Making Games for the NES

by Steven Hugg

Learn how to program games for the NES! You'll learn how to draw text, scroll the screen, animate sprites, create a status bar, decompress title screens, play background music and sound effects and more. While using the book, take advantage of our Web-based IDE to see your code run instantly in the browser. We'll also talk about different "mappers" which add extra ROM and additional features to cartridges. Most of the examples use the CC65 C compiler using the NESLib library. We'll also write 6502 assembly language, programming the PPU and APU directly, and carefully timing our code to produce advanced psuedo-3D raster effects. Create your own graphics and sound, and share your games with friends!

260 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2019

Reviews

[Katrina Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got through my first reading of this book, and it is a fairly okaying work designed to get you onto the ground with doing some very basic game programming for the NES. Some parts towards the end feel a bit more rushed--where as the beginning has the feeling of "stuff later on will justify some of my questions"

This book very much appears to be designed as a starting point for a person's journey into making homebrew games for the NES. With there needing to be a fair amount of work on the person learning the topic to find answers in various other places--mostly via experimentation with code and reading various other works people have allowed to have the source code viewable regarding

It covers a decent amount of material in its ~250pg pages of stuff--and for it to be more than a starting point (you know a rather complete tome on the topic), it would easily rack up three times as many pages for its count. As this book does practice word economy, to a point that it might cause some readers issues

Definitely a decent starting point to get a decent lay of the land, before doing much more interesting exploring on the topic

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic primer!

I've got a little prototype up and running, and I'm putting together some neat metasprite art now.

I read up to the 6502 assembly chapters. I'll read those if I need to dig deeper for efficiency, but otherwise, working in C is great.

[Diogo Muller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a pretty great way to start, if you are thinking about learning how to make games for the NES. It not only explains how the NES works, but also teaches about many, many particularities of the platform - all with code examples, also avaliable on 8bitworkshop's IDE. It's mostly easy to follow - a few parts may require a couple google searches, depending on your experience with older platforms and the NES in particular.

However, be aware: this book requires some C experience, and 6502 ASM experience is a good extra to get 100% out of the it.