Final project for the Computer Architecture and Organization course.
First of all, you should be on Windows to build this game.
If you are not on Windows, God help you, cause this tutorial will not.
This project uses cc65 to build the actual NES rom. You can download the Windows version here
After downloading, make sure the bin folder of cc65 is available in your $PATH variable.
So for example, if you downloaded and unzip the cc65 into the folder C:\cc65-snapshot-win32, you should add C:\cc65-snapshot-win32\bin to the $PATH.
How to add Executables to your $PATH.
After that, just run in the shell:
./build.bat
This will build the game, creating the main.nes file, and execute it with the emulator Mesen.exe
It is possible that Mesen will ask you to install the .NET 6 Runtime when you run it for the first time. Just follow their instruction and you'll probably be ok.
| Folder or File | Description |
|---|---|
| src/ | Source code for generating the ROM. |
| src/main.s | Entry point of our ROM, every other file is imported here. |
| src/lib | Files for controlling NES modules like talking to the PPU or reading controller input etc. |
| src/bin | Raw binary files. Usually the end up here so we don't have a giant array of bytes directly in our code. |
| src/state | Main game logic. We tried to sperate the logic into multiple chunks of code, but most of it end up living in the player.s file. |
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Hex Editor - Allows viewing and editing files in a raw binary format, useful for the nametable and attribute tables.
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Alchemy65 - Syntax Highlighting. It also connects to the Mesen debugger, allowing you to debug the NES ROM inside VSCode.
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Trigger Task on Save - Builds the game automatically on saving.
The configuration for the extensions is also provided under the .vscode folder.