I regretted it and deleted that post.) Sorry. qalle, are you by any chance the same person as psycopathicteen? The reply you quoted had nothing to do with the account of user name "qalle", but rather "psycopathicteen". Did you forget which a...

Is it even worth it? Most players will never notice, since input will become less predictable after regular gameplay begins, meaning it's only really going to affect the very beginning of a play session. Well I'm actually using the result from my first RNG as the seed for the next, so the only plac...

If someone times pressing Start to title screen music, this press might land in a 66 ms window, which provides only four possibilities from power-on to game start. It might be useful to combine this with sub-frame measurement of key down timing. I've made a tech demo of this on Game Boy (called Tel...

@psycopathicteen

Why don't you make an NES game about it?

.. as long as you aren't planning on something like TASbot ever playing your game :P That's a good point. I guess it would limit the game in some sense. Perhaps I could add a small TAS friendly workaround by having the randomness being taken strictly from the frame counter if a certain button was h...

It wouldn't be reliable for randomness, as there would usually be a lot of bias towards specific numbers, and often the same ones at every power-on. There was a thread about getting a random number for any input from the player, but I can't find it now. However, there was also this recent discussio...