NESFab – A new programming language for creating NES games | Hacker News Reader

NESFab – A new programming language for creating NES games

pubby.games

219 pointsredbell23 comments

When I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s I was fascinated with the process of making video games for my favorite console. But back then I didn’t really know how to research that topic (and much of it - unbeknownst to me - was behind NDA anyway).

One day I asked my friend if he knew how these games were programmed. He confidently claimed that they were made in a top secret tool called NPL - The Nintendo Programming Language.

Of course that kid didn’t know anything more about it than I did so this was just a wild rumor. Now I know that “NPL” was just 6502 assembly with the correct system documentation and some dev hardware, but kid me didn’t know that. Instead, he spent a lot of time dreaming up what this super secret language looked like.

When I checked out NESFab today I instantly saw something that looked very much like what 7 - 9 year old me would have imagined. So thanks for that.

For me, it was the same but with the game boy. Turns out no-one knew the name of it. For some reason.

One of my favorite Kickstarters was for a new NES game, because the updates were deep dives into different aspects of NES development and the tradeoffs on that hardware. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1101008925/lizard/posts

I think he was eventually sued into taking it all down, but the custom devkit work Brian Provinciano did in order to create his own GTA port for the NES was incredible: https://web.archive.org/web/20070125130745/http://www.bripro...

Hey, this is my project. Cool to see it here again.

You might like this article I wrote on the backend: https://pubby.games/codegen.html

Nice read, thanks for the link!

I often wonder what sort of tools like this must have existed in-house at the many small game development studios of the era.

This one reminds me of another modern compiler for the Intellivision console called INTYBasic, which has an extremely impressive suite of games and NES remakes implemented in it:

https://nanochess.org/intybasic.html

https://youtu.be/h7ttNz2UVw8

For something even higher level check out GBStudio:

https://www.gbstudio.dev/

Nice to see GB Studio get a mention, I’m still working away at it after many years! Definitely going to be checking out NESFab to see what I can learn from it.

There’s also been a fork recently called BB Studio adapting it to make NES games:

https://github.com/michel-iwaniec/bb-studio

Oh wow, it’s exciting to see the same idea catching on for other platforms. And thank you so much for sharing your hard work - I’m loving the huge new influx of GB(C) games thanks to the community that sprung up around your project!

Show HN a couple of years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35055308

The code is GPLv3: https://github.com/pubby/nesfab/blob/master/COPYING

While software made using this SDK can be any license, as stated in the readme:

>TL;DR: If you make a game using NESFab, your code can remain private, and you do not need to include attribution in your binary release.

It means it is actually LGPL in practice then ?

To clarify, the _compiler_ is GPL (as is GCC, GPL doesn't mean that artefacts created with it share that license), but the standard library is the boost software license (which is not a copyleft library) so any machine code artefacts can remain private and doesn't require attribution.

[0] The NESFab standard library (lib/), examples (examples/), and documentation (doc/) are licensed under the Boost Software License 1.0 (See lib/LICENSE_1_0.txt).

No. The (GPL) license doesn't "infect" the output of the (GPL) software.

But it does infect if some "standard library" is injected into the output. This is why glibc has a "linking exception".

I've been using this and it's a lot of fun

+1. It’s a lot of fun, it makes 6502 more approachable and it’s deeply satisfying. I’ve been making a game with my daughter.

I just finished Gustavo Pezzi's NES course last year (https://pikuma.com/courses/nes-game-programming-tutorial). It was excellent and it gave me some great insights to how things work inside the NES using 6502. This looks a lot simpler. I'll take a look. :)

Hi there. I'm glad you enjoyed the NES module. :)

Oh this is cool. One of my back-burner projects is a compiler targeting the 6502 specifically for NES development. This looks super nifty.

Would love this for GBA instead. Something about that system is so perfectly limiting.

The SNES probably has tools like this, and a GBA is pretty similar limitation-wise to a SNES.

Maybe someday you will be able code in c or whatever language and have AI convert the entire codebase to assembly in 15 seconds.

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