SNES Homebrew Development

There's a wikibook and Matthew Callis' notes.

However, most of the success stories I've heard of are NES developers getting comfortable with 6502 and then moving onto 65c816

>>3797043
I actually do come from C64 development, so I'm comfortable with 6502 asm

>>3797058
Great!
As a bonus, 65c816 is backwards compatible with 6502, so you already have the knowledge to program basic games.

>>3797058
That's good. The hardest part is getting started and setting up an environment that you feel comfortable with.

Wish I could help more but you've already got a fantastic starting point if you're good with 6502.

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>>3797043
>However, most of the success stories I've heard of are NES developers getting comfortable with 6502 and then moving onto 65c816

The NES is a ball of spit and wax compared to the SNES. The architecture of the SNES is the NES taken to its logical conclusion, and it is pretty neat and tidy, compared to the oddities of the NES you are forced to deal with if you want to make anything non-tirival.

6502 also has an incomplete instruction set, with tons of invalid instructions. The 65816 fills out all of those missing instructions with useful ones.

Anyway, I'm working on a great little assembler targeting 65816 and SPC700, and it can easily be extended to 6502, Z80, and 68k. I'll share in time if anyone is interested. It's gonna be part of an SNES dev toolchain I'm putting together. I have an SPC700 codec too. I have a few other tools I'm planning as well, such as a disassembler to target my assembler, and a graphics utility too. Those are on the backburner at the moment though.

Anywho, OP, the docs you want to get are these:

Programming the 65816:
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/images/7/76/Programmanual.pdf

SNES Official Dev Manual
http://www.romhacking.net/documents/226/

All of Anomie's hardware docs (more accurate and informative than the manual)
http://www.romhacking.net/?page=documents&category=12&platform=&game=&author=548&perpage=20&level=&title=&desc=&docsearch=Go

That's all the documentation that you need. The rest is getting an assembler and firing up your favorite text editor and having at it.

>>3797184
Thanks bro

Not to derail the thread, but are there any resources and working compilers for the N64?
Tools for handling 3D models?
I've seen a few 2d demos, but those were basically just a proof of concept for N64 homebrew.

>>3797285
There's one tool under development but the name escapes me right now

>>3797285
The nice thing about the 5th Gen+ consoles is that their CPUs were powerful enough to handle abstraction without worrying about performance. No special tools should be needed to write code for these consoles beyond a standard compiler, such as gcc. Just cross compile to mips for N64. I have never done that though, and don't know how to define the memory map, which will have to be done specific to each console.

Almost the same goes with 3D modeling. Standard tools, like Blender, can be used to create the vast art assets needed for a 3D game. Tools like Gimp can be used to do texturing. However 5th Gen had a lot of variation in GPU architecture designs, and you may have to write some code to transform Blender output into something the console can digest, but it would be limited to geometry definitions and perhaps some image encoding. If you think you can cut your teeth on a 3D system, then this should be no problem. That being said, 3D requires a variety of skills, particularly with linear algebra, computer graphics, and some algorithms.

What would be money is if someone had the official libraries Nintendo supplied developers. That would save you a lot of time writing basic code, but then again, it's good to do that stuff at least once.

>>3797041
Yes. Many excellent ones.

>>3797184
>a ball of spit and wax
WTF?

>>3797802
Yes, that's nice and all, and I understand that, but I know dick all about how to program the RSP, which is the important part.
I also have no idea what format the 3d models and textures should be in.

>>3798169
>I also have no idea what format the 3d models and textures should be in.
The only resource for that is the dev manual and its derivatives.

https://n64squid.com/Nintendo%20Ultra64%20Programming%20Manual+Addendums.pdf

>I know dick all about how to program the RSP, which is the important part
The CPU architecture is well documented. You just have to read what's there. Nintendo probably had some extra hardware put into the CPU, but ignoring that it should more or less feel like a MIPS R4200.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15740-f97/public/doc/mips-isa.pdf

It really just comes down to reading some manuals. Granted, it you don't have any experience programming assembly, you are starting off WAAAAAAY too big. You should start on a smaller system, like what OP wants to do.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15740-f97/public/doc/mips-isa.pdf