This is meant to be a quick boilerplate library for games coded in C using cc65, neslib and the like. Has a hello world rom that you can rename and hack at to suit your fancy. Released under the MIT license, so do with it what you like. Happy Hacking!

This is mostly here for historical purposes. I have tooling I consider much more effective available now.

Check out NES Starter Kit for a good all-around starter kit. If you want something basic like this, you can build up one with create-nes-game.

This should still technically work, but it's provided without much support. If you still go for it, happy hacking!

• Neslib
• MMC1 ROM 256KB PRG ROM and 8k of chr rom.
  • compiler/assembler config
• nes_boilerplate library with helper functions that extend neslib
  • Switch PRG banks
• famitone2
  • makefile-based compiling from nsf/txt files. (Windows only)
• makefile with commands to build, run, and more.
• CircleCI integration (Optional) -- Build your ROM on every commit for free, as long as it's open source! -- CircleCI Build details available to rom at build time. Ever want to show a build number in your rom?
• Auto-generated header file with build stats.

These functions are meant to help facilitate mmc1 features such as prg bankswitching. Include them by including boilerplate.h.

• Inputs:
  • bank_id: The id of the prg bank to switch to.
• Returns: The id of the prior prg bank that you switched away from.
• Description: Sets the current prg bank to whatever id is passed in.

• Inputs:
  • N/A
• Returns: The id of the prg bank that is currently in use.
• Description: Get the current prg bank.

• Inputs:
  • bank_id: The bank to switch to
• Returns: N/A
• Description: Temporarily set the current PRG bank. Easily revesed with temp_restore_prg_bank(). Note that nested calls to this method will not work. This only caches a single bank.

• Inputs:
  • N/A
• Returns: N/A
• Description: Returns from a temporary bank switch with temp_switch_prg_bank(bank_id).

• Inputs:
  • bank_id: The id of the chr bank to switch to.
• Returns: N/A
• Description: Switches the first 4k bank of chr tiles to the given bank. These are 4k banks, so if you are using 8k files (like the example) remember each file represents 2 banks, and thus 2 ids.

• Inputs:
  • bank_id: The id of the chr bank to switch to.
• Returns: N/A
• Description: Switches the second 4k bank of chr tiles to the given bank. These are 4k banks, so if you are using 8k files (like the example) remember each file represents 2 banks, and thus 2 ids.

• Inputs:
  • mirroring: Value to set mirroring to. The most common options are MIRROR_VERTICAL and MIRROR_HORIZONTAL. If for some reason you'd like single screen mirroring, you can use either MIRROR_LOWER_BANK or MIRROR_UPPER_BANK.
• Returns: N/A
• Description: MMC1 allows you to change the mirroring mode of the game on the fly. This method wraps that for you. Pass it one of the constants defined for a mirroring mode.

This repository tries to make working with famitone2/famitracker a little easier. Unfortunately we can't extract directly from the native format for famitracker/famitone, so any time you make changes you will have to remember to export them to nsf (sound effects) or txt. (music) If you extract to sound/music.txt and sound/sfx.nsf, the makefile will automatically compile these into assembly. The compiled files are then included by the bootstrap script. (lib/crt0.asm)

Important note: This feature only works on Windows. The nsf2data and text2data tools for famitone2 are written for Windows, and haven't yet been ported. As such, make sure you include your music.s and sfx.s files in git. (Sorry!)

This repo allows for easy integration with CircleCI if you're using a public Github repo. If you go to http://circleci.com and sign in, you can turn on automatic builds for it, then on each commit, CircleCI will build your rom using the makefile. Configuration is in .circleci/config.yml in the root of the repo.

The built NES files will be available as artifacts on the build itself. (You may need to be logged in to see them.)

Using a little bit of trickery with the CircleCI API, you can link users to a copy of your latest ROM directly.

Look into the tools/circle-redirect folder for an example using PHP.

There are some predefined tasks for vs-code in the .vscode directory. If you want, you can add keybindings for compiling so you only have to press f6 to compile and run with fceux, for example. Here's some sane defaults. You will have to add these to your keybindings.json file in VS Code settings.

[
	{"key": "f6", "command": "workbench.action.tasks.build"},
	{"key": "f5", "command": "workbench.action.tasks.runTask", "args": "debug"},
]

NESLib by Shiru

Who's Cuter Font by Damian Yerrick (Tepples)

I don't have any set rules around this right now. If you've got something you'd like to add, just send over a pull request, and I'm sure we can get something together.

These are things I'd like to do, but haven't taken the time yet.

• Add a prepare_cart method to strip the headers. (Cross-platform ideally)
• Install script for cc65 to simplify non-windows installs (Since we're already figuring it out for circle)
• Generate proper output for nintendulatordx based debugging
• Support compressed nametables