NesDev.org – A community of homebrew game devs for NES and other retro consoles

Oh fun, we were wondering where all the traffic was coming from. :P

After finding it 5 or so years ago, NESDev rapidly evolved into my full time hobby, and I couldn't be more thrilled. The community is full of knowledgable nerds, and for a 40+ year old console (... that statement that is distressing on many levels) we're somehow still discovering new things daily.

Right now I'm researching esoteric behavior of the lesser known Famicom Disk System, whose disks are rapidly being lost to time, and which is still quite tricky to emulate properly. Because I can't write my own disks yet[0], that currently means doing fun things like running out of console WRAM while I switch from my devcart to the "RAM Adapter" (which plugs into the cartridge slot), then communicating with my hopefully still running program via an arduino plugged into the controller port. It's wild. :D

[0] Not for lack of ability but a lack of "spare" FDS disks I'm willing to overwrite. I want to study the ones I have, not clobber their contents.

The tab next to HN in my current window is literally nesdev.org. It really is an invaluable resource and has taught me only as much as running code on the machine itself has taught me, you have to hand it to the community for putting a lot of this technical knowledge out there.

So cool to see the nesdev community getting a shout out here!

I’ve been part of this group for years and it’s been a great learning experience of engineering for limited hardware and making the most of it. The nesdev community has been super friendly and welcoming and helped me get up to speed very quickly.

Currently a lot of NES homebrew is written in assembly due to hardware and compiler limitations. While you can write C oftentimes it’s simpler and faster to use assembly with some classic optimization techniques.

For anyone interested in low level coding or getting started with 6502 development, NES is a great platform to start with.

While not fully complete yet, there is a project that I work on with a couple of other folks to bring better editor support for 6502 assembly to a bunch of common code editors.

https://github.com/techwritescode/ca65-lsp

Have fun building!

If you're into handheld console emulation then definitely check out https://gbadev.org as well. I remember their forums were epically filled with reverse engineering knowledge.

A community of homebrew game developers and hardware researchers for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and other retro consoles.