nesdev.org

Hmmm, since this is my first post on the forum, I guess I should introduce myself before the main topic. Hi there, the name's Will. I've been a bit of a lurker of this site for about 2 and a half years now. I have wanted to make an NES game since I was about 13, but never had the patience to learn assembly. Recently though, I took a course at my college in assembly and the concepts have been much easier to pick up on now. I've been working through the nerdy nights tutorials for the last month, and hope to be producing my own NES games soon. Anyways on to the main topic.

I'm curious what draws people to the homebrew scene specifically. I can look at myself and get the same answers many of you probably will say, but I figured it'd be interesting to see what other reasons people may have for homebrewing.

For me, I guess the main reason I'm interested in getting involved is the nostalgia and admiration I have for these old systems. My aunt had an NES that I used to play all the time when I was a kid. My siblings and I all loved spending time playing the classics, and I especially was drawn to them. I eventually got my own NES and collection in 2000, and haven't stopped playing or collecting games for it since. Despite being a child of the 90s, I just can't help but love the NES.

I can make a game that competes with Super Mario Bros. all on my own, but not Super Mario Galaxy.

Simple: fame and glory!

But seriously, I guess it must be the same thing as most people: liked the thing as a kid and always wanted to make a game for it. Maybe someday I will reach that goal hopefully.

welcome!

Personally I can't get myself to stop playing around with hardware long enough to write a game. I have plans start some simple stuff after graduation in June. But for me I can't help but be attracted to it. It's definitely todo with growning up with the controller in my hands. How it worked was always so mysterious, so know to be able to understand what's going on and make things for myself to play around with on the NES will never get old. I definetly suffer from spending more time tinkering, coding, and on here than actually playing games on it...

First of all: welcome, WillBillXP.

Kasumi wrote:I can make a game that competes with Super Mario Bros. all on my own, but not Super Mario Galaxy.

That's a great way to put it... That's probably my reason for programming for old consoles too. I have nearly zero nostalgia for the NES, I'm just fascinated by how much can be done on such limited hardware.

I like to get to the metal and get my hands as dirty as possible, know how things work and take something out of it, though just demos... I wish I could one day make a complete NES game or port any of my favorites from the 8-bit home computer era (they are fairly small since they just had 64Kb for storing ALL the game, code and graphics).

I'm very fond and nostalgic about NES in particular, SNES would go next. Discovered ten years ago the Sega consoles I could not have as a child and I am also into them at the programming/hardware level... impressive the Master System, love it.

I got desire to make video games since I played NES for first time (thanks to Contra). I do it since then for many platforms, and when I eventually got an opportunity to make an actual NES game it was sort of turning a childhood dream into reality.

I'm into homebrew because I've had an interest in game dev ever since I started programming. I'm attracted to the NES specifically (and retro systems generally) because it's possible for one developer or a small team to actually produce a finished game that's on the same level as commercial releases. On modern consoles and the PC that's hardly possible anymore.

A long time ago, I was writing simple puzzle games for the Apple II in BASIC with assembly language subroutines. (The NES's CPU uses the same instruction set as the Apple II's CPU.)

Fast forward to years later when I was CHR-hacking SMB1 to replace Mario with different characters. Then I tried to hack Contra but discovered that its graphics were compressed, so instead I decided to try to write my own platformer. Obviously, other things intervened, and the puzzle games I wrote to familiarize myself with the platform ended up taking over.

Tools are out there, popular system still, easy to find parts, good hardware without being too complex, wanting to be a game programmer so this helps a ton, like said world domination, many things.

So I can actually state my opinions about games:



me: Simon Belmont walks too slow in Super Castlevania 4.

them: NO YOU IDIOT!!! THE SNES RUNS AT 3.58MHZ!!! IT CAN'T MOVE ANY FASTER!!!

me: (showing off some stupid game I made) PWND NOOB!!!

psycopathicteen wrote:me: Simon Belmont walks too slow in Super Castlevania 4.

them: NO YOU IDIOT!!! THE SNES RUNS AT 3.58MHZ!!! IT CAN'T MOVE ANY FASTER!!!

me: (showing off some stupid game I made) PWND NOOB!!!

Or even simpler: Just show them Somari on an NES running at half that frequency. But as I recall from something tokumaru said a long time ago, this is part of why he had been working on a Sonic clone for the NES, to prove that level design like that of the Genesis games is possible on an 8-bit platform.

Bio Force Ape moves really really fast.

Normal people tend to think there's a direct connection between CPU speed and the perceived speed of a game... We programmers know it's not like that.

Updating a decent number of tiles and moving several sprites every frame are two of the simplest/fastest tasks in games. A lot of these old systems have enough CPU time to redraw the entire screen every frame in addition to calculating game logic, so as long as the objects' A.I. isn't terribly complicated and there's not an insane number of them on screen, any game can be blazing fast. 60 frames per second is simply too fast for the human eye to keep track.

Even more limited systems like the Atari 2600 can have really fast movement, considering that redrawing the entire picture every frame is mandatory.

me: Hey what about these NES games?

them: The NES cpu runs faster than the SNES cpu because the graphics are not as detailed and colorful.