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Tyrel Souza
Tyrel Souza

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6502 Code I wrote running on an actual NES.

As I mentioned in my December post on my own blog, I'm doing a 6502 course on Pikuma.

I'm about 75% of the way done, and I think I need to circle back to some earlier stuff about how the PPU works, but it's super fun.

Over the holidays I was able to stop at my father's and pick up my old NES.
I swapped out the ZIF connector for a new one, and cleaned up some contacts on the RCA ports, and it works great!
Once I found out that it was working - I played Sesame Street ABC 123, as that's the only one I had up in my office - I ordered an EverDrive N8.
That came last week.

The pictures are tall due to how I took them, so sorry I'll attach them at the end of the post.

Once I got the EverDrive N8 I made sure it worked by playing a Battletoads ROM.
Battletoad tested - I then copied Atlantico.NES to my Everdrive.
Atlantico is the game that Gustavo is walking us through making in the current part of the course - not a real published game.
I loaded it up and HOLY COW - something I actually wrote in Assembly is running on real hardware.

If you want to watch the video, it's very simplistic at the 75% mark, this was before the Collisions chapter, and no sound yet.
I posted about it on my Fediverse server.

The feeling of getting something running, locally, and seeing it working on screen, despite being a programmer for ~~20 years, is AMAZING.
Writing code that executes on the system you grew up playing the early 90's, wow.

I do wish the CRT TV my wife had was square, things get cut off on it.
I even got a remote, so I could try to fix that in the menu, alas, only picture option is brightness.
(Not that I realistically thought I could scale it, CRT Pixels are only Pixels.

A CRT TV screen with a game running on it. In 8bit graphics, the game is a ship sailing to the right, with planes flying to the left. Some missiles are shooting up.

An NES Console with the flap opened up. On top is a Zapper gun with another controller, both with cables neatly wrapped up. On the floor, plugged in, in front of the NES, is another controller. The Power LED is on.

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