Nintendo Stuff!
Here’s some stuff from the Way Back Machine. This is a smidgid of my Nintendo life from back in the day. I have a modest collection of Nintendo, Sega, and Atari games that I amassed throughout my late 20’s. I also produced numerous Homebrew NES games, wrote a bunch of articles for vintage gaming magazines, and wrote documents detailing how to build NES game engines. The NES will live forever.
Long live NintendoAGE.
Homebrew NES Games
I have worked on a total of 7 Homebrew NES games. For reference, a Homebrew game is a game you make yourself, from scratch, which plays on the Nintendo Entertainment System (or whatever system you’re using). I released, on a PHYSICAL NES CART, 5 games. If you visit each page, there are various pictures as well as links to the original Development Blogs for the games. Some of these pages even have playable demos that you can try out. You’ll need an emulator.
Scroll down farther to learn about NES Development. It’s free. I learned using these resources.
Couldn’t have done some of these games without Zi, the music man. Visit his site bleepbop.com for some 8-bit music goodness.
Slappin' Bitches
Here's my very first attempt at producing a game. It is a simple Tower Defense game. Fully playable and released on an actual cart.
Bust A Nut - The Flight of the Harbinger
This was the second game that I released for the NES. It was fully functional game with a unique control style game play similar to Galaga.
Nightman Vs. Justice Incarnate
I worked on this game for a very long time, here and there. The idea was a full fledged game similar to The Legend of Zelda. Got pretty far, never finished.
The Grind
This is my third release for the NES. It featured randomized enemy movement and required lots of patience. One just had to grind their way through it.
The Love Machine
Here's my 4th release for the NES. I only made one copy of this game. It was easily customizable for the user for specific life events. I used this one to propose to my wife.
Harbinger 2 - Cunt Punch
Here's another game I worked on. I go into specifics on the game page, but this game featured extremely advanced programming (at least for me).
Humbug
Here's another game I was working on. This was meant to be a multi-cart Christmas themed game. I didn't get too far, but it's a neat idea for someday!
NA E-Zine Articles
I wrote numerous articles for the NintendoAGE.com e-Zine, may it RIP. All of them are worth a read, I’m not sure which ones I wrote for, but here’s a link to the list. You may have to log in to access them.
(It should be noted that NA is defunct. So, this link won’t work. It’s here for posterity. I have all the files I submitted saved, and probably the E-Zines, maybe someday I’ll expand this and re-post them.)
Ferris on NA archived them HERE for everyone to view!!
Programming Tutorials
Getting started with NES programming or development can be a daunting task. As well it should be. It’s not easy and takes a lot of time to get started, let alone master. Here are the resources I used to get started and some that I wrote to help others along their way. Ask lots of questions and make mistakes. Most importantly, don’t give up!!
NERDY NIGHTS
This series was written by one BunnyBoy. He is a great guy and very responsive…if you know where to look. His website, retrousb.com, has everything you’ll need to make games, from cart shells, to complete NES systems. He also features a PowerPak. Trust me. You need one.
This tutorial series starts from the absolute beginning. It will get you started and provide you with a template game engine from which you can build any game you want. Also featured in this thread are MetalSlime’s music engine tutorials. These start from the basics and show you how to build a fully functional music engine for the NES. They also show you some tips and tricks along the way. I use a somewhat modified version of his engine in all of my games. (As NA is defunct, I’m not sure BB or MS have migrated their stuff over to VGS. Here’s the original link.)
MY TUTORIALS
Here are the links to my tutorials. Mine take off about where BunnyBoy left off and build from there. First, I organized the tutorials into a thread with various programming resources, developer sites & blogs, and other things you’ll need.
MRN’s Programming Resources
Game Engine Building:
#1: Sprite Movement, Animation, and Meta Sprites
#2: Playable Character, Bit Testing, Game States, and CPU Usage, and Game
#3: Tile Molestor and Weapons
#4: Sprite Collisions
#5: Background Compression
#6: Background Set Up, CHR_RAM, and Room Indexing
#7: Background Collision Detection
#8: Sprite Cycling and Attribute Handling
#9: MMC1 Memory Mapping