Hi. Kind of new to the scen and just started programming. But i've been thinking, and what i understand is that most of the info out there describing the custom parts of the nes(graphics, sound, etc) is just the works of normal people?
Thinking about all the games that were made for the nes and all the companies that made them, shouldn't there be some official devkits/manuals/etc from nintendo out there? Or is this something that they payed big money for and keep locked up perhaps..

Perhaps Nintendo had some its own game engines for sale, but I think most companies just wrote their own. If you pick up a game coded by Ljn, for example, you'll notice it looks a lot different from games coded by Rare. They used totally different sound/graphic engines. It is quite possible that they used the same programs for generating usable graphics (i.e. drawing bitmaps, converting those to NES format), but maybe not for sound. And yes, there is an official NES manual, but it's just probably some crappy translation of the japanese manual.

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