Gameboy Programming: Using the Joypad

In the last tutorial I showed how to create a sprite, and animate it. in this lesson, I will demonstrate how to use the gamepad to move your characters and start to build some interactivity to your games. The good news is that we don’t have to change much of the previously written code in […]

Gameboy Programming: Sprites

In this tutorial I am going to look at one of the most important aspects of creating a game. Sprites! Here we will show the tools to create and animate a simple sprite on the Gameboy. With this in your toolset you will be well on your way to making some great games! Using the […]

Gameboy Coding : Hello World

It’s long been an ambition of mine to Program something on the classic Gameboy. It’s been a faithful companion throughout my childhood, on car trips and as I sat in the bedroom completing Super Mario Land for the hundredth time. The good news is that if you know the C Programming Language its quite easy […]

NES Assembly – Building an ASM File

In this post we are going to explore the structure that you need to build to create a NES assembly file to run on the console. It’s extremely important to note that indentation is crucial. The assembler will not recognise the code unless the indentation is correct. All labels start right at the beginning of […]

Beginning NES Assembly

The NES is a beautifully complex piece of 8 bit machinery. It uses a customised Motorola 6502 processor which is more similar to the x86 chips than the ARM series. For its Picture Processing needs, the NES has a PPU (a Picture Processing Unit) chip that we program indirectly through memory registers. NES Assembly Language\ […]

Nes Programming : Hello World

The first exercise in any coding tutorial is invariably printing ‘Hello World!’ to the screen, this gives us a basis for the structure of the language and shows us something on screen. I’m not going to sugarcoat coding for the NES can be difficult and in order to get this basic message onscreen, we will […]

An Introduction to NES Programming: 8bitworkshop Online IDE

In a previous post I described how to set up the development environment for your PC to be able to use something like Visual Studio Code to create NES titles. There is also an alternative to this, an online IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called 8bitworkshop. Its something I recently discovered and works for a multitude […]

Programming the NES : An Introduction

Most NES titles were written in 6502 assembly language. This allowed developers to fine tune each and every byte of their programs. You could code directly to the memory which was critical when fitting games into the small but (at the time) expensive ROM in the game cartridge. Assembly also allowed for clever optimisations which […]

Hello World! – Spectrum Assembly Tutorial 01

I figured it was about time to delve into the fantastical world of the Speccy when it comes to teaching some basic assembly language for the 8 bit Micros. I sincerely hope that through my work that you, the reader, become as enthusiastic for these systems as I have become. This is going to be […]

DEMO STYLE TEXT : C64 Assembly

With thanks to Shallan for his help in this We have all seen the fancy demos that have been created on the C64 over the years. Some of the most artistic and entrancing graphics and text swirling around the screen. In this tutorial I am going to take you through how to make a fancy […]