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8bit Workshop
- shaunxcode 8y agoMaybe this will finally satisfy the people who balk when they see chip-8 pico-8 etc. described as 8-bit. This looks REALLY cool. I would love to see something similar for 16-bit/68000 console/arcade machines.
- pjmlp 8y agoThis looks really cool!
- 3chelon 8y agoThe timing of this is superb - I literally just ordered an IceStick FPGA with the intention of recreating an 8-bit gaming platform, and I was wondering if I could somehow start playing in a virtual environment first! Can't wait to try this out...
- benj111 8y agoI like how 'Making games for the Atari 2600', features a character quite obvious supposed to be Mario. I'm struggling to id the dragon though. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541021304/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1541021304&linkCode=as2&tag=pzp-20&linkId=c149f6365c0a676065eb6d7c5f8dd6ae https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541021304/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
- tarentel 8y agoMario Bros, the arcade game, was ported to Atari a few years prior to the release of Super Mario Bros on Nintendo.
- benj111 8y agoDid not know that thanks. The box art also explains the blue hat (on the book cover). https://www.retrogames.cz/play_004-Atari2600.php?language=EN https://www.retrogames.cz/play_004-Atari2600.php?language=EN
- levicole 8y agoI own "Making Games for the Atari 2600" which is listed on this site. It's definitely worth picking up.
- sixothree 8y agoI actually just finished reading "Making 8-Bit Arcade Games in C" in its entirety. It definitely has a target audience: Those who know how to program in a language resembling C, who don't know assembler, don't care to learn assembler, but can understand basic syntax of assembler. And most importantly it is for people who want to gain an understanding of the internal hardware of some vintage arcade machines. I was surprised to learn that Robotron doesn't use sprites.
- JKCalhoun 8y agoI suppose I am surprised as well — but surprised too if it had. I mean, that would be a lot of sprites. I could ask you how it was done but perhaps I should just look into it myself. Thanks.
- sixothree 8y agoI suppose the real clue as to the sprites is that when two objects overlap and one moves away, it briefly leaves a black spot on the other object.
- mrspeaker 8y agoBack in 2006 I heard about the Atari 2600 homebrew scene and was fascinated to read about the mind-boggling tricks required to write a game for the system (like, coding to the TV raster beam... madness!). I went down the rabbit hole for a while and learned 6502 asm, and ended up with this "sort of a game" - https://github.com/mrspeaker/plops https://github.com/mrspeaker/plops. It was a great learning experience and certainly made me respect the devs of the day - who were performing miracles given the hardware constraints, and luck of modern debugging tools!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- andrepd 8y agoMore or less my experience with Z80 assembly in the calculator programming scene, back in ~2009 ;)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kgwxd 8y agoI've been into the 2600 homebrew scene since "Making Games for the Atari 2600" came out a few years ago. I haven't made anything useful yet, but the community is great and very active. There's an awesome twitch channel[1] dedicated to 2600 homebrew, ZeroPageHomebrew. They do 2 shows a week, ~2 hours each. The developers and various AtariAge people are usually active in the chat. They're doing an awards show in February for homebrews made last year. [1] https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew
- basementcat 8y agoAfter seeing demos like Bang!/XayaX [1] and Chiphead/Altair [2], it is pretty clear that the hardware that I work on is ridiculously overpowered. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Wk9Oi_Fsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Wk9Oi_Fsk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nTRMTnTeLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nTRMTnTeLQ
- nategri 8y ago> You can even write C or 6502 assembler code for Woz's creation, the Apple ][+. Thrill to the unusual frame buffer layout and one-bit speaker output! These folks get it.
- jackhack 8y agoC? Pascal, maybe, Cobol, Fortran, and even some oddballs like Forth, but C didn't catch traction until the mid-80s. I remember Chuck Sommerville (author of the original Snake Byte) and his father describing this "new language" (C) which has all the speed of assembly but is much friendlier. Applesoft Basic and 6502 ASM (thanks to the Lazer Systems Interactive Assembler -LISA) were tops in those days.
- peapicker 8y agoThe OP was quoting the 8bitworkshop page which has an environment, now, for programming the Apple ][+ in the manner decribed.
- jackhack 8y agoI understand now. Thanks for that clarification! I spent a few minutes on 8bitworkshop and honestly, it's kind of exciting to think of coding the APPLE ][ in C. I think it was the mid 1990s before I saw my first color-coding editor (Metrowerks?). All this for an Apple is just fantastic.
- msie 8y agoWhere has this been all my life? Thank you HN!
- agentultra 8y agoSweet! I love that, 30-odd-years-later, I'm actually programming for the NES and can flash my own carts. What a piece of hardware that console was. To be able to pass on this knowledge in an easy-to-digest format is really cool. Kudos to the authors!
- aquova 8y agoThis is a really neat project, I look forward to diving into it deeper. Within the last week or two, I've (re)discovered the Game Boy homebrew scene, which seems to still be rather active. It's still quite Greek to me, but I've been attempting to learn how to make games in GBz80 assembly. https://github.com/gbdev/awesome-gbdev https://github.com/gbdev/awesome-gbdev
- rchrd2 8y agoAbout a year ago, I used this to make a hack of the Atari game "Freeway", which is just ambient drone sounds: https://gist.github.com/rchrd2/9f4d8cedef373c05563f69486cf497e6 https://gist.github.com/rchrd2/9f4d8cedef373c05563f69486cf49...
- sneakernets 8y agoOh man, and I just bought a bunch of stuff for my C64 to start developing games. Is the simplicity yet complexity of 8-bit coming back?
- canada_dry 8y agoThis reminded me of an interesting gent I met at last summer's San Mateo Maker Faire. He was showing off how he'd designed a Sinclair Z80 computer running on a FPGA. Sadly I misplaced his info and can't find any info on the interweb. Oh well, I can have some fun with this!
- Lerc 8y agoThe ZX80 was a truly impressive model of simplicity. A Z-80 a ROM some RAM and a handful 74 series chips. http://searle.hostei.com/grant/zx80/zx80.pdf http://searle.hostei.com/grant/zx80/zx80.pdf If you want to understand how a bunch of chips make a computer it's a good place to begin.
- mcnichol 8y agoSo gorgeous...love when these types of projects get out to the community. Just loving this!
- ArtWomb 8y agoGreat to see this product evolve since v1.0. And a terrific tool for teaching game design and programming.
- FPGAhacker 8y agoI'm impressed with the online verilog simulator. Very cool website. https://github.com/sehugg/8bitworkshop https://github.com/sehugg/8bitworkshop
- Dowwie 8y ago8 bit games show what is possible when hard constraints are imposed on programmers. They did so much with so little. There's a great documentary about game audio, called "beep!" [1], where musician-programmers share stories about how they were given the absolute bare minimum memory to create sound effects and music. It's inspiring to hear what they managed to create. [1] http://www.gamessound.com/ http://www.gamessound.com/
- Wildgoose 8y agoI sold my first program aged 15 back in 1981. It was a version of Space Invaders for the minimum-spec Acorn Atom squeezed into 512 bytes. That kind of experience doesn't really go away, I still try and first find a clean minimal code before "expanding" the code to make it more easily maintainable.