The 8-Bit Revolution

Have any of you witnessed Nintendo reselling NES and SNES Classic Editions at Gamestop?

A mini version of what ruined your grades in elementary school.

Why did Nintendo end up reviving the NES.

Well, perhaps Nintendo got sick and tired of people illegally downloading the

most popular games published on them. They figured since the games are

obviously still in high demand, they would be able to make it all over again…

and they did.

Sales exploded so hard Nintendo decided to republish the consoles starting

from this past Spring 2018.

And consumers do not hesitate even at the pretty expensive price tag of $59.99 for the NES Classic.

Clearly, there is a market for these retro games.

People are STILL developing games for the NES to this day!

Why, well, it is simple enough to develop a NES game that a single person can

single-handedly do the deed.

And now they are trying to develop online multiplayer games for them! Host

coding competitions, and a development community on NESdev.com.

There’s even a game engine in the making for it: NESMaker.

There’s still much to be done for the 8-bit Revolution. There are still a lack of

well-known popular resources on 6502 Assembly Programming, the

programming language often used in creating homebrew retro games.

The NESMaker only works on Windows, so NES homebrew development will

definitely take place there.

So how can you get involved in homebrew development? First, determine if

you are willing to take the time to learn 6502. Check out easy6502 tutorial and see if you enjoy that.

If you did, then consider getting a copy of Rodney Zak’s

“Programming the 6502” as a complete beginner.

Join the NESdev community to become up to date with currentmost issues in

the community.

Read development manuals for the system you are interested in designing

games in and publish them. The NESdev community has several resources to

help you get started with that.

And you can easily publish games there or even sell original games on sites

like RetroUSB!

Just be sure to never include any copyrighted material in your software, or

you might end up getting in trouble.

It’s amazing such an old technology still continues to bear fruit to this day. Let

the game-dev challenges begin!