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NES (Games) Classic Games (Games) Programming Entertainment Games IT Technology

Carnegie Mellon Students Develop New NES Games 60

Posted by CowboyNeal from the blast-from-the-present dept.
dalangalma writes "Students at Carnegie Mellon University who took the student-led course 98-026: Game Development for the 8-bit NES have finished up their ROMs and made them available for download. Most of these ROMs were developed using NBASIC, which was written by their instructor, Bob Rost. These are some of the first new NES games developed in years, and best of all, the ROMs are legal! You can get the games and learn about the NES (and the software tools developed for this class) at the course web page. You can even start developing your own games!"
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Carnegie Mellon Students Develop New NES Games More

Carnegie Mellon Students Develop New NES Games

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  • This is what the industry needs. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JavaLord ( 680960 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @02:34PM (#9175418) Journal
    A class where students actually make a game, rather than just design it. Game design is one thing, and everyone "has an idea for a game" nowadays but not everyone can make one. I'm glad to see students working on a console, even if it is an old one.

    • We do this already in high school! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nomihn0 ( 739701 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @03:18PM (#9176022)
      Actually, my high school does this.
      If time permits, the students in the Java programming class get to design and code a fully networked multiplayer Java game. The class works as a team to write the game.
      The class has been known to experiment extreme programming techniques for short stretches also. Also, most tests are open-book and internet (as real-world jobs are). I find this pretty impressive. Most schools take the easy way out and stick to an oppressive lecture-only teaching format. Booklearning gets tedious and gives you no idea of how the industry works in real life.

    • Re:This is what the industry needs. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @07:26PM (#9178489) Journal
      Game design is a different sort of thing though. I think both are interesting. There are a number of properties that a good game should have (and I haven't seen much attempt to analytically break it down). For example, repetition is generally a bad thing. Syncing visual stimmuli to audio stimuli tends to be exciting (if you can put together an intelligent music engine and sync beats to something, you might have something interesting going -- Rez depended heavily on this, for example, but it'd be okay to be less blatently music-oriented. Minimizing time that a player is "out of the game", be it chapter screens or a "death screen" reduces addictiveness, since it provides opportunity for a player to stop playing. Quake did a good job here -- click and you're back in the game. Players become more involved in a game if they feel that they are "gaining" something constantly -- RPGs lived for a while on almost this characteristic alone. So on and so forth...
      • Game design is a different sort of thing though. I think both are interesting. There are a number of properties that a good game should have (and I haven't seen much attempt to analytically break it down). For example, repetition is generally a bad thing.

        I think they are different also. I find that most schools that offer "Video game" courses tend to lean twards design. Being a programmer, this doesn't please me that much. :) As for the repetition, it depends if the person considers the repetition f

  • Developping homebrew for the NES, better than PC? (Score:1, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder if I should develop my first serious homebrew game under NES or Gameboy? It will be instantly cross-platform under all those emulators, less likely to encounter those nasty hardware configuration problems and I won't have to worry about conforming to the latest 3D graphics.

    Oh, and I couldn't resist: first post!
    • I wonder if I should develop my first serious homebrew game under NES or Gameboy? It will be instantly cross-platform under all those emulators, less likely to encounter those nasty hardware configuration problems and I won't have to worry about conforming to the latest 3D graphics.

      I would go for the gameboy if I were you. You could buy a compact flash card then and play your game on a gameboy advance which is a bit cooler to show off than just playing it on an emulator on your PC.

      Oh, and I coul

  • GBA, too. (Score:5, Informative)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @02:46PM (#9175585) Homepage
    There's a lot of this sort of thing [gbadev.org] going on for the GameBoy Advance, too. Its a lot of fun developing for such limited systems. :-)

  • Don't really see the news in this (Score:5, Informative)

    by Grey Ninja ( 739021 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @02:55PM (#9175700) Homepage Journal
    Homebrew games have been around since the Atari days. I honestly don't see what's so newsworthy about this.

    But that being said, my homebrew system of choice is the GBA. It's easy enough to program for, (in fact, it makes game programming quite dreamlike.) and it's powerful enough to do some pretty cool stuff. I recently bought a flash cart for it as well... cost me almost $200, but I think it will be worth it when one of my projects gets close to reaching completion.
  • Does this mean we'll finally get Super Mario Brothers 4?!

  • Marketable skills (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @03:26PM (#9176110)
    What great marketable skills they are being taught. Once they get out of school, they will surely be able to dominate the videogame industry of either Albania or Burma.

    • Re:Marketable skills (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You joke, but I know somebody who knows C++, Java, PHP, and just about any other current language you could think of... and he got hired at his current job because he knows COBOL.
    • I know it's a little late to respond to this, but anyway...

      Who said school was all about marketable skills?
  • Those gold medal games must be awesome, then.

    Rob
    • Bob gave his own game, Sack of Flour, a silver mainly because (don't take my word for it, but I think this is why) he didn't get to put bosses in, and there's a bug in some emulators when respawning in the middle of the first level. Sack of Flour was developed as the demo for NBASIC and his other tools, which were developed as an independant study when he was an undergraduate here at CMU. So it's mostly a proof-of-concept.

