Have you encountered cases of slowdown or dropped frames in your game? That’s because the game uses too many cycles to be processed in a single frame. But how many cycles do you have actually? This short post will show you the number of CPU cycles you can use, and why it’s that number exactly.
ppu
Deep Dive: LoadChrData
Here’s a post about loading CHR data! NESMaker uses a macro, which in turn uses a subroutine, to load the graphic tiles into the PPU. In this post, I will dissect what NESMaker does under the hood exactly, while adding some context to how the NES loads tiles from the game into its picture processing unit.
NES architecture: the CPU memory map
This article will try to make sense of the 64KB of memory the NES’ central processing unit (CPU) uses. This is a first, shorter dive into the CPU. In future posts, I’ll go into more detail about the CPU.
NES architecture: the hardware
In this post, I’ll give you an overview of the NES hardware. I’ll discuss both the console and the cartridge, what chips are in them and what they do.