bay wrote:
thanks for the responses thusfar
going specifically into assemblers and linkers, what are the advantages for NES development in any of the assemblers? i've look at DASM briefly as well as cc65, i know there are more out there.
I used DASM for a while, and quit because it didn't have the .incbin command. Having to converting binaries to text just seemed.. dumb.
One thing I like about cc65 is that it's still being maintained by the developer (who seems to actually care about it, even), there's an mail list, and it's just got more features than I'll probably ever get around to using.
WLA-DX is another popular one, looks cool. It supports various processors though, and some of the conventions for using 6502 in it looks annoyingly awkward to me (and are kinda non-standard).
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Memblers wrote:
Very cool to hit F9 in ConTEXT, wait for the LED to turn green, reset my NES, and have my program running just like that.
this is exactly what i'd like to be doing, as well as stepping through game via the hardware. i'm hoping copyNES allows me to do this sufficiently. programming in emulators is ok, but i like to be interacting with the hardware directly.
Yeah, it's pretty nifty to be able to step through code with CopyNES. I haven't used it very much, but that's mostly been due to parallel port problems with my PC.
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this sounds very cool, i'd like to hear of some ideas you have for that PIC onboard!
My favorite thing I've done with it so far is the sound synthesizer I wrote. Holds waveforms in RAM (so they can be modified by the NES and/or PIC), takes frequency and volume settings from the NES and outputs the samples to the NES with an IRQ so the NES can play it through it's DAC ($4011 register). It does this for 4 channels, and sounds very nice.
PIC can be set to do some automatic CHR bankswitching. Counts scanlines, NES CPU cycles, has it's own 10Mhz timer, and can generate IRQs to the NES. It's an 18F PIC too (18F4525, to be exact), so it has an 8x8 multiplier in hardware so some fast math stuff should be possible.
It'll do pretty much anything you want it too, heheh, and it has a parallel port that sits on the NES CPU's data bus (with some limited addressing capability - enough to be useful), so it communicates fairly well with the NES, too.
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i've seen several builds of FCE ULTRA, some with debugging tools and extensions to what was originally built. do you find these tools useful? does nintendulator provide any advantages over FCE ULTRA?
Personally, I found the debugger in the standard version of FCEU to be more useful than the one in the FCEUXD version.
Nintendulator is highly accurate, and also has some unique features in the debugger, like being able to see the current scanline, CPU cycle, and PPU status (hblank, vblank). Very handy stuff when writing tricky timed code.
FCEU isn't too accurate, really, but it's still the emu I use the most. It'll run any working code just fine, and some non-working code sometimes.