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Carnegie Mellon Students Develop New NES Games
dalangalma writes "Students at Carnegie Mellon University who took the student-led course 98-026: Game Development for the 8-bit NES have finished up their ROMs and made them available for download. Most of these ROMs were developed using NBASIC, which was written by their instructor, Bob Rost. These are some of the first new NES games developed in years, and best of all, the ROMs are legal! You can get the games and learn about the NES (and the software tools developed for this class) at the course web page. You can even start developing your own games!"
A class where students actually make a game, rather than just design it. Game design is one thing, and everyone "has an idea for a game" nowadays but not everyone can make one. I'm glad to see students working on a console, even if it is an old one.
I wonder if I should develop my first serious homebrew game under NES or Gameboy? It will be instantly cross-platform under all those emulators, less likely to encounter those nasty hardware configuration problems and I won't have to worry about conforming to the latest 3D graphics.
Oh, and I couldn't resist: first post!
I wonder if I should develop my first serious homebrew game under NES or Gameboy? It will be instantly cross-platform under all those emulators, less likely to encounter those nasty hardware configuration problems and I won't have to worry about conforming to the latest 3D graphics.
:D
I would go for the gameboy if I were you. You could buy a compact flash card then and play your game on a gameboy advance which is a bit cooler to show off than just playing it on an emulator on your PC.
Oh, and I couldn't resist: first post! Nah, that was me. YOU FAIL IT!
There's a lot of this sort of thing going on for the GameBoy Advance, too. Its a lot of fun developing for such limited systems. :-)
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Homebrew games have been around since the Atari days. I honestly don't see what's so newsworthy about this.
But that being said, my homebrew system of choice is the GBA. It's easy enough to program for, (in fact, it makes game programming quite dreamlike.) and it's powerful enough to do some pretty cool stuff. I recently bought a flash cart for it as well... cost me almost $200, but I think it will be worth it when one of my projects gets close to reaching completion.
Does this mean we'll finally get Super Mario Brothers 4?!
Actually, my high school does this.
If time permits, the students in the Java programming class get to design and code a fully networked multiplayer Java game. The class works as a team to write the game.
The class has been known to experiment extreme programming techniques for short stretches also. Also, most tests are open-book and internet (as real-world jobs are). I find this pretty impressive. Most schools take the easy way out and stick to an oppressive lecture-only teaching format. Booklearning gets tedious and gives you no idea of how the industry works in real life.
What great marketable skills they are being taught. Once they get out of school, they will surely be able to dominate the videogame industry of either Albania or Burma.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Those gold medal games must be awesome, then.
Rob
Also, you can play NES ROMs on most modern PDAs, so you have even more platforms available to you. In the end, you should pick the system that has the features and development environment that suits your game.
These are some of the first new NES games developed in years
Hardly some of the first...There have been tons of homebrew NES demos and full games developed within the past few years. Well-polished games like Chris Covell's Solar Wars and Kent Hansen's Bombsweeper are polished games that put Bob Rost's own self-proclaimed 'NES game of the century', Sack of Flour, to shame - if not on code complexity and dev team size, on well-polished game design and playability. Not to mention the promising Megaman: Vengeance homebrew game being (slowly) developed by the folks at Dragon Eye Studios. The rom hacking community has produced plenty of other high quality rom hacks that do amazing things with the NES.
Either way, I think it's a cool project. I first discovered the student class webpage a month or two ago, and I'm glad that the class ended successfully.
I see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic?? Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology. For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
Also, you can play NES ROMs on most modern PDAs, so you have even more platforms available to you. In the end, you should pick the system that has the features and development environment that suits your game.
the Pocket PC OS has trouble with games because it doesn't read two different directions for the controller, so all of the diagnals don't work. (ie upper left, upper right)
I wish that i had the money to go to carnegie mellon. I have to go to a school where the head of the computer science department thinks that working on video games is akin to whoring my computer science skills to the lowest common denominator.
best quote eva:
"Non-scrolling games are teh awesomes!"
I remember I took a computer systems architecture class in college where we took a programmable Xilinx board, two "customized" NES controllers, and a monitor and created our own game system. We emulated our own MIPS processor, created a compiler, wrote our own OS and filesystem and then wrote Pong for the system and a driver for the monitor and the controllers. Needless to say, it was a learning experience. Timing was a pain. We had about 9 weeks to do it all and I don't think we finished. Most of the parts were completed but we didn't have time to integrate everything. I wish we did, it would be nice to say I developed my own "console" on my resumè ;-)
As a C64 Doom Clone! :)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I played and reviewed all the seal rated games to completion (except Gravedigger) without cheats or savestates. Reviews:
Galaxxon: The Third War
This game has good graphics, but the gameplay has one very big flaw. Because only one enemy type presents a serious threat (the spinning things), it's very easy to just ignore all the others unless you need to kill one to make another enemies respawn. Because there's no scoring system and the timelimit is mostly meaningless, it's very easy to win by just sitting in the middle and hammering fire. Even if you chose to play "properly" (much more fun), there's no real challenge until at least level 4. This game is too tedious to be real fun. My ship's firing glitched up once, but it fixed itself at the end of the level. No other bugs noticed.
Dikki Painguin in: TKO for the Third Reich
What little there is of this game is great. Awesome graphics, really fun gameplay, and plenty of challenge without feeling cheap. Also there's something extremely cool about playing a sword weilding pengiun who fights Nazis. Good music too. The only problem is it's far too short, I hope the "To Be Continued.." ending means more development will happen. No bugs noticed.
Grave Digger
A puzzle/action game, but it's a puzzle that I find quite boring. I didn't play this for long. Good music, no bugs noticed.
Sack of Flour, Heart of Gold
Graphically and gameplay-wise inferior to Painguin, but this game is still quite fun. Varied levels and an interesting dark/light world system. Challenge is almost nonexistant, I completed this game very easily.
Shittier sound? That's because you haven't played in a japanese Master System! They had an extra FM sound chip (YM2413), and games that used it had much better music. Try R-Type with an emulator that supports the chip, and you will know what I'm talking about.
Circumcision is child abuse.
You can actually view the course notes/lectures online for the class. I thought this was amusing in one of the PDFs you can download. Just because you are smart and rich enough to get into a good college dosen't mean your still not a total scum bag
"Announcements (1 of 3)
The hard drive and CD-ROM drive were stolen
from the lectern computers in this room and
several others. If you stole them, please return
them.
Changes to this Room"
-Dipster
Do you have any information on the class or the project? (notes, sylibus, etc) That sounds really fun!
I wonder how hard it would be for the teams to convert it to dot code to be played on the E-Reader. Doesn't that thing have a built in NES emulator?
Now someone please make me a Trogdor nes game