I have made demos before but more to understand how the NES works rather than trying to make games. This was done to to increase my skills as a Romhacker. I am far better at reverse engineering games than I am making them which seems to require a new set of skills which I'm willing to learn.
I have also ripped a lot of NSFs which is also a long the lines of reverse engineering games to extract the sound code out of the game. I believe that I've done that for long enough and want to do some game programming.
One advantage I have from this is that I can rip a game apart to determine how it works, if I see something similar that I may need in my own game.
I have my assembler of choice and that's ASM6 because it is very easy to use and doesn't require too much setup to get started. In fact, if I wanted to, it would output even a small binary chunk which is very useful for Romhacking. So, I'm not really interested in another assembler. I'm also not interested in any of the C compilers for NES either because I am having such a difficult time learning C and it's associated IDE that I don't want to spend the years needed to learn both.
If I could learn C, I would just use it to make tools that I need. However I don't want to spend the time to learn it right now.
There are more than enough tile editors out there for my needs. There is a nice attribute table editor by Shiru that I really like a lot.
Plenty of sound drivers and Famitracker, although I've heard of people making the tunes in Famitracker and importing the data to a custom driver because Famitracker drivers are too expensive for a game to use.
I can also use that NES Music tracker NTRQ but again that is not really for games even though I can definitely use it well enough.
I've skimmed through the NESdev wiki and can use it again and gain as a reference when needed.
My plan so far is to take NROM and program various demos using the features from that configuration so that I can get the hang of and get started actually making games. For example, I would do background drawing, vertical or horizontal scrolling, either one but not both. Learning to use the IRQ, use CHR-ROM on some and CHR-RAM on some others to practice various techniques. I definitely want to do this to practice development. Once I build up code libraries I think it may help me.
Due to the fact that I haven't been around for quite awhile, I am not up to date on tools and other information that has been released in the past 2-3 years. So, I feel like I'm starting again and trying to refresh my memory about various things about the NES and programming.
I hope I have the right ideas what I'm doing to get started. If anyone has ideas I would like to hear them.
I have also ripped a lot of NSFs which is also a long the lines of reverse engineering games to extract the sound code out of the game. I believe that I've done that for long enough and want to do some game programming.
One advantage I have from this is that I can rip a game apart to determine how it works, if I see something similar that I may need in my own game.
I have my assembler of choice and that's ASM6 because it is very easy to use and doesn't require too much setup to get started. In fact, if I wanted to, it would output even a small binary chunk which is very useful for Romhacking. So, I'm not really interested in another assembler. I'm also not interested in any of the C compilers for NES either because I am having such a difficult time learning C and it's associated IDE that I don't want to spend the years needed to learn both.
If I could learn C, I would just use it to make tools that I need. However I don't want to spend the time to learn it right now.
There are more than enough tile editors out there for my needs. There is a nice attribute table editor by Shiru that I really like a lot.
Plenty of sound drivers and Famitracker, although I've heard of people making the tunes in Famitracker and importing the data to a custom driver because Famitracker drivers are too expensive for a game to use.
I can also use that NES Music tracker NTRQ but again that is not really for games even though I can definitely use it well enough.
I've skimmed through the NESdev wiki and can use it again and gain as a reference when needed.
My plan so far is to take NROM and program various demos using the features from that configuration so that I can get the hang of and get started actually making games. For example, I would do background drawing, vertical or horizontal scrolling, either one but not both. Learning to use the IRQ, use CHR-ROM on some and CHR-RAM on some others to practice various techniques. I definitely want to do this to practice development. Once I build up code libraries I think it may help me.
Due to the fact that I haven't been around for quite awhile, I am not up to date on tools and other information that has been released in the past 2-3 years. So, I feel like I'm starting again and trying to refresh my memory about various things about the NES and programming.
I hope I have the right ideas what I'm doing to get started. If anyone has ideas I would like to hear them.