View Full Version : NES development tools
jajaja
11-30-2005, 07:13 PM
Anyone have any info or pics of the development tools they used back in the days for making NES/Famicom games?
darknut101
11-30-2005, 07:29 PM
I dunno about back in the day but this site pretty much has everything NES development related. Tools and all.
http://nesdev.parodius.com/
Jagasian
11-30-2005, 08:15 PM
Anyone have any info or pics of the development tools they used back in the days for making NES/Famicom games?
One such dev kit was sold on Ebay a few weeks ago. It was used to make one of the Simpsons NES games and a few others. Here is a CherryRoms thread about it:
http://www.cherryroms.com/viewtopic.php?t=4603
darknut101
11-30-2005, 08:29 PM
Anyone have any info or pics of the development tools they used back in the days for making NES/Famicom games?
One such dev kit was sold on Ebay a few weeks ago. It was used to make one of the Simpsons NES games and a few others. Here is a CherryRoms thread about it:
http://www.cherryroms.com/viewtopic.php?t=4603
I didn't realize you were talking about an actual dev kit. That's cool stuff.
CosmicMonkey
11-30-2005, 08:34 PM
I didn't know Nintendo didn't issue a standard dev kit. WTF!! Ok, so you can make games for our console, but you have to build your own dev kit and still pay scandalous licencing fees. Hmmmm.
I was expecting something along the lines of the CopyNES to be issued as standard.
But surely larger comapnies would have had to have something made on a larger scale. Maybe Capcom/Namcot/Konami etc have/had vaults full of custom NES dev kits, all entirely different from company to company (but still nearly the same thing).
Chronodriftersx
11-30-2005, 08:56 PM
nope you had to make your own tools and design your own software
darknut101
11-30-2005, 10:38 PM
nope you had to make your own tools and design your own software
That's crazy.
Ed Oscuro
11-30-2005, 10:41 PM
Interesting. I'd like to see what various Japanese dev houses (Capcom, Konami in particular) used :)
Chronodriftersx
11-30-2005, 11:43 PM
nope you had to make your own tools and design your own software
That's crazy.
Yes :vamp:
rbudrick
12-01-2005, 11:36 AM
didn't know Nintendo didn't issue a standard dev kit. WTF!! Ok, so you can make games for our console, but you have to build your own dev kit and still pay scandalous licencing fees. Hmmmm.
Well Nintendo did, but their licensees didn't. As I understand, Nintendo gave their licensees plenty of info on the architechture of the NES. mappers, etc, but they had no real dev kits for them. They figured, if you can write 6502 and put tiles together, you're all set.
I always thought this strategy was really weird, but it was pretty common back in the day. I've always wondered what it would be like to take the very best from all of the NES developers' dev kits and combine them into one product. I suppose many of today's tools are sufficient, but I bet there's also a lot of tools from back in the day that would help a lot today too.
-Rob
christhegamer
12-01-2005, 05:45 PM
Call me a dummy, but I have NO IDEA of what dev kits are.
darknut101
12-01-2005, 05:54 PM
Call me a dummy, but I have NO IDEA of what dev kits are.
Dummy.
In the most basic terms a development kit is what the developers use to create games on a certain platform. The kits may include an API, debbuging tools, and other utilities.
Most of the time companies like sony will give dev kits to their licenscees so they can make games for their hardware. I find it interesting that back in the day the developers themselves had to create their own kits and their own tools for the NES. Especially since Nintendo made everyone follow strict third-party rules.
jajaja
12-01-2005, 05:54 PM
Call me a dummy, but I have NO IDEA of what dev kits are.
Dev (development) kit = Hardware and software used to make games :)
Thanks for all the info. I didnt know it was that much trouble to make NES games. I thought they all used the same hardware that Nintendo gave them. Im most interrested in how they did the music and sound. Anyone have more info on this?
rbudrick
12-01-2005, 06:08 PM
I believe that the NES sound format is very similar to midi.
Many musicians did their best to convert midi tracks to the NES sound format, others used their own proprietary software to write the music. I'm sure others still wrote songs, and then tweaked the channel settings until it had the desired tone. Or all of the above.
Each of the five channels is handled a little differently, so I'm sure a lot of tweaking was necessary.
There's some pretty good tools to make NES music out there now.
-Rob