nesdev.com

Why NES have strange and ugly architecture?

strange and ugly, compared to what system?

_________________
http://www.frankengraphics.com - personal NES blog

GBA

Well it was Nintendo's first real home console that could play arcade-style games.

I think the 6502 architecture is simple and beautiful, though Ricoh butchered it a bit when they cut off the decimal mode and made other things not work in the R2A03.
And then there are hardware features in the console that doesn't seem to work as they should, like the sprite overflow flag.

But other than that I think it's a quite simple (which can't be said about the SNES or GBA) and beautiful console. Its biggest problem is the lack of color though.

I try PyNes.

But how to paint my graphics and save in chr?
Any tutorial?

Easiest way might be to use NES Screen Tool. You can download a BMP here: https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?p=115203 to use as a template, so you get an indexed BMP with 4 colors (don't use more colors than that). NES Screen Tool can convert a BMP image to CHR pattern data for you, and it can also make edits if you don't have a good image editor.

Photoshop is bad for NES?

The GBA came out in 2001, while the NES came out in 1983. One tends to learn quite a lot of things about system design over the course of 18 years, so of course the NES is going to seem "strange and ugly" to you in comparison.

Pointing it out explicitly isn't going to make you many friends here, though - on the contrary, it's likely to make a lot of people here dislike you for insulting one of their favorite video game consoles...


Photoshop won't be able to save graphics in the format that the NES needs, which is an array of 2-bit planar 8x8 tiles - you could use a normal editor, but you'd then need another tool to convert the resulting images.

_________________
Quietust, QMT Productions
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.

Even the first ARM processor wouldn't appear until 1987, and that would have been way too expensive to put into a console at the time.

_________________
Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!

I not hate NES, i love NES, but it architecture in some aspects strange.

For example, why console self can't get controller states and save it in one byte with every bits - button state?

Loop with 8 passes is only waste of CPU time

I use GIMP and a conversion tool I wrote in Python. I draw things, save in 4-color indexed mode, and have my makefile run pilbmp2nes.py. Lack of indexed mode is why Pyxel Edit alone is not sufficient for retro game dev, as I discovered in a recent paid project where the artists used Pyxel Edit.


Tools to create graphics for retro consoles need to export in indexed mode because these consoles expect transparency to be color 0.


Unless you're on an Atari 2600 or a Neo Geo, there isn't a wire for every button. If you're referring to some sort of Super NES-style autoreading, some controllers don't have exactly eight buttons.

In Photoshop, you can reduce the image to 128x128 pixels (or smaller), and change color mode to 'indexed', 'custom palette', choose 4 colors...

...some people use posterize filter to reduce to 4 colors...

Open YY-CHR.

Photoshop, select all, cut. Paste to YY-CHR.


Edit, nobody uses pyNES because it has no documentation or example code.

_________________
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

The time it takes to read a game pad is negligible. It shouldn't be the cause of slowdowns.



I suggest taking the time (a couple of hours) reading through one of the many excellent 6502 instruction set manuals. Whether you'll end up using assembly language or not, it will probably help you a lot. Currently, viable options are assembly or C if you want to make a game.

Or if you on the other hand think NES is just a little too limited, you might want to try coding for PC Engine/TurboGRAFX or Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

_________________
http://www.frankengraphics.com - personal NES blog

If you don't want to mess with indexed mode graphics, my tool makechr is another option. It figures out the palette automatically, and can even compile directly to a sample rom.

PyNES is simply Python API -> NES assembler translator.