nicetryguy

Right but the world runs on base 10 is all i'm trying to say. It's needlessly difficult to use anything else (aside from hex or binary in very specific situations). In some college sophomore philosophy class you could argue for base 27 but it doesn't make your system usable or intelligible.

Yeah... the slippery slope into the walled garden continues.

I was thinking that you need a 386 minimum with extended memory to run the earliest versions of Linux but yeah no nevermind it's a Raspberry Pi...

286's were pretty ancient by 89 anyway. The first 486 was released that same year.

Same thing is happening to the web: I put compiled executables in a zip on my website and Chrome flags them as "unknown / untrusted" with a few hoops to download and run it. I understand the advantages of protecting naive users from malware but this is really going to hurt small / independent software developers.

Yes. It was $62 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. I can't just go displaying that in a program. Nor is it meaningful to me without a decimal conversion.

Yes i do simplify my posts and try to write them in ways that normal people can understand. Your snide comment is a sign of success =)

Right. It lets you see the bits more easily: 0-F is a good representation of 4 bits.

Say i were to name a random hex value like #$9C right now it would take me a few seconds to convert that to decimal in my head though... 156 took me a few seconds to sort out. I don't have to think about what 156 means in decimal because i just know what it is.

> you are just as used to hex.

I do 6502 ASM with bit tricks and all and i can tell you straight up that hex is never as intuitive as decimal IMO.

Base eleven sounds like the stuff of nightmares =)

Arabic notation / base ten seems to work really well with our brains. Having that many fingers probably helps. I couldn't imagine a modern world running on Roman Numerals.

it is a beautiful feeling! well worth the time in my humble opinion =)

i just wanted to stress that gamedev is anything but "lets do this great idea" and then magically it's done. it is a ton of work and you gotta celebrate those small steps.

Use a metronome.

The romance wears off fast once the ideas are in place and the tedium sets in. The fun brainstorming and dreaming parts amount to about 1-2% of the project, then you actually have to build, draw, tweak, and fix the damn thing.

Goldeneye has a native 16:9 output; in 1997 mind you. Another example of that game being both incredible quality and way ahead of its time.

There is a story about how BIT sets bit 6 into the overflow flag, and this was documented on a piece of parchment paper in pencil!

http://www.6502.org/tutorials/vflag.html

Either way, every transistor in the processor has been broken down completely, and even recreated in a visual simulation:

http://visual6502.org/

Our fathers CPI is never coming back either. What i wouldn't give for that...

They treat those distribution warehouses like plantations and the workers like ...you know

If you appease the complainers they will only find something new to complain about. They do not seek justice or a better world but only attention for themselves and complain simply for the joy of complaining.

It seems to me the complaints of the author have little to do with technology and much to do with the author.

You're doing Gods work then my friend =)

Is it possible to sync python up enough to get it to write frames accurately without a significant amount of lag? I'd certainly be interested in how to get it to do that.

Right, all you could do with the "player" objects was point them at a different byte every scanline, write the X value into the register, and it would paint the "1's" as "pixels" in that byte on that particular scanline with that X value. It was up to the programmer to multiplex them on a per scanline basis. No framebuffer whatsoever. Fun stuff!

Perhaps i'm projecting my own frustrations trying to learn retro dev, which is unfortunate and maybe immature on my part, but i've been burned too many times to shut up.

> Simple NES emulator

The timings get really tough between the PPU / CPU with all of the scanline tricks you can do, even with an NROM setup. Many 6502 instructions don't behave like you think they would with page boundaries, there are some hardware errors. The PPU / registers get all kinds of weird with their behavior too, such as $2003/$2004 (sprite addr / data) basically being broken on real hardware and Sprite DMA only falling on even cycles, etc. Each mapper is it's own unique snowflake as well, the MMC3 and VRC6 scanline interrupts work completely differently in hardware. There are many more examples of strangeness.

I'd love to see someone tackle it and wish you luck.

True. 2600 sprites work like this too. "Specky" has a Z80 anyway. I can't imagine realistically targeting something like this or being nostalgic for that XOR'd sprite look. Most later machines had more / varied graphical capabilities, even the new Commander X16 which uses a 'c02 has it's own graphics processor and several formats.

My problem with these "part 1 making a game" tutorials is that they usually never make it past part 3... This article only covers 1BPP byte graphics, and assumes that all 65(c)02 machines use them which is absolutely not the case. Graphics for 8-bit machines are usually handled by a separate processor with its own format(s) anyway: VIC for C64, ANTIC for Atari 8-bit, PPU for the NES, etc.

You could check out the Nerdy Nights tutorial for NES development which is fully fleshed out and has a tried and true record of getting people started: https://nerdy-nights.nes.science/

Apologies to the author if this seems harsh and disheartening, but, i've seen too many tutorials both never finish and give out incorrect information.

> "And while Android is reaching EOL in the next 4-5 years"

I wouldn't bet on it. Sounds like IBM OS2 all over again.

Endow. Extend. Extinguished.

People argue that Flash has been completely replaced with HTML5, but, there is no GUI / interface for designing games / animations for the web that even comes close to what Flash had. I miss me some movieclips =(

GC every frame? Jesus. Gamedevs jump though hoops to avoid it.

I can't speak for modern gamedev, but as far as the classic console homebrew scene goes, most popular systems have extremely accurate emulators with step-thru debuggers that make writing and testing code exponentially easier. Testing on real hardware is easier too, aided by flash-carts with micro-SD cards. I'd imagine devs back then would have killed for such luxuries.

Not likely. Engines were not reused back then, each game was coded from scratch. We know this because there are few similarities between disassembles, even of games from the same company or even the same series that look and play similarly.

Companies would roll their own assemblers and asset tools, but that is only known anecdotally and sometimes from pictures, and the majority of that software is lost to time.

It's great for making "Pokemon style" top down RPG's, if that's what you want to make, but as of the latest release you are fairly locked into that style of game.

The tools feel very nice to use, and the developer is still actively adding features. I'm excited to see where it progresses.