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Awesome 8-bit Game Dev

A curated list of awesome resources for 8-bit retro game development.

Table of Contents

Home Consoles

Fairchild Channel F

Bally Astrocade

  • Bally Alley - An archive of all things Bally Astrocade.

  • The Better Bally Book - A wiki dedicated to organizing, annotating, and improving Software and Hardware for the Bally Arcade, a technical manual for the Bally Home Computer/Arcade/Astrocade originally published in 1978 by Dave Nutting Associates.

  • hxlnt's Astrocade Dev - Z80 demos and graphics tools for the Astrocade. Also see this thread.

Atari 2600

AFP MP-1000

Intellivision

  • jsintv - Portable Intellivision emulator and programming tools

  • IntyBASIC - a BASIC compiler for Intellivision

ColecoVision

Vectrex

Sega SG-1000

NES

Atari 7800

  • Atari 7800 (Dan Boris) - System Specs, Cartridge Information, Links, The 'Encryption' Issue, Technical Files, and more.

  • Atari 7800 Software Guide - 7800 hardware description, registers, DMA timing, and more.

  • Atari 7800 Programming Wiki - This site is intended to be a reference for the Atari 7800 Programming mailing list, with information culled from the mailing list archives and other sources (i.e. Atari Age forums)

  • CC7800 - A C-inspired compiler for the Atari 7800.

Sega Master System

Home Computers

Apple I

Commodore PET

TRS-80

Apple II

Atari 8-bit

TI 99/4

Commodore VIC-20

Acorn

Sinclair

Commodore 64

MSX

CPC

  • cpctelera - Amstrad CPC game engine for C and Assembler developers, integrated into 8bitworkshop

Arcade Games

Hardware

6502

Z80

TMS9918A

AY-3-8910

FPGA/HDL

Microcontrollers

  • Uzebox - An open-source micro game platform based on the ATmega644 chip.

Development Tools

Compilers

  • CC65 - a C compiler, linker, and assembler for 6502 machines. Targets Commodore, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, NES, and more.

  • SDCC - Small Device C Compiler and toolchain. Targets Z80 and Gameboy Z80, among others.

  • z88dk - A Z80 C and assembly toolchain. There are two C compilers supported (sccz80 and sdcc), two independent C libraries included (the classic and new), an assembler/linker/librarian (z80asm), and a data compression tool (zx7). Targets over 80 different machine families.

  • CMOC - A 6809 cross-compiler for a subset of the C language. Depends on the LWTOOLS toolchain.

  • batariBASIC - BASIC programming for Atari 2600 systems.

  • LLVM-MOS SDK - A clang-based compiler/SDK for 6502 systems.

Assemblers

  • DASM - a versatile macro assembler with support for several 8-bit microprocessors including MOS 6502 & 6507, Motorola 6803, 68705 & 68HC11, Hitachi HD6303 (extended Motorola 6801), and Fairchild F8. Used most often for Atari 2600 development.

  • NESASM3 - The O.G. NESasm assembler for NES 6502 assembly.

  • ASM6 - 6502 assembler primarily targeted at NES/Famicom development.

  • zmac - Macro cross-assembler for the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, sometimes used for Astrocade development.

Emulators

  • MAMEDev.org - Home of the MAME/ MESS mega-emulator.

  • Javatari - Atari 2600 emulator in JavaScript.

  • JSNES - NES emulator in JavaScript.

  • Stella - A multi-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

  • Mesen - A high-accuracy NES and Famicom emulator and NSF player for Windows and Linux.

  • VICE - The Versatile Commodore Emulator.

  • https://github.com/floooh/chips - Portable C emulation library for C64, CPC and other microcomputers.

  • jsvecx - Vectrex emulator in JavaScript.

  • Altirra - Atari 8-bit family emulator, includes compatible open-source ROM.

IDEs

  • 8bitworkshop - An online batteries-included IDE targeting home consoles, home computers, arcade games, and Verilog hardware design.

  • WUDSN - a free integrated Apple II, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari 8-bit, C64 and NES development plugin for Eclipse

  • NESICIDE - multiplatform IDE for NES, includes FamiTracker support.

  • CBM prg Studio - Free C64 IDE for Windows written with C# and VB.NET.

  • Turbo Rascal SE - A Pascal -> DASM compiler for 6502/68000 computers -- the C64, C128, VIC-20, PLUS4, NES, PET and Amiga 500.

  • BASIC8 - A fantasy console supporting a BASIC-like language.

Graphics

  • Dithertron - From 8bitworkshop. Downsamples/reduces/converts images into many different retro formats, with lots of tweaking options.

  • mcDRAW - Cool online bitmap editor for C-64.

  • retropixels - A command-line tool and library that converts to C-64 format.

Libraries

  • CROSS-LIB - Cross platform game library for several 8/16/32-bit computers.

Open-Source BIOSs

  • apple2go - The Apple][Go ROM is a public domain Apple ][ replacement ROM that is capable of running most games not requiring Applesoft. This ROM was written in 2006 by Marc Ressl specifically for use with the Apple][Go Emulator

  • open-roms - A project to create unencumbered open-source ROMs for use on selected retro computers

  • CBIOS - A BSD-licensed MSX BIOS written from scratch by BouKiCHi (no cassette/disk/BASIC yet)

  • SEBasic - Open source ZX Spectrum BIOS with BASIC.

  • Altirra - Contains Atari 8-bit compatible ROM and