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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!"
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.
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.
Even simpler - this class was for fun. It was only 3 units (most CS courses are 12) and didn't count towards our major. It's just one of the fun student-taught classes that CMU lets students set up on their own for other students. Lots of people enjoyed developing for the technology that had been one of the biggest sources of entertainment when they were kids.
We had a real Game Development course that semester that was much harder that focused on OpenGL, DirectX, shaders, programming for consoles, and working in the industry.