Programming games on NES? Absolutely yes!

It’s been a while since I have written here, the reasons because I haven’t been here are two:

  • I was really busy with life in this period
  • I have been busy with fun activities, like playing videogames for example

Retrogaming took me a lot of my time because there were some classic games that I needed to play.

Each of us at some point in our lives has got a console, handheld or not, who got the Game Boy, who got the Nintendo 64, or PSP, or Xbox…whatever. But you had fun!

Have you ever wondered about how old Game Boy games used to be so tiny that you used to carry them around in your pocket in cartridges?

Well, I did a lot of times when I was a child and I wasn’t a programmer: I was a stranger in that world; however bringing in that tiny cartridge a lot of worlds from Super Mario or Pokemon, it doesn’t matter which one, has always fascinated me.

The question wasn’t just about the Game Boy but it was also about the NES: both of them use cartridges, and you need them to play games.

I don’t know you, but I always dreamt about writing my own game or app, even if “simple” (no Pokemon :P) for Game Boy or NES…

Well, after a lot of hours digging Google I have finally found nesdoug’s blog here - take a look who explains how to create NES games using C language.

I was so enthusiastic that I wanted to start (and end), all the resources were in the blog so I tried to find out a way to organize everything in a simple and elegant way.

The result was… a book: there is nothing better than learn how to program step-by-step by using a good programming book that teaches you the basics.

Rust’s community (Rust is an interesting language, https://rust-lang.org) has made a book to learn Rust, the original author in this case has made everything from scratch by himself but he did it in a manner which nobody can explain in such an easy way.

I think it is one of the best guides on the internet about NES developing, it is simple and clear: judge by yourself

And finally, I understood what is “VBlank”, thing which it is not so simple to explain because you are going to read a looooot of explanations which you are not going to fully understand.

See ya!