Well, LD17 is just over a day away, and the final theme has not been announced just yet. My last LD challenge was ASCII art, and to continue the “challenge” theme, I have a new one this time round. I’ve seen a fair share of “8-bit” games, or so they claim – the only “8-bit” thing about them is they use a 256 colour palette. Now myself, that’s cheating! I want to take it to the next step, “8-bit” to me does not mean colours, it means CPU. Originally I was going to do LD17 in 6502 assembly for the NES, but after a brief look at doing it – there is no way I would finish anything even slightly respectable, or even to be proud of.  No, you won’t get to see this from me:

.WaitV:
 lda $2002
 bpl .WaitV
 ldx #$00
 stx $2000
 stx $2001
 dex
 txs
 ldy #$06
 sty <$01
 ldy #$00
 sty <$00
 lda #$00

So yeah, I feel I’m not doing this quite as authentically as I should be – I’m not going to limit myself to an 8-bit architecture running at ~1.79Mhz for the game code. I am going to be limiting myself to the same capabilities as the NES’s PPU and APU though! Sprite count, single background, 2-bit colour per cell limits, the lot. It’s all still fresh on my mind due to writing a NES emulator not too long ago (still unfinished, but works for most mapper 0 games). I shall be logging my progress on here, and posting pictures and screenshots as I go.

Super Mario Brother running inside Nestopia