NESICIDE2 Progress

essial · Post by **essial** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:12 am

Point taken about screenshots with copyrighted material running. They can investigate all day long though, even with that rom running, it's not illegal in any way, shape, or form. The whole purpose of the IDE is to create home-brew ROMs and programs. It's coded to do this, that is the goal of the IDE. If they send a cease and desist, I will respond with a pirate-bay style reply. The patents on the Nintendo have expired. We do not offer commercial roms, nor do we link or give directions for using said roms. Have at it Nintendo.

Oh, and LJ65 doesn't currently work, but I'll make sure chris knows about it. We haven't spent a lot of time on the tester roms yet, just trying to get the old stuff ported over first. Once he finishes cleaning that code we will work to improve accuracy.

Do you know of any places that have collections of home-brew nes games? I haven't found much on that, we hope to change that with this project.

Kasumi · Post by **Kasumi** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:19 am

essial wrote:Do you know of any places that have collections of home-brew nes games? I haven't found much on that, we hope to change that with this project.

http://www.nesworld.com/homebrew.php is the best list I've found. He even shows which ones work on a real NES of the ones he's tried so you don't go crazy trying to make a broken game work. (Though he never added me as creator of Galaxy NES, even after we exchanged emails.)

Post by **tepples** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:19 am

essial wrote:Oh, and LJ65 doesn't currently work

To get LJ65 to work, make sure that sprite 0 is accurate and that the VRAM port is available through $2006/$2007 when the program turns off rendering.

Do you know of any places that have collections of home-brew nes games?

PDROMS.de is one, but it appears to be down right now. Another collection is on the projects and emulator test cases pages on the wiki. But make sure to test them against the PowerPak or an EPROM cart so that you don't waste time getting NES-incompatible software to work.

essial · Post by **essial** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:27 am

Thanks, and yeah, I plan on buying the $120 powerpak so I can play on a fairly unmodded NES. I have 3 of them (NES consoles), and I figure one can be dedicated to testing nesicide2 stuff

But yeah, I hope when this app is done we can get some devs to join up and actually get some finished, fun games written for the NES. It'd be nice to have compos and things as well -- but that could be just a big impossible dream

There's a lot more planned for this app than is immediately apparent with the screenshots, but of course I'll be posting more as they come -- just with non-commercial games running in them. Actually within a week or so I'll most likely be showing games compiled in the IDE itself anyway!

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 11:18 am

Kasumi wrote:
essial wrote:Do you know of any places that have collections of home-brew nes games? I haven't found much on that, we hope to change that with this project.
http://www.nesworld.com/homebrew.php is the best list I've found. He even shows which ones work on a real NES of the ones he's tried so you don't go crazy trying to make a broken game work. (Though he never added me as creator of Galaxy NES, even after we exchanged emails.)

That page doesn't work in Google Chrome, grrrrrr.

Bregalad · Post by **Bregalad** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 11:25 am

I recommend you use Opera.

essial · Post by **essial** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 12:32 pm

I was wondering why that page was blank. Oh well, theres other links recommended to me

cpow · Post by **cpow** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 5:23 pm

tepples wrote:
essial wrote:Oh, and LJ65 doesn't currently work
To get LJ65 to work, make sure that sprite 0 is accurate and that the VRAM port is available through $2006/$2007 when the program turns off rendering.

Do you know of any places that have collections of home-brew nes games?
PDROMS.de is one, but it appears to be down right now. Another collection is on the projects and emulator test cases pages on the wiki. But make sure to test them against the PowerPak or an EPROM cart so that you don't waste time getting NES-incompatible software to work.

The LJ65 problem was a migration problem. The game works fine. I had just forgotten to move over the code that replicates the single iNES PRG-ROM bank to both banks in the emulated machine.

essial · Post by **essial** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 7:13 pm

Yeah, he has it fixed now. Do note we do not run off of rom files directly. You CAN import roms into the project, but the emulator runs off of the data in the Cartridge object (displayed visually in the treeview under the "Cartridge" node).

essial · Post by **essial** » Tue Dec 15, 2009 12:12 am

Oh and some screenies:

I have a screenshot of the code editor but chris doesn't like me posting half-finished screenshots so I'll hopefully get a shot up tomorrow when it looks nice and pretty.

essial · Post by **essial** » Tue Dec 15, 2009 9:17 am

essial · Post by **essial** » Tue Dec 15, 2009 5:08 pm

And a screenshot from OSX:

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Tue Dec 15, 2009 5:24 pm

Cool! The program you have there seems very poorly coded though! It probably comes from an old tutorial or something, and from what I can see I doubt that program would work on a real NES.

If "Start" is the location pointed by the reset vector, this code is hideous. It doesn't wait for the PPU to warm up, it writes the palette with rendering enabled, it treats $2003 as a 16-bit register... it scares me that newbies might be learning from code like this. Where is it from?

Anyway, I'd just like to suggest you use something newer that has been coded by someone that actually knows the NES, and stop propagating these old pieces of broken code.

EDIT: I checked and found out this is one of those godawful GBAGuy's tutorials. I heard they were bad, but I didn't know they were this bad.

essial · Post by **essial** » Tue Dec 15, 2009 5:39 pm

Hehe, honestly I just googled nes tutoral and copy-pasted the code over. I couldn't be arsed to write an NES program this early in the game when I can't even open a saved project yet! I just needed some NES code to show off the editor. (I honestly didn't even look to see what it does)

Rest assured once this project is more mature, we'll be writing our own tutorials with code that actually makes sense. It sounds like you would be a good candidate to help us with this -- eh?

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Tue Dec 15, 2009 6:02 pm

I knew you weren't the ones coming up with the code, I just don't like how those terribly inaccurate tutorials seem to live on and on! So I suggested you used something better for future screens.

Now about me writing tutorials... well, I don't think I'd have the time for that! Plus I'm not very good at explaining things in english. Don't get me wrong, I never deny help, and I always try to correct or explain things to newbies here in the forums (as long as the person that's asking for help shows signs of actual effort - I simply ignore "do this for me" requests), but I don't think I could ever write a series of organized lessons, I'm not that organized! =)

I'd be glad to offer my criticism on whatever written material you might come up with, as would many other coders here, I'm sure. If we work together in order to refine the tutorials until they are truly accurate, maybe someday we will get rid of the ghost of GBAGuy's tutorials.

Just to be clear, I don't hate GBAGuy, I'm sure he was well intentioned when he wrote those tutorials, but it's clear he didn't understand much of the subject, and you simply can't teach what you don't know.