Anyone here interested in NES homebrew?

[udisi]

Just wondering if anyone here is interested in NES homebrew. I started messing around with NES programming about 2 months ago. I knew nothing about NES architecture or ASM, but I've been working on a Battle Pong game, and I'm starting to get close to done. Really just finishing up some graphics and adding the soundtrack(music engine isn't done yet), and a few gameplay tweaks left.

 

The Game itself I think is really fun 2P, the One player is ok, but needs some AI work yet. I thought I'd post it here if anyone wanted to see something NES related in progress.

 

The Game is called NA Battleball, It's a themed battle pong game with a Nintendo AGE theme, the characters are all forum members there.

 

If people are interested in see more, I'll update the builds here too.

 

The Game should work fine in the popular Nes emulators, and works on the nes flash powerpak(so also probably on real hardware)

 

This site wouldn't let me upload a .NES file, so I've provided a link to the download on NA

 

Almost forgot... the build here has the 1P mode set to a very easy match 8 with the 4th player, because match 9 is the final boss, and I wanted to be able to test some animation in the final match. The final match is more challenging. If you beat the final boss, you can see the champion screen. Much more fun if you can find a person to play 2P with ^^

 

NA Battleball 2-3

Edited October 4, 2009 by udisi

[Primordial Ooze]

Hi udisi,

 

Its me Cell Wall Rebound from the NintendoAge forums. I eas the one who wanted to create a pong remake for the nes but, woun'd up doing nothing. I remember reading your thread there about how your game was progressing. Anyways i can't wait to try out your game and see how it plays once i get the chance.

 

Sincerely,

 

Asylums Of The Undead

[udisi]

yeah, I remember. I think basic pong is one of the first games most people try. It tool me about 2 days of going through asm tutorials to grasp it, and about 5 more days to make a basic pong game. There's soooo much more the system can do though, and I wanted to try some more things, so I took basic pong and just added to it. Things like the custom character attributes, power-ups. Alos most demo pong games just have the playfield, and I went ahead and added a title screen, and more informational screens. I made the one player more of an championship mode, where you win your way though the 8 characters to reach the champion, etc.

 

After, all that, I wanted to add music(most demos are silent, or use a few sounds). A lot of programmers have gone to using tracker based NSF music due to the simplicity of adding it, but doing that makes it impossible to have sound effects AND music, unless you wanna hack the tracker NSF code, so I've been going the custom music engine route, so that I can have both while preserving prg space. I can also use the engine in my other planned games.

 

I really hadn't done anything with palette swapping or animation, so I took a few days and made the animated final stage and champion screen. Most recently I did the splash page, which used some more advanced trickery. I used my basic sound engine so far, but the soundtrack sounds are much more complicated, requiring envelopes and mid song tempo changes which the engine just isn't capable of yet.

 

Right now, I'm trying to squeeze all the character graphics into the character select screen, and I'm trying to go back and re-write some routines to make the game more efficent. I'm pushing the limits of the NROM mapper I'm using with 32k PRG and 8K Graphics, I need to save prg space to have for the song data, and to tighten up some gameplay features.

 

I know this post is a story book, but there's just so much I've learned from this game already. It amazed me hom much a game like pong can help with doing other games.