Nearly everything in the old days was done with sequenced tracks. Now both music tracks, voice and sound effects are stored in various compressed audio formats. While certainly smaller than uncompressed data, they are still significantly bigger than their sequenced equivalents. As for programming language: yes, it was all assembly.
Luckily, programming the or rather, the 2A03 is quite easy[1]:. These 3 things together make for an environment that is easy enough to memorise while working with it. Yes, you manage all memory yourself but that meant essentially that you create a full map of where everything goes up ahead and that map isn't very big because you only have to worry about 2K, so you could plot that out on a piece of graph paper.
You had to plan things out a bit more and statically assign variables and constants to RAM and ROM on cartridge locations. It gets a bit tricker once your cartridge data goes beyond the addressable limits of the CPU. This is where bank-switching comes into play, which means mapping a section of the ROM into part of the higher 32KB address space. This can be used however the programmer wants, but an example use might be having a game with 3 levels, with all the level data, meta data and code for each level crammed into separate 8KB memory areas on the cartridge.
The level might have callbacks for e. You could then specify that the init routine is always at 0xC, the frame update routine is at 0xC and the level data starts at 0xC The game's main code housed in another memory chunk then controls level changes simply by swapping in the right chunk and jumping to absolute addresses 0xC and 0xC at the appropriate times. These 4-bit values were then indexed into a entry palette, with I believe 53 effective unique colours available.
Sprites also used the 2-bit pixel data and each sprite specified its own 2-bit group index again forming a 4-bit pal index. The BG image on screen is a 32x30 array of tile index numbers. Essentially, by having a ton of repetition and indexes into indexes you can keep data very small.
Level data was often stored as vertical bars of tile indexes and because those vertical bars were re-used as well, those were indexed as well and only stored once on the cartridge. Simple data compression techniques work similarly. As for dev environments, I've seen some photos where people worked on some certifiably ancient computers hooked up to EEPROM burners for work.
Tool-assisted debugging was not really a possibility until after the SNES age[2]. This is the main reason so many old games have "obvious" bugs in them and why things like Gameshark could do what they do; player health would always be at mem-location X, so you can force it to be at all times.
If you find these things interesting I encourage you to look at e. There are a lot of sub-topics in almost all of the questions you are asking. Optimization is a huge field all to itself and there are a lot of things to explore. If you are interested in this sort of optimization, one of the things you might explore is the demoscene. The demoscene, and some of its related art cultures, has long retained a sense of wonder about trying to create intricate art for computers that takes up as little space as possible.
Many of them will have information on how they did some or all of their "tricks". This is really a borderline link-only answer. To award the bounty, I would expect a more in-depth answer with sources and citations, not just a link to a webpage. JAL I edited it and added more. I think it would be quite reasonable to precis the answer to the questions about how the flow worked, using the referenced work.
Here's what the hardware part of the NES development kit looked like: kotaku. Baron You've given us a lot of context, but not the actual answer to the question.
Please include a summary of the book, not a description. Show 1 more comment. Thomas Thomas 3, 15 15 silver badges 25 25 bronze badges. Wow, very cool! Was it a dev kit officially licensed by Nintendo or was it third party? Did any of your games make it to production? Do you remember any other specs of your development machine?
We had both: we had an official Nintendo one that we were given by them, and we had a few from a company called "Cross Products" I think they were in the UK ; these guys did devkits and cross compilers on many platforms for many years; it was in a large studio, so all games made it to market. I used a for development, with the cross products compiler and ultra edit, dos version, for editing.
Found an old newsgroup thread about Cross Products and their dev kits, interesting read groups. Source A comment mentions Cross Products and their development kits. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. One thing is I am not sure if it still stands in the post N64 era but the SNES and N64 often reused textures on other 3D objects which often save considerable space and pre rendered art which the backgrounds are often fake.
Another trick was to create a border background fog would be used. First, early arcade games were programmed using machine language. To write the game, I composed a computer program in a language called assembly language. Super Mario Odyssey is a platform game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch video game console. For Super Mario 64, Nintendo compiled its source code without any fancy compiler options, meaning the decompiled assembly language is simpler to convert back to C code.
Higher level languages were now routinely being used for game logic. In general, the NES was programmed in assem bly. Might want to check out NESDev for more. The bit consoles were also generally programmed in their native assembly languages, but later on I'm sure there were at least some games written in C. Ravyne In General it was Assembly Language. The primary reasons to use Assembler include Speed and Instruction density, but more importantly, total control over which trade-off was made at what time.
These early systems dealt with two main limitations: Speed and program memory. A relatively average NES game contained two ROM chips, a KB chip containing the program and constant data such as maps and music, and another KB chip containing the graphic tiles used by the game. On the flip-side of that coin, performance-critical code could be written using the fastest possible instructions instead.
Remember, C is essentially platform-agnostic assembly, most things in C map 1-to-1 with most processors. The in the Genesis, on the other hand, with it's 16 bit registers, true 24bit address bus and highly orthogonal instruction set, was much more easily exploited by compilers and so C was more common there, though still usually eschewed for performance-critical code.
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