NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

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Erockbrox
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by Erockbrox »

I can imagine a NESmaker compo being a totally benign way to help the scene.
I found some strange video of some dude saying he is going to hold a NESmaker competition and website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yvEdE-VBR4
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Punch
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by Punch »

Erockbrox wrote:
I can imagine a NESmaker compo being a totally benign way to help the scene.
I found some strange video of some dude saying he is going to hold a NESmaker competition and website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yvEdE-VBR4
Does he have any fucking shame? There's so much wrong in that video/pitch. We have $$$ and prizes without charging people a cent, and yet this nobody wants you to pay 10 dollars to vote and 25 to submit a game in his made up contest. Is he insane or is this an elaborate troll targeted at us? Guy's supposed to be 40 for god's sake.
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by FrankenGraphics »

I... feel weirded by that video. Definitely not what i had in mind.

Not meaning to bash on him for having initiative, but i found these things a bit troublesome:

-It's hard to get people behind an idea with all its specifics that you've developed all on your own.
-Is it really okay to use brands wholly unaffiliated to your cause? Including logo, as you see a bit deeper into the video.
-Having to pay to submit to a compo for the chance of winning back an admittedly large fraction sounds a bit like a gambling scheme, to be perfectly honest.
-if that is not the intention, that is still sort of how it comes across, which wouldn't help it.
-If it's about love, not money (as stated in the video), why not begin with a humble, freely hosted message board and see how things grow from there?

Only reason i can see for a submission fee is a symbolic one (like 1$) to filter out any plausible spam and make jurying / peer review more managable, should there be an overwhelming flood of entrants.

Might just be that he's isolated and doesn't know there's two major sites (here, NA) to rally around, exchange ideas and springboard from if needed.
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thefox
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by thefox »

Bananmos wrote:Oops... now that I look at the readme.txt of the pc2nes I've had on disk for quite some time, it does say this. Heh, not sure how I managed to miss that... was it a feature you added in a later release of pc2nes?
Nope, it was there always. It was actually somewhat easier to do it this way rather than read from the CF card.
Still happy with my Everdrive purchase - the dev examples are a bit better, the USB transfer seems faster, and it seems to be an FPGA with more memory bits too, if I read the specs correctly. But I might actually try to repeat this for my Powerpak, as I've already got Xilinx tools installed.
Yeah the FPGA in Everdrive is much more powerful than the one in PowerPak, not just in memory bits.
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JoeGtake2
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by JoeGtake2 »

Hey everyone - yeah, I think this might be the same guy that hit me up about it. I haven't figured out exactly how to respond, because I don't want to discourage anyone from doing what they feel might help the scene. However, I do want to be sure that it is known there is no affiliation.

We were definitely planning some game-jam type events at conventions for sure. I personally want to hold two contests, which I'll put up the money for myself if I can't find a sponsor. I want to hold a contest to see just how deep someone can get with NESmaker in the way it was intended (take a genre as coded, and build something truly remarkable and evocative), and then another (which will appeal to those here) to demonstrate who can break the thing the coolest and develop something completely unique and unexpected with it.

Also, I've already teamed up with a few schools to use this as a primer to help begin to teach ASM. That's super validating, and is the stuff I really hope this tool brings about.

FYI - a quick mapper2 iteration of Troll Burner (there IS a rogue subroutine which was suggesting bus conflict, but I found it!...this might even show up on the mapper 30 version). This has been tested on Everdrive and about a half dozen emus, so it seems like this will be a solution (with the tradeoffs of losing chr-ram bankswitch-aided animated tiles and flash saves). Again, this is a bit hacked together, but figured you guys would enjoy! :-)
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Bananmos
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by Bananmos »

TheFox: Must have been pretty blind then, and will RTFM more in the future. Pardon me for spreading untruths about your awesome utility, which only recently looks to be partially retired in my coding-flow. :)

Joe: I've made a new version of my mapper30 for the everdrive.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15es4lW ... h7juB/view

That should let people play it on an everdrive without missing out on the animated tiles.
(although IMHO you should probably consider animating them with CHR-RAM writes anyway, as all those 8kB banks could be put to better use... but your choice :wink: )

A feature still missing is the ability to write the PRG-ROM to emulate the Flash ROM functionality of a real mapper30. This would probably need Krikzz's help to make sure the everdrive OS writes the entire ROM back to the sd card for mapper30 games with the battery bit set.

But assuming that's possible, then I don't think it should be too difficult, as long as I can rely on games writing every single byte of the flash sectors when they save their data, then it should just be a case of identifying the right write command sequence and pulling the /wr line low.

Dealing with games that would rely on sectors being cleared to FF would be much harder, as the verilog logic would somehow need to find spare cycles to loop through a 4kB sector and erase the PRG-ROM to FF, and it seems like way too much work to support an esoteric use-case. What's more, I kind of like the idea that relying on the FF values could be a poor-man's copy protection scheme if they are worried about everdrive/powerpak mapper30 support increasing piracy of new homebrews. :roll:

By the way, I assume Nesmaker will in fact make use of Infinitelives 4-screen version of mapper30, rather than the original version? 4-screens do make a lot of things easier, and it is what the NES hardware was originally designed to use, with the mirrored 2kB looking mostly like an afterthought to bring the console costs down.
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by tepples »

Bananmos wrote:Dealing with games that would rely on sectors being cleared to FF would be much harder, as the verilog logic would somehow need to find spare cycles to loop through a 4kB sector and erase the PRG-ROM to FF, and it seems like way too much work to support an esoteric use-case. What's more, I kind of like the idea that relying on the FF values could be a poor-man's copy protection scheme if they are worried about everdrive/powerpak mapper30 support increasing piracy of new homebrews. :roll:
Any game that wants to treat flash as a log-structured file system, programming small strings until a page is full and copying the latest version of each string to an empty page once full, will probably need the $FF values to know which pages are empty and which parts of each page aren't used yet.
psycopathicteen
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by psycopathicteen »

I was watching videos, and one shade of purple is really off. Is that going to be fixed?
geod
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by geod »

Standing alone the NesMaker project is a wonderful thing. With all the respect for you and your team, i still feel a little bit unfair for Mystic Search's backers because this project will certainly delay its release date. With your vision, further refinement of NesMaker is probably the necessary and unavoidable step to complete Mystic Search but again these extra modules have really nothing to do with Mystic Search. That's just fact. Maybe most backers doesn't mind at all but still... Just my two cents...
A side note i'm very surprise that people who want to create nes hombrew games are so much more than the ones who want to play it :D
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JoeGtake2
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by JoeGtake2 »

@Psycopathicteen: Hm - is shade of purple way off? I'll have to ask Josh what palette he used. Is there a better one? This would be a fairly easy fix as far as I know, and might even be able to be variable.

@Geod: We polled the community more than a few times - those who were vocal about it were very adamant in support, except for one or two folks. You're partially right about the extra modules having nothing to do with Mystic Searches - but you have to remember that since the tool is in the state that it is in, it's no longer just me working on Mystic Searches. Austin, for instance, no longer has to dig into code to make changes that previously only I could make. Josh can work on monsters and AI and boss building, where as before, I had to do 100% of that sort of work. Etc. This helps, and honestly allows us to be more efficient, even though it doesn't seem like it.

For those who haven't seen the latest video - if you want to see the sort of sub-tools that may even speed up workflow for those developing from scratch that we want to include in NES maker, check this out about our Pixel editor and how it works. :-)

https://youtu.be/tV9TF9T7Avk
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by nesrocks »

Bananmos: is that already working? How do I compile the v code?
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psycopathicteen
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by psycopathicteen »

JoeGtake2 wrote:@Psycopathicteen: Hm - is shade of purple way off? I'll have to ask Josh what palette he used. Is there a better one? This would be a fairly easy fix as far as I know, and might even be able to be variable.
The 4th column, 2nd row. It should be blue violet.
JoeGtake2
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by JoeGtake2 »

Is there a general palette that is considered the most accurate? (Yes, I know that there is really no such thing as an *accurate* palette, but is there one that is generally regarded as the most accepted as accurate?)

I've been given a few different answers through this throughout the years. At this point, we tend to match paired emulators. But if there's something this community feels is more accurate, that's an easy update.
psycopathicteen
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by psycopathicteen »

I was looking around, and I think this palette is accurate. You can tell if it's a good palette if the colors are equally spaced.

http://drag.wootest.net/misc/nespalette.png
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Re: NESMaker Kickstarter - Make NES games without coding

Post by thefox »

JoeGtake2 wrote:Is there a general palette that is considered the most accurate?
No there isn't, really.
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