In the first part of this series, we kicked everything off with a nice sample project in which we displayed hello world using the NES. However, the majority of this code was written for us, and was really hidden away. The real goal of the last post was to get our tools setup before we start actually writing code, using the sample code only to confirm our tools are working. Thus, for this next post, we’re instead going to focus on writing our own entire project! A lot of this was put together with help from the NesDev Wiki, so make sure to check that out as well!
Let’s start with getting an understanding of the hardware we are working with: One of the big appeals of working with the NES these days is that it is incredibly simple to work with compared to modern systems in many ways. This ultimate starts with its main chip: The 6502 chip. This chip is super simple, and is where we will be doing the majority of our work in assembly code. To that end, I’d highly recommend brushing up on your assembly, and maybe going over this tutorial before continuing on. All of these posts are going to be in assembly, so if you’re really out of practice like I was before this, it’ll be helpful to do some reviewing. The 6502 chip used in the NES is documented pretty well here on NesDev: It’s got only a handful of registers and Opcodes (all of which you can view here), and is relatively slow at…
