/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8135923
what do you think is hard about it?

>>8055671
SNES is an easier system to program and develop for.
you can download the dev manual and read it.
you can also download a book on the 65816.
of course, you should know some C before learning assembly, but it's not hard

I've made several. I still need to finish the last one I was working on. https://github.com/gewballs/graviton

Recently I've been getting into FPGA, and I am wanting to make a PPU- or VDP-like graphics chip.

>>3797043
>However, most of the success stories I've heard of are NES developers getting comfortable with 6502 and then moving onto 65c816

The NES is a ball of spit and wax compared to the SNES. The architecture of the SNES is the NES taken to its logical conclusion, and it is pretty neat and tidy, compared to the oddities of the NES you are forced to deal with if you want to make anything non-tirival.

6502 also has an incomplete instruction set, with tons of invalid instructions. The 65816 fills out all of those missing instructions with useful ones.

Anyway, I'm working on a great little assembler targeting 65816 and SPC700, and it can easily be extended to 6502, Z80, and 68k. I'll share in time if anyone is interested. It's gonna be part of an SNES dev toolchain I'm putting together. I have an SPC700 codec too. I have a few other tools I'm planning as well, such as a disassembler to target my assembler, and a graphics utility too. Those are on the backburner at the moment though.

Anywho, OP, the docs you want to get are these:

Programming the 65816:
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/images/7/76/Programmanual.pdf

SNES Official Dev Manual
http://www.romhacking.net/documents/226/

All of Anomie's hardware docs (more accurate and informative than the manual)
http://www.romhacking.net/?page=documents&category=12&platform=&game=&author=548&perpage=20&level=&title=&desc=&docsearch=Go

That's all the documentation that you need. The rest is getting an assembler and firing up your favorite text editor and having at it.

>>3735273
Goddamn it. I just loaded it up for the first time in ages. Why didn't I finish this?

>>3273368
I was working on this last summer, but school happened and it got put on hold. I'll start it back up after I've reprogrammed my assembler. I posted the source at

github.com/gewballs/graviton

but without my assembler it's doesn't do anyone else much good except to see what goes into a program. In time I'll make the assembler available when it hits v2.0

>>3015562
github.com/gewballs/graviton ?

I'm the lead. What happened was grad school. I want to finish this guy, but probably won't have time again for another 2 or so months.

Furthermore, although I have posted the source code, I did not post my custom assembler. Although it works, I wrote it a long time ago, and over the years I have come to realize its shortcomings, which are many. I have designed a new, much more powerful assembler, but haven't gotten a chance to implement it yet. Once it's done, I will release it to the masses.

All that I've had time to do recently was the "mega man" series of posts in thread #6 that was detailing how computers work and the basics of assembly. That thread got nuked by spergs in a single night, and I don't think anyone saved that stuff, but it was really me just thinking about how to go about teaching folks how to rom hack. I learned a lot of do's and don't from that. Perhaps I'll write a tutorial from what I garnered and post it on my website or something in the future along with the new assembler.

When it comes down to it I want to help people learn how to hack, because I find it incredibly amusing, and the subject is incredible opaque to the uninitiated, even if the concepts aren't that difficult.

Anyway, I'm here if anyone wants to talk/ask questions about something more technically challenging than graphics hacks (btw the pokemans from the last thread looked great).

>>2901679
School started so I had to shelve at the end of summer, but I really need to complete get around to completing this.

>>2840616
If you have no interest/talent in actually writing music, then you have to make people want to contribute to your project. The only meaningful way is to show off the progress you have made thus far. That's how I got someone to submit a song when I was programming my last project (still incomplete, but winter break is fast approaching). It took a lot of effort on my part to transcribe the music, but that's the toll.

If you do want to try to write your own music, use tracker software to compose the score. I was using MilkyTracker, but I think many different tracker programs can save to a common portable file format. A good tracker will allow you to define instruments with sound samples, play with envelops, encode special effects, and write music that naturally loops.

If you want to see an example of what a (poorly) working music player might look like in a retro game, you can check out my said project's github repo. Just look under audio.asm (the driver) and bgm.asm (the music). It's in assembly, but commented with pseudo-C code.

Added a basic in game level editor.

Select=toggles edit mode.
D-Pad=Move cursor.
A=Place tile
Y=Cycle forward through characters
B=Cycle backwards through characters
X=Cycle through the 4 flipping modes (~,H,V,HV)
R=Cycle through the 8 palettes
L=Cycle through the 2 background-object priority states

Press select. A cursor will appear in the top left corner.
Use the d-pad to move . Inside the cursor you'll see a preview of what you are placing. Note the SNES's objects and backgrounds do not share palettes, so not all all palettes are available. However I have set the default to a value that shouldn't need to be changed. I've also set the default character to a block, one of the only solid tiles. I need to implement a hud so you can see what's selected, but for the time being I wired (most of) the character number to player 2's score. The tiles that are important are:

0x20 Stone
0x21 Spike
0x22-0x25 Grass
0x26-9x27 Grassy stone
0x28 Air (or any clear tile really (or really anything else not stone))

Unfortunately the blocks can't be moved around in edit mode yet. You can however watch them fall continuously by deleting the floor out from underneath them.

Everything pushed to github. Just added edit.asm. Last time was move.asm, and that is fully commented for those interested and that can read C.

Try to make some levels and I'll add them in.