The revival of the NES!

Hey everyone! When I came across NESMaker on kickstarter I instantly fell in love. Like everyone else here I'm sure...my mind was instantly filled with idea after idea, and it's really exciting to give the NES some new life. It's kind of like reliving my childhood a bit! I've dabbled in game making over the years, but my biggest downfall as a "one man band" has always been creating graphics. My main issue was having endless possibilities of what can be created. It was overwhelming so the idea of working with NES limitations was actually awesome to me. Strangely enough, after practicing pixel art and researching NES scanlines I kind of wish we had a SNESMaker instead . Regardless, I cannot wait to get my hands on the software so I can start bringing my ideas to life!

Hi ModelMissing and welcome!

You might be interested in the fact that the AVS (a true FPGA clone of the NES) has an option to allow for 16 sprites per scanline, as opposed to the originals' 8. I can totally see a wave of games exploiting that feature now that the stakes/time it takes making NES homebrew is lowered considerably with the advent of NESMaker.

As for the revival, i dare say it started already a decade ago when post market game making for the NES started to become serious.

FrankenGraphics said:

Hi ModelMissing and welcome!

You might be interested in the fact that the AVS (a true FPGA clone of the NES) has an option to allow for 16 sprites per scanline, as opposed to the originals' 8. I can totally see a wave of games exploiting that feature now that the stakes/time it takes making NES homebrew is lowered considerably with the advent of NESMaker.

As for the revival, i dare say it started already a decade ago when post market game making for the NES started to become serious.

Click to expand...

Hello to you as well!

I wasn't aware of the AVS so thanks for linking that. It's pretty cool overall, but the 16 sprites per scanline is absolutely awesome. I wonder if the AVS is commonly owned among NES junkies? Either way I definitely appreciate it. I had no idea people were making real games for the NES 10 years ago either. To be fair I never even researched it though ha! I just hope we can help cultivate a larger interest in real retro gaming. I'm in it for the love of childhood gaming memories, but the thought of being able to sell brand new NES games in 2018 is pretty amazing too.

I think a lot of n.american NES collectors have it, yeah, but it's of course not a mass market. But.. noones' getting rich making nes games anyway so i think releasing a game meant to look & play its best on the AVS is completely feasible as long as the time spent making it is reasonable compared to the size of the audience.

Before, that might've not been much of an option because writing an engine from scratch in 6502 asm or C takes a lot of time.

If you're interested in the history of NES homebrewing, i recommend listening to this pod the assembly line.
There's quite a handful of true gems out in the wild.

Oh I agree that the chances of getting rich doing this are basically zero. I just meant how cool it would feel to sell a few copies of a game you made for the NES. Even that could be stretching it I suppose. Overall, I think people will just appreciate legal and unique NES roms to play on emulators.

Oh yeah in regards to that, it might be easier to make people get the point of a game that looks great on the vanilla NES, something that looks "just" decent on it, but great on the AVS
But from a technical standpoint/as a design exercise i still find it tempting/rewarding to try making something that exploits the 16-sprite/scanline limit of the AVS, just because.

Overall, I think people will just appreciate legal and unique NES roms to play on emulators.

Click to expand...

Definitely! There's sure to be a crowd for that sort of thing.

" i still find it tempting/rewarding to try making something that exploits the 16-sprite/scanline limit of the AVS, just because."

While I totally support NES development, and while it would be cool to use the AVS to do special tings, technically doing things like this isn't what the original NES is all about. Everything and I mean everything must essentially boil down to how it looks on the NES and not the AVS. You could always code your own special 8-bit hardware for an "imaginary" system using the AVS, but it will be a game that is not fundamentally grounded to any real system.

I do not mean to be contrarian, but i just don't agree.

I think you'd find that NES games do exceed the 8 sprites per scanline "limit" more often than not. If games always heeded what looked good*, the spectrum of viable, interesting game designs would shrink quite rapidly. Remember that the so-called limit is a soft one. Technically speaking, you can put all 64 sprites on the same y coord on the NES just as you can on the AVS. The design value is very questionable, but you still can.

Or would you call bubble bobble not fundamentally grounded to any real system just because the designers chose gameplay design over visual presentation, and the AVS happens to do a better job displaying it?

*i'd also argue that "looks good" has different connotations among homebrewers and the predeceding demo scene than it had for commercial NES developers of the day. It seems to me this is a value passed on from hacker culture and the demo scene where writing "elegant" software is valued, whereas being pragmatic was mission critical to those who designed or wrote games back then.

Secondly, the AVS is not an imaginary system. it is very much real in itself, and any game that would be running on the AVS is 100% backwards compatible with the NES.

Lastly, if we were going to draw lines on what's fundamentally grounded or not, every cartridge type except an NROM one is a cheat since it does things the console can't (mappers do what nintendon't).

Mapper 30, which NESmaker relies on, isn't historically accurate (or even historically present), so if we were to draw such a line, not a single game made with NESmaker would be "fundamentally grounded to any real system".

The bottom line is it doesn't matter. The NES is, among other things, an interface to your game. I'm honestly more interested in the NES seen as an interesting, specific interface to entertainment, experience and fun, than the NES as a nostalgia catalyst. Everybody probably feels different about what is important to them, but the good news is it all fits under the umbrella of homebrew hobbyism.

The AVS is also stupefyingly expensive, so no, not everyone has one, or will ever have one.

Common PC emulators can be set to accept 16 sprites per line, though.

Yeah, the avs is a niche within a niche. Regarding its price, though... It really depends on what you're comparing to. The only other FPGA-based nes system out there (NT mini) costs $499 (and is out of stock), whereas the AVS costs $185. The old NT cost as much as $585 if you wanted HDMI.

An old actual NES will cost less than the AVS, of course, but it won't play famicom or PAL games correctly, and you need to add in an expansion audio bridge and unlock regions yourself if you're into that. plus you'd have lag if converting the signal to fit an HDMI screen.

Comparing with emulator based clones would be comparing apples and pears.