The New 8 Bit Heroes recently have announced a lot of new, exciting stuff that’s coming up! Watch the video here.
ByteSize: AddValue
Welcome to ByteSize, a new category featuring small, infographic-like bits of information on NESmaker things, like macros, UI elements and more. This is the first category post, explaining how to use the AddValue macro.
Deep Dive: doLoadScreen
This episode of Deep Dive will touch upon doLoadScreen (and, subsequently, doLoadScreen2). These are huge subroutines, so we’re not gonne dissect them line by line. Instead, we’ll mainly go through the order in which things get done. This might explain why, for example, your HUD value doesn’t update, or a triggered tile is not being destroyed. Either way, let’s go!
Deep Dive: Object values
For this post, I’ll dive into the values NESmaker uses in its object system. I’ll zoom in on the object direction variable especially, and add a Markdown file with the other object values that are available.
Assembly 101: Branch out of range
For this post, I want to zoom in a little on the “Branch out of range” error that pops up every now and then. I’ll try and explain what it means, what’s the most likely cause, how to fix it, and why that fixes it.
FAQ: Can NESmaker do Zapper games?
A question I saw popping up from time to time, both in the Discord and on the forum, is if NESmaker supports the Zapper. That’s what prompted me to write up a tutorial on how to add Zapper support to a NESmaker game on the forums. This post is more or less a mirror of the existing forum topic.
NESmaker news: Strategy Guide available now
The official NESmaker Strategy Guide, which has been teased for quite some time now, finally is available! This is the official handbook for anyone using the 4.5-series of NESmaker. Order your copy online now.
Assembly 101: odd or even?
Do you want to check whether a certain variable is odd or even? This is fairly easy in Assembly: simply check if the lowest bit is odd or even, and you know that the entire byte is or isn’t as well. There are a few ways to code this though. In this post, I’ll briefly go through all methods, explain why they work and tell you my favorite way to do it.
NESmaker News: Byte-Off III results
Update (april 28, 2023): the results are in! Read the post to see the winners.
Deep Dive: VBlank and NMI
Sometimes, you’ll want to stop code execution until the screen is done drawing. For instance, if you need to update more tiles on screen than the vBlank period is capable of, when you want to turn off the screen to do additional updates, or simply because you want a few frames of idle time in your game. There are two ways to do this, which NESmaker both applies. Let’s go into the details.