Deep Dive: NESmaker Summer Camp ’22

This is a news message more than an insightful post, but it absolutely belongs to the Deep Dive category. Starting on wedNESday, july 6th 2022, Joe Granato (founder and creator of NESmaker) is organizing a five weeks long online boot camp for NESmaker developers, going deeper into Assembly coding then ever. The main topic will be the Empty module, one that has been untouched in tutorials up until now.

Updates

August 29th, 2022
I think Summer Camp has come to an end. All lessons, as well as a combined ZIP file, can be found below.

July 28th, 2022
I have added a mirror to all (six) Summer Camp lessons so far.

July 8th, 2022
Summer Camp has started! I’ll try to update new sessions as much as possible, although I’ll be on vacation in a few days, so updates may stall.


Introduction

Before you begin, make sure you visit the official NESmaker Summer Camp 2022 page for updates. Also, this Summer Camp starts at a fairly high level of experience, so make sure you have at least followed the intermediate and advanced tutorials, as well as the 12 Days of NESmas (found here), and keep the newly updated NESmaker Documentation at hand as well.


Lessons

Lesson Topics Download
1 Building the skeleton; script settings tab; setting up new script defines; make and add new scripts; how a memory map works; variables, labels and constants PDF
2 Non-maskable interrupt (NMI); vertical blanking (vBlank); the stack; 16 bit memory adressing; defining constants; writing values to vRAM PDF
3 Palete writing routine; create and read from table; the X register; assembly logic loop PDF
4 Loading graphics; address pointers; 8 and 16 bit math; embedded loop PDF
5 NESmaker’s GUI; the PPU; logic loops; drawing sprites PDF
6 Handling controller input; using frame timing PDF

 


Mirror

Updated 28 july 2022 – there are six lessons so far.
I have added a mirror to all lessons, you can download them here: 220728-NESmakerSummerCamp2022-mirror.zip


About Summer Camp 2022

In the NESmakers Facebook group, Joe said the following:

We’re going to enter into a whole new world for some of you – we’ll be using the EMPTY module, which effectively has *nothing in it* except the bare essentials to make the ROM load, and we’ll be creating basic functionality FROM SCRATCH, using NESmaker as our asset organizer.

This is the opposite approach of many of the other tutorials, where it has been to showcase NESmaker at a high level as possible.

This won’t be for the faint of heart. This is a NESmaker survival camp!

So join the Facebook group if you haven’t yet (or if you don’t use Facebook, join the Discord server* where summer camp will be discussed as well), buckle up and get ready for a wild ride through NES development from scratch!

* Discord link has expired; feel free to contact me if you want to join.