So, as a big Homestar Runner fan, one of my favorite games on the site is Stinkoman 20X6, a game made in the NES style that references and parodies many NES games, particularly the Mega Man series.

For a long time, I've wistfully thought about how cool it would be to play this game on the original NES hardware (for my own personal enjoyment). The creators of the game have worked in the past with an Atari homebrew person to make an Atari 2600 Homestar Runner game, Homestar Runner RPG, which is what got me excited about the idea in the first place (although unfortunately this project seems to have been indefinitely put on hold).

Also related, other Homestar Runner games have been translated into Nintendo DS homebrew games: Population: Tire and Secret Collect. Obviously, the DS is a much more sophisticated machine than the NES, so the dreams of translating a Flash game for it are much more realistic.

However, I just thought I'd throw it out there: how hard would it be to take Stinkoman 20X6 (a Flash game) and turn it into an NES rom that could then be put on the PowerPak, or, theoretically, its own cartridge? I'm supposing that the game would have to be entirely reprogrammed from the ground up, right? Or is it more realistic than I fear?

Anyways, thanks for bothering to read this.

Hey bud...I believe the problem would be that since the languages are so different you would pretty much have to recode everything....a lenghty, lengthy process.

Yeah, that's what I figured :-\

well I think most if not all the homestarrunner games are made by Videlectrix.

Videlectrix web site

I'm not sure if they are the same people who do homestar runner or not. Most of the games are more atari like in game play, but the graphics are nicer. The games are pretty simple in theory and I bet they could be done on the NES. Granted they would have to be coded from scratch as they're all flash based.

My Top 5 are:

Trogdor: The Burninator (Dragonfire type game with some twists)

Where's an Egg? (weird searching game, but entertaing once you know what your suppose to do.

Kid Speedy (Kinda like a Hack of Grand Prix and Fast Food where you race a fat kid against other runners and have to eat healthy food to speed up and if you eat candy you slow down)

Secret Collect(O2 type graphics, pretty much try and run around collecting treasure puzzle/reflex type game)

Peasant's Quest(like old text adventure games from the 80's)

Probably all these are doable on the NES, as is Stinkoman, which I think is ok, but needs to be cleaned up gameplay wise.

Yup, the same guys (Mike and Matt Chapman) do both Homestar Runner and Videlectrix — the latter is actually part of the former.

I agree with you about Peasant's Quest and Where's an Egg? — those games are awesome as well.

After playing the game for about a minute I didn't see anything that couldn't be done on the nes, except for the graphics quality (number of colors). All the gameplay can be done but would take an experienced programmer. Schedule that for your 4th game

Cool, thanks for the input. I think it'd be fun to start playing around with making some (simple) games — what software do you recommend?

Also, do you know when the PowerPak will become available again at retrousb?

Notepad, and yes that is serious. To write a game you need to use 6502 assembly language, there is no game making software. My unfinished programming guide is athttp://www.nespowerpak.com/nesasm.pdf. Eventually I will start a real tutorial in this forum...

That's actually a pretty good guide there. I've done higher level languages like VB and C, but this is one of the fist asm papers I understood decently. I hope you finish it.

Haha, that's awesome. Thanks!

Be thankful you GET notepad. When I was your age we didn't have assemblers to parse our neat little three-letter commands, we had to program in hard hex codes. In the snow!

My dad still has a few stacks of punch cards from his college programs, he isn't sure if they are still in order

Uphill, both ways?!

Barefoot. With scoliosis.

anyone know where you can find some nes game source codes. I haven't messed a lot with roms or anything, but can you decompile them. I'd love to be able to step through the code of some games, and see if I can tell whats going on. Maybe try a Hack, or maybe a simple game. I actually love coding in notepad, takes me back to the early HTML/Java days. Who am I kidding I still do HTML in notepad.

Theres lots of demos and a couple full games with source at http://www.nesdev.com/#NESPrograms but it may not be commented well! Just to see programs running you can use a good emulator with debugger like FCEUXD SP and step through the code one line at a time. It also has graphics and color palette viewers to give you a better idea of what it takes to make the backgrounds. Having the debugger makes everything far easier than it was in the NES era!

I would love if you started a tutorial like that. I'd like to be the first one to enroll.

Now I just need to figure out how to make money from it because I am a greedy bastard

I think I will start weekly tutorial threads tonight or tomorrow, with the absolute most basic stuff first. If you already understand binary/hex/processors then you will have to wait a few weeks to get new info.

I'm looking forward to this!

Awesome, I can't wait.
~~NGD

been waiting for something like this for some time

bunnyboy, you said there was no game making software. Are you saying that all NES games were written out from scratch, no programs, or did they have programs that you do not have access to? That seems like a TON of work.

I'm pretty sure they didn't have much, hense why teams of people worked on them and they took months if not years to develop.

Almost every game was programmed from nothing in 6502 assembly. The only known exceptions are some really crappy games that were written in plain C. It is likely big companies like Nintendo and Konami had some standard libraries of asm code for things like sound engines, but usually games are different enough that everything is rewritten. It is a ton of work, but so it writing a full top game now using high level languages.

For things like creating graphics and level editors, there were computer programs written in C. Generally that is still done today, using whatever language the person is comfortable with (basic, c, java, etc). Maybe albailey can note what he has done here, I haven't written the level editor for my game yet.

Today we have it even easier, because accurate emulators with full debuggers are freely available. Back in the NES era everything had to be run on the real NES with very limited debuggers. That is why there are still so many prototype boards with UV eproms in sockets around.

It's also why you'd see games that are very similar (Home Alone 2 and Bart vs the Space Mutants) because code modules would be isolated and reused. In-house libraries were most certainly developed and passed on as developers changed jobs. I can imagine at some point some code was decompiled and "ripped" as well by other companies.