6502 NES Course by Pikuma
As I mentioned in my December post I'm doing a 6502 course on Pikuma.
I'm about 75% of the way done, and I think I need to circle back to some earlier stuff about how the PPU works, but it's super fun.
Over the holidays I was able to stop at my father's and pick up my old NES. I swapped out the ZIF connector for a new one, and cleaned up some contacts on the RCA ports, and it works great! Once I found out that it was working - I played Sesame Street ABC 123, as that's the only one I had up in my office - I ordered an EverDrive N8. That came last week.
The pictures are tall due to how I took them, so sorry I'll attach them at the end of the post.
Once I got the EverDrive N8 I made sure it worked by playing a Battletoads ROM. Battletoad tested - I then copied Atlantico.NES to my Everdrive. Atlantico is the game that Gustavo is walking us through making in the current part of the course - not a real published game. I loaded it up and HOLY COW - something I actually wrote in Assembly is running on real hardware.
If you want to watch the video, it's very simplistic at the 75% mark, this was before the Collisions chapter, and no sound yet.
The feeling of getting something running, locally, and seeing it working on screen, despite being a programmer for ~~20 years, is AMAZING. Writing code that executes on the system you grew up playing the early 90's, wow.
I do wish the CRT TV my wife had was square, things get cut off on it. I even got a remote, so I could try to fix that in the menu, alas, only picture option is brightness. (Not that I realistically thought I could scale it, CRT Pixels are only Pixels.
Picture Gallery
Trying out putting all the pictures at the end of my posts, if they are not directly related to paragraph content.
My NES plugged in and running.
Atlantico game. There may be some interference with scanlines causing moire patterns, sorry.