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How to realize a childhood dream and program something for Dendy

For me, Dendy has always been more than just a prefix. I not only played it, but also spent considerable time inside it with a soldering iron in my hands for some simple modifications. On the way somewhere I often thought about how these games are created and how it works inside. Surely, many of you once asked such questions, such is the nature of future IT people.

Years have passed. With a certain periodicity I immersed myself in an emu-topic, learning everything new on thematic sites, but I did not dare to plunge into the study of 6502 assembler and NES architecture. Internal conflict is rational and irrational. I have long convinced myself that I did not need to spend time on it, but ... I lost my temper. Looking at what interesting things do emu-scene enthusiasts do, I took up my old idea with a bright thought: “I will be able too!”. Two weeks passed quickly, I could barely stop myself. And yes, now I am familiar with assembler without multiplication commands, which I had previously only heard in a song about programmer youth .


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It is very likely that now you have remembered your first cartridge for Dendy and a menu with a romantic plot and pleasant music. On such cartridges there was never a “serious” game, and without looking at the loud inscriptions like 9999-in-1, there were usually about five of them. But this menu ... Is it not a masterpiece of Chinese thought? :) I liked this melody from childhood (Unchained Melody), and the background images now evoke a bunch of nostalgic memories. Therefore, I took IDA and disassembled the 300-in-1 menu, cut out all unnecessary, corrected errors, added fading and some pleasant trifles - and the Unchained Nostalgia demo came out (you need an emulator to run, for example, Nestopia ), there is an entry on YouTube .

Do you also want to plunge into old school programming? I share the most useful and interesting that I found on the topic.

Architecture, programming and debugging


Previously, the processor 6502 was written only in assembler, the choice of tools was small, there was little documentation and the behavior of the iron was poorly understood. Today there are no such problems. In recent years, libraries for C and full-fledged games have been developed, which quickly work on the modest hardware NES.



Modern design for NES


If someone thinks that NES is a dead platform, that is wrong :) New games and demos are released regularly enough. It is clear that this is not a mass market, and there are mostly enthusiasts here, but nevertheless ... There are quite a lot of different releases, I will share the most interesting and amusing of what I found myself.



Thematic sites




Why all this?


If you ask this question, it may not be for you. But in fact this is a very interesting and exciting activity. If your favorite console was not Dendy, then maybe it will be more interesting to do something, for example, for Sega Mega Drive. Forward! And be sure to tell about what you got.

Thanks for attention


If you know something else useful or interesting on the topic - be sure to share in the comments.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/201864/

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