Nestalgic

An NES game written in 6502 assembly

Note

This project is under heavy development

Current progress

Terminology

• PPU - Picture Processing Unit
• APU - Audio Processing Unit
• NMI - Non-Maskable Interrupt

Done

• post-boot hardware init (RESET NMI)
  • disable APU interrupts
  • clear PPU memory
  • clear system memory
  • wait for vblank
• read controller data from memory-mapped registers
• PPU setup
  • load palettes
  • load sprites
• Rendering
  • Handle the PPU NMI
• Object entity system
  • metatile support
• Level data loading
  • compressed-tile format
  • generating PPU display data from level data

TODO

• basic physics support
• NPC support
• screen scrolling

Build instructions

This project requires the cc65 toolchain (ca65 assembler + ld65 linker) and GNU Make. To build it run

make

This will output a game.nes file which can be tested in an emulator or transferred onto a flashcart and played on a real console.

Note

This game targets the Famicom system model.

Additional notes

This project wouldn't be possible without the tremendous documentation work done by the NESdev community and their help on Discord. Thank you!