Classic Game Programming on the NES

5 Starting somewhere

This chapter covers

• NES code structure and memory configuration
• Initializing the NES hardware
• Loading tile and sprite shape data
• Displaying some text on the screen
• Displaying a bat and a ball using sprites
• Moving the ball and bat around the screen

We are going to create a simple space shooting game throughout the rest of this book, but before we get too carried away, we should start with a simpler demo NES project that provides the basic template for making a game. This demo does all the required setup to get the console up and running, placing some text on the screen along with two objects, a ball that bounces around the screen and a bat that is moved via the game controller.

We will work our way through this sample template ...