Heh, i first had this crazy idea while i was quite drunk at MGC earlier this year. Why hasn't someone homebrewed this game yet? Well, i'm a pretty decent programmer but i suck at artwork (see the stick figures above). I needed help. I knew Bratwurst was PaulB, and I had seen some of his artwork around, mainly on the genesis covers he made.

I may be a good programmer, but i haven't worked in assembly in years and i've never even considered writing code for the NES. I had no idea where to start, and before i pull someone else into this project i needed something to prove, not only to Brat but to myself as well, that i could pull this project off.

So i spent about a week learning how the NES works, how code interacts with the GPU, how the controllers are handled... etc. I admittedly didn't have a very good understanding of how everything worked, but i knew enough to start putting things together. I finally sent a quick PM to Brat telling him my plan. He came back pretty quick, he was up for the task. Kick ass, we're on our way.

Brat sends me the original images he used for the hoax. At this point i'm probably one of the very few people with a clean source image for the butter monster (i'll let Brat discuss that whole thing). So i take the sprites he drew for the ape, and put them together into the quick and dirty engine i was making to learn the NES.

This is the first time we actually got the ape into an NES game. I sent this back to Brat as a proof of concept, to show we really could pull this together and make a game out of it. After this, we really got started on making the game in full.

Just a few notes on this rom, i'm not sure how much of this even Brat knew:
- The green "ground" the ape is standing on was my attempt at making the girders that ended up in the final demo you all saw before. I was still trying to figure out how the NES' background palettes worked at this point.

- The ape in this rom is about 50% bigger then what we ended up with. See, Brat was very careful to take the NES' color palette into consideration when he made the hoax images, what he didn't realize was the NES requirement of 8x8 pixel tiles. All the images in the hoax were made from 10x10 px tiles. In order to pull off this early test build, i stuck with the 10x10 tiles for the ape.

- This was the final build of the test engine i was writing. Everything beyond this was officially work done on the Bio Force Ape engine. As such, i *still* haven't changed my build script to update the name on the final executable. Every time i hit compile, it produces a file called bg_sprite_demo.nes. It stands for Background and Sprite demo, from when i was trying to figure out how sprite and background tiles would come together to form the final screen image. This has created some problems in development where i've mistakenly emailed off the wrong build of the game...

And so you can take a look at the *original* incarnation of Bio Force Ape, here's the rom: http://programmingace.com/downloads/...tial_test).nes

It's funny, when i look back at that rom i realize how little i really understood about NES programming...

Controls:
D-Pad: Movement
A: Jump
Start: Turn off physics
Select: Swap background and foreground images (more to the point, cram the ape behind the background tiles.)