Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

How did they actually make NES games? By that I mean, what types of computers were they using for creating NES games? Other 6502-based computers? Could they run the NES games on there? Or did they have to burn to a cart to test things every time?

How did they design graphics? Was it basically graph paper, which then they translated into sprites by hand?

View on HN

Not a NES game, but HAL Laboratory used a Twin Famicom-based system to develop Kirby's Dreamland (GB) using just a trackball as an input device: http://sourcegaming.info/2017/04/19/kirbys-development-secre...

Here you can see some developer pictures. The computers are HP 64000. The light pen/sprite program looks very interesting.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--09WfR60x...

Here's a neat video, where Miyamoto describes some of the processes. You can see near the beginning that the sprites were hand drawn on graph paper and translated onto the computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLoRd6_a1CI

Alllllll that tooling had to be built in-house. Sprite editors, level editors, debug and test tools. Doing it well requires multiple people working across multiple games.

I guess smaller studios were left having to roll their own stuff, which set them at an even further disadvantage to the Capcoms and Konamis of the world.

IIRC an NES dev kit was mostly just the hardware and a manual, not even an assembler

> By that I mean, what types of computers were they using for creating NES games? Other 6502-based computers?

At the place I worked in the early '80s [1], which did some games for Mattel for a couple 6502-based systems (Atari 2600 and Commodore VIC-20), we used small PDP-11s running some DEC operating system (I don't remember which one), using in-house written 6502 cross development tools. Each developer had a PDP-11.

Same setup for developing for game systems we worked with that used processors other than the 6502, such as the GI 1610 that was used in the Mattel Intellivision and the next generation successor to the Intellivision we were designing for Mattel.

We're talking old school here--as in you started your work day by toggling in a short boot loader via the front panel switches to get your computer going.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APh_Technological_Consulting

As I recall, Nintendo (eventually) had an official NES devkit which had a special ram cartridge and was linked to a pc running ms dos with an assembler and other programs to make graphics and sound, but there were NES devkits from third parties as well.

I might be wrong but I seem to remember the Sharp X68000 being a preferred platform in the early days?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000

That has a release date years after the NES and seems to have been similar to and used as a development platform for 68k-based arcades. It's completely different hardware, much more powerful than a NES but too slow to sensibly emulate one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com