  • first NES games developed in years? (Score:5, Informative)

    by radimvice ( 762083 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @03:38PM (#9176234) Homepage
    These are some of the first new NES games developed in years

    Hardly some of the first...There have been tons [parodius.com] of homebrew NES demos and full games developed within the past few years. Well-polished games like Chris Covell's Solar Wars [zyx.com] and Kent Hansen's Bombsweeper [stud.ntnu.no] are polished games that put Bob Rost's own self-proclaimed 'NES game of the century', Sack of Flour [bobrost.com], to shame - if not on code complexity and dev team size, on well-polished game design and playability. Not to mention the promising Megaman: Vengeance homebrew game being (slowly) developed by the folks at Dragon Eye Studios [dragoneyestudios.net]. The rom hacking community has produced plenty of other high quality rom hacks that do amazing things with the NES.

    Either way, I think it's a cool project. I first discovered the student class webpage a month or two ago, and I'm glad that the class ended successfully.
    • You're right, I was mistaken. I didn't know about a lot of those development efforts - they're pretty cool. But I still think it's amazing that a bunch of students could learn this stuff and pump out games in a semester, especially when this was (for most students) their least important class, since it was really just for fun. I know that my submission, Gravedigger, was built by me and two friends in a week after I had finished my final project for my real Game Development course (one of the teams for that
  • I see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic?? Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology. For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??

    • Re:Seems pointless (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JavaLord ( 680960 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @04:03PM (#9176479) Journal
      see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic??

      Computer Science students often start off with Pascal. It's not as important what platform they are programming for, It's more important that they learn the basic concepts for making a game. While teaching J2ME coding on a Cell phone emulator might be more practical for a 1 man development project, it doesn't mean teaching for the NES is worthless.

      Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology. For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??

      I don't think the course is about trying to get a job in the gaming industry afterwords, it's more about concepts that are needed for game devolpment (ie Double Buffering, different types of collision detection). While you might understand these things if you have made a small game already, you probably don't if you just have a CS degree.

      • Re:Seems pointless (Score:5, Informative)

        by dalangalma ( 514344 ) <dalangalmaNO@SPAMnumbera.com> on Monday May 17, 2004 @06:20PM (#9177844) Homepage
        Even simpler - this class was for fun. It was only 3 units (most CS courses are 12) and didn't count towards our major. It's just one of the fun student-taught classes that CMU lets students set up on their own for other students. Lots of people enjoyed developing for the technology that had been one of the biggest sources of entertainment when they were kids.

        We had a real Game Development course that semester that was much harder that focused on OpenGL, DirectX, shaders, programming for consoles, and working in the industry.
  • best quote eva:

    "Non-scrolling games are teh awesomes!"

  • Xilinx board (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wickedj ( 652189 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @05:12PM (#9177243) Homepage
    I remember I took a computer systems architecture class in college where we took a programmable Xilinx board [xilinx.com], two "customized" NES controllers, and a monitor and created our own game system. We emulated our own MIPS processor, created a compiler, wrote our own OS and filesystem and then wrote Pong for the system and a driver for the monitor and the controllers. Needless to say, it was a learning experience. Timing was a pain. We had about 9 weeks to do it all and I don't think we finished. Most of the parts were completed but we didn't have time to integrate everything. I wish we did, it would be nice to say I developed my own "console" on my resumè ;-)
  • As a C64 Doom Clone! [c64.com] :)

  • Game reviews (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mprx ( 82435 ) on Monday May 17, 2004 @06:49PM (#9178136)
    I played and reviewed all the seal rated games to completion (except Gravedigger) without cheats or savestates. Reviews:

    Galaxxon: The Third War
    This game has good graphics, but the gameplay has one very big flaw. Because only one enemy type presents a serious threat (the spinning things), it's very easy to just ignore all the others unless you need to kill one to make another enemies respawn. Because there's no scoring system and the timelimit is mostly meaningless, it's very easy to win by just sitting in the middle and hammering fire. Even if you chose to play "properly" (much more fun), there's no real challenge until at least level 4. This game is too tedious to be real fun. My ship's firing glitched up once, but it fixed itself at the end of the level. No other bugs noticed.

    Dikki Painguin in: TKO for the Third Reich
    What little there is of this game is great. Awesome graphics, really fun gameplay, and plenty of challenge without feeling cheap. Also there's something extremely cool about playing a sword weilding pengiun who fights Nazis. Good music too. The only problem is it's far too short, I hope the "To Be Continued.." ending means more development will happen. No bugs noticed.

    Grave Digger
    A puzzle/action game, but it's a puzzle that I find quite boring. I didn't play this for long. Good music, no bugs noticed.

    Sack of Flour, Heart of Gold
    Graphically and gameplay-wise inferior to Painguin, but this game is still quite fun. Varied levels and an interesting dark/light world system. Challenge is almost nonexistant, I completed this game very easily.
  • You can actually view the course notes/lectures online for the class. I thought this was amusing in one of the PDFs you can download. Just because you are smart and rich enough to get into a good college dosen't mean your still not a total scum bag

    "Announcements (1 of 3)
    The hard drive and CD-ROM drive were stolen
    from the lectern computers in this room and
    several others. If you stole them, please return
    them.
    Changes to this Room"
  • I wonder how hard it would be for the teams to convert it to dot code to be played on the E-Reader. Doesn't that thing have a built in NES emulator?

  • ooooo (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now someone please make me a Trogdor nes game

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