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How to make a rom hack nes how to#
How to make a rom hack nes plus#

How to make a rom hack nes how to#

The main problem is how to store local variables and function parameters, which are essentially the same thing. It’s remarkable what developers managed to do with such limited audio hardware.Ĭ's concept of function calls is difficult to map to the capabilities of the 6502. I even had to move the sound effect for when a player moves their cursor to another audio channel because it was too obvious when it overrode another sound effect, let alone part of the music. This was a lot trickier than I thought it would be, and involved making changes to both the music and the sound effects until everything stopped sounding terrible. Sound effects are essentially hacked into the music playback engine, and briefly override the less important parts of the music to make their sounds.

Much like with the graphics, I wrote a tool that imported the MIDI files, converted them into a simple compressed format that lived in code, and then wrote my own playback engine that hardcoded the logic for his instruments. He ended up creating a simplified version of the game’s music using his usual tools, exported it as a MIDI file, and then made some instruments in FamiTracker to go with it. There are tools especially made for creating music for NES games, but it seemed cruel to make Matthew learn and use one for a single project. The main uses of this ended up being the players' EXA cursors (so that we could use more grays and have them “hold” a block drawn behind them in the background) and most of the text (so that we could perfectly align it and use brighter colors). We ended up making both the red and purple blocks use the same pink highlight color, which allowed us to store some grays in the other palettes to draw the UI frame (palettes 2 and 3) and lock blocks (palette 1).įor small graphics that needed different colors or did not align neatly to the background grid we were able to use sprites, so long as we didn’t run over the per-scanline (8) or per-screen (64) limits. The hardest part was figuring out how to have 5 different color blocks with only 4 palettes. The blocks in HACK*MATCH are large, so it was easy to make them 16x16 and give each block its own color palette.

Making a block-based action puzzle like HACK*MATCH on the NES is almost certainly going to require drawing all the blocks as the background (rather than having them be sprites).

The NES will only draw the first 8 sprites for any given scanline.

Each sprite gets its colors from one of 4 sprite palettes (for a total of 8 palettes).

There are 64 single-tile sprites that can be freely positioned (above or below the background).

Each 2x2 block of background tiles uses one of 4 customizable background color palettes.

The background of the screen is a 32x30 grid of tiles (which can be scrolled).

How to make a rom hack nes plus#

Everything you see is made up of 8x8 pixel, 4-color tiles (3 colors plus transparency).

This is not an NES development tutorial, so I’m not going to explain it in depth, or even accurately, but you should know that: The best (or worst?) part of developing a game for the NES is how limited the graphics hardware is. (The TEC Redshift in EXAPUNKS is kind of inspired by it, although I guess most game consoles from that era are the same, with sprites and tiles and square waves and stuff.) And, considering that NES emulators are a completely solved problem, and that you can even purchase cheap, flashable NES cartridges that work in unmodded consoles, I figured we could make an NES port and people might pay attention.Īnd then we spent two years working on it. I never owned an NES but I’d seen a little about the architecture and found it intriguing. (I have one and love it! It’s a fun console with a surprisingly solid and acquirable library of games.) Even though I found a game engine that would have made it easy and convinced Keith to help, we ended up bailing on the project because no one would be able to play it you’d either need a soft-modded Sega Saturn (so, no one?) or an emulator (none of which seemed to support CD audio).

Shortly after we ported SHENZHEN SOLITAIRE to MS-DOS, I started working on a version of HACK*MATCH for the Sega Saturn.