http://www.parodius.com/~memblers/games/

LOL. Hot Seat Harry is hilarious. I practically gave myself heart failure playing it. Your games are actually weirder than the stuff I'm working on, which I thought was impossible.

Questions:
1. When are the other games coming out? They all look and/or sound great.
2. Does Hot Seat Harry work on a real NES?

Anyway, great job. No one else has said anything yet so I thought I would.

Hopefully I'll finish Heathen Blaster soon. Premise: squat old man wearing a fez and a bright red bathrobe shoots down, Galaga-style, anyone who doesn't worship a certain newspaper (translation: Shoot everyone.)


"There is a loud SAKRAHAH! and everything turns chartreuse."

Hehe, yeah that game can be pretty stressful. It's pretty much unbeatable on the later levels. I haven't seen it run on a real system, but hopefully it would run correctly. I avoided stuff that was problematic with my older programs.

The other projects aren't very far along. Roadkill is furthest along, and likely to be the next release. I should probably put a completion % or something on the page.

Haha, Heathen Blaster sounds like it will be pretty good. Blusterer will probably be a shooter too. Even though it's an "educational simulator".

How are you guys making these NES roms? This is pretty damn cool. I've always wanted to make my own NES games, I've got tons of ideas in mind. So what's the secret?


--Snake

The "NES 101" document on this site (among others) will walk one through the creation of an NES program.

Mostly, just learning 6502 assembly language. After that, it's just putting everything together, kinda like building with legos.

Heh, I'll check out that 6502 (?) laguage and see if it confuses me further :)

I read one other tutorial and it was very confusing. If it is the 6502 language it shows...damn :o Lol, I'm used to simple programming laguages like QBasic and VB. I'm currently using AGS (adventure game studio) and it's scripting language is quite simple to learn...but this 6502..yikes :) Just looking at it gives me the heebeejeebees. Is it really as hard as it looks?
Oh, and is it the same language the programmers for NES games used?

Heh, someone should make an engine so laymens people can just make their graphics and peice their game together with ease and have it compile the game into ROM format ;)

cya guys,


--Snake

sorry for double posting...
(guess I can't edit without being a member)

What I was going to add in there, was that I'm used to languages that use stuff like:
if (blar blar=1) then
hoooh oo
end if

It makes me wonder how variables are used in 6502...


--Snake

6502 looks strange, but it's really simple when you learn the basics. (take a look at the LDA and STA instructions, e.g. LDX/STX/LDY/STY are for reading/writing memory (like peek/poke I guess?)

A 6502 assembly version of the code you typed would look kinda like this:

blar_blar = $00 ; (RAM location)

lda blar_blar ; load variable into A
cmp #1 ; compare A to 1
bne end_if ; if not equal, branch to the end_if label
hoooh oo (?? heheh)
end_if:

Maybe you would want to take a look at NBASIC? It's similar to BASIC, but it probably would still be difficult to use without knowing some 6502 basics at least.

"Simple" means one of two things. Programming languages that are "simple to program in" (the real name for this is "high level language") have a structure that's close to the problem you're trying to solve.

Another meaning of "simple" is "having very few components, or components that do very little." The 6502 is a chip series; the instructions in the language you see directly correspond to the basic instructions you can give the chip. (This is called "assembly language," and each instruction corresponds exactly to one operation on the chip. High level languages are generally transformed into assembly language by a compiler, which is then run through an assembler to produce machine code that the computer can actually run.)

The 6502 chip is generally programmed only in its assembly language (each chip has its own assembly language, so this won't help with writing code directly for an x86 machine; also, different assemblers for the same chip have slightly different ways of expressing the same things.)

If you've never done any assembler programming for ANY chip before, the 6502 is actually a reasonable one to learn on. However, the NES is *not* the platform that you want to do it with. I recommend the Commodore 64 (which has a 6502 series chip in it as well) as a learning platform for that. A softcopy of the Commodore 64's programming guide can be found at http://www.classicgaming.com/area64/fdi/docs/c64prg10.zip. Chapter 5 is a pretty good tutorial in assembly language programming from the ground up.

If you "just want to write games," don't bother writing for the NES. Use the Simple Direct-media Layer (SDL) instead, and write your games in C or C++. They'll run under Windows, Mac OS X, and several flavors of Unix without needing to be ported.

If you know QBasic pretty well, you should consider picking up the language Python. You've already got the basic ability to use Python's simpler structures, and its more advanced features are immensely powerful once you're ready for them. (It also can access SDL functionality through the "pygame" library; I don't have a link.)

I'm not sure what Adventure Game Studio is, but if you're talking about AGI Studio, that uses a language similar to C. If that's what you're using, you might want to try GameBoy development. There's a complete development kit for that (GBDK) that uses a C-like language. It might be easier for you. Even assembly stuff on the GameBoy is a little easier than NES programming. I started with GB programming before I did anything for the NES.

Learning 6502 isn't the hard part, it's all the little intricacies of the NES (especially the PPU) that give people problems. But there's enough info on this site alone to get past this. You won't have to "discover" the vector table by accident like I did. :)

I don't have an address on hand for GBDK, but I'm sure you can find it fairly easily.

"There is a loud SAKRAHAH! and everything turns chartreuse."

In reply to:

---

I don't have an address on hand for GBDK, but I'm sure you can find it fairly easily.

---

This is on sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gbdk/

Pygame library:
http://pygame.org/
:)

"There is a loud SAKRAHAH! and everything turns chartreuse."

Will there ever be any more games from Strangulation? I hope so anyway.. :)

sorry for misspellings

Maybe or maybe not. Munchie Attack was finally released though (at the 2003 MiniGame compo), and it features Strangulation Games' mascot - Squeedo del Tepton, heheh.

I've got a few other game projects I'm working on, I think they take themselves somewhat more seriously than my other ones, plus it's a different dev team (2 different teams for 2 projects actually, I'm burying myself in work here, heheh), so we might make another game company name.

ok.. just take it easy.. ;)

sorry for misspellings

Enquiring Minds Want To Know: What is the Squeedo del Tepton?

Squeedo del Tepton is a gigantic mutant squid from outer space that can talk.