Learn how to program games for the NES! You'll learn how to draw text, scroll the screen, animate sprites, create a status bar, decompress title screens, play background music and sound effects and more. While using the book, take advantage of our Web-based IDE to see your code run instantly in the browser. We'll also talk about different "mappers" which add extra ROM and additional features to cartridges. Most of the examples use the CC65 C compiler using the NESLib library. We'll also write 6502 assembly language, programming the PPU and APU directly, and carefully timing our code to produce advanced psuedo-3D raster effects. Create your own graphics and sound, and share your games with friends!

Build your own retro games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Do you have an amazing idea for a NES game you’ve been itching to turn into reality? Classic Game Programming on the NES will show you how. This all-practical beginner's guide is full of step-by-step guidance on everything from graphics and music, to enemy AI, to the 6502 Assembler language you need to get the most out of the NES. Inside Classic Game Programming on the NES you’ll learn how to: Use the 6502 Assembler language to create your own game Create and display tile and sprite graphics Play sound effects and music Program enemy AI Balance cycle times and memory usage Design and develop your own action game from scratch When you’re developing retro games, it’s dangerous to go alone—so take this essential guide! Classic Game Programming on the NES is an all-in-one handbook to the resources you need to start building for the NES. You’ll learn to understand modern emulators and discover the secrets of programming in ages past. Best of all, you won’t need any specialist experience! Even highly technical elements are broken down into step-by-step instructions, and fully illustrated with easy-to-follow diagrams. Foreword by Philip and Andrew Oliver. About the technology Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games like Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda shaped the video game industry and defined childhood for millions of gamers worldwide. Bring back the magic by creating your own NES games! All you need is this book and your imagination––no game dev experience or specialist programming skills required. About the book Classic Game Programming on the NES distills the scattered secrets of NES development into clear instructions for building your first games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. You’ll learn about the NES’s unique design, the surprisingly simple 6502 Assembly language, and more. As you go, you’ll create a simple space-based shoot-em-up that gives you a pattern you can follow to build anything you can dream up on your own. What's inside The tools of NES game development Create and display tile and sprite graphics Sound effects and music Program enemy AI About the reader No game programming experience required. About the author Tony Cruise is a legend in the field of retro games. In the 80’s he programmed games for 8-bit systems; now he creates resources for developers working with 8 and 16-bit systems. The technical editor on this book was Dan Weiss. Table of Contents 1 Let’s program games! 2 Getting set up 3 Starting 6502 Assembler 4 Math, loops, conditions, and bits 5 Starting somewhere 6 Starting a game 7 Move and shoot 8 Enemy movement 9 Collision detection 10 Keeping score 11 Player collisions and lives 12 More enemies 13 Animations and more 14 Sound effects 15 Music 16 Where to from here?

A comprehensive, colorful guide to every game ever released on the classic Nintendo Entertainment System. One of the most iconic video game systems, the NES is credited with saving the American video games industry in the early 1980s. The NES Encyclopedia is the first ever complete reference guide to every game released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo’s first industry-defining video game system. As well as covering all 714 officially licensed NES games, the book also includes more than 160 unlicensed games released during its lifespan, giving for the first time a definitive history of this important console's full library. Written by a retro gaming expert with 30 years of gaming experience and a penchant for bad jokes, TheNES Encyclopedia promises to be both informative and entertaining. The NES continues to enjoy a strong cult following among Nintendo fans and gamers in general with wide varieties of officially licensed merchandise proving ever popular. Nintendo’s most recent console, the Switch, is the fastest selling video game console of all time in the United States and Japan. Nintendo launched a variety of classic NES games for download on the system, meaning a new audience of gamers is due to discover the NES for the first time if they have not already. Praise for The NES Encyclopedia “As a catalog of all 876 NES games, this work is unique in its breadth of coverage and will be of great interest to old-school video gamers and collectors.” —Booklist “A definitive resource that is more than worthy of the title ‘Encyclopedia.’ ” —Nintendo World Report

With this book, you'll learn all about the hardware of Golden Age 8-bit arcade games produced in the late 1970s to early 1980s. We'll learn how to use the C programming language to write code for the Z80 CPU. The following arcade platforms are covered: * Midway 8080 (Space Invaders) * VIC Dual (Carnival) * Galaxian/Scramble (Namco) * Atari Color Vector * Williams (Defender, Robotron) We'll describe how to create video and sound for each platform. Use the online 8bitworkshop IDE to compile your C programs and play them right in the browser!

More American children recognize Super Mario, the hero of one of Nintendo’s video games, than Mickey Mouse. The Japanese company has come to earn more money than the big three computer giants or all Hollywood movie studios combined. Now Sheff tells of the Nintendo invasion–a tale of innovation and cutthroat tactics.

The Atari 2600 was released in 1977, and now there's finally a book about how to write games for it! You'll learn about the 6502 CPU, NTSC frames, scanlines, cycle counting, players, missiles, collisions, procedural generation, pseudo-3D, and more. While using the manual, take advantage of our Web-based IDE to write 6502 assembly code, and see your code run instantly in the browser. We'll cover the same programming tricks that master programmers used to make classic games. Create your own graphics and sound, and share your games with friends!

Maybe it was the recent Atari 2600 milestone anniversary that fueled nostalgia for the golden days of computer and console gaming. Every Game Boy must ponder his roots from time to time. But whatever is driving the current retro gaming craze, one thing is certain: classic games are back for a big second act, and they're being played in both old and new ways. Whether you've just been attacked by Space Invaders for the first time or you've been a Pong junkie since puberty, Chris Kohler's Retro Gaming Hacks is the indispensable new guide to playing and hacking classic games. Kohler has complied tons of how-to information on retro gaming that used to take days or weeks of web surfing to track down and sort through, and he presents it in the popular and highly readable Hacks style. Retro Gaming Hacks serves up 85 hard-nosed hacks for reviving the classic games. Want to game on an original system? Kohler shows you how to hack ancient hardware, and includes a primer for home-brewing classic software. Rather adapt today's equipment to run retro games? Kohler provides emulation techniques, complete with instructions for hacking a classic joystick that's compatible with a contemporary computer. This book also teaches readers to revive old machines for the original gaming experience: hook up an Apple II or a Commodore 64, for example, and play it like you played before. A video game journalist and author of Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life, Kohler has taught the history of video games at Tufts University. In Retro Gaming Hacks, he locates the convergence of classic games and contemporary software, revealing not only how to retrofit classic games for today's systems, but how to find the golden oldies hidden in contemporary programs as well. Whether you're looking to recreate the magic of a Robotron marathon or simply crave a little handheld Donkey Kong, Retro Gaming Hacks shows you how to set the way-back dial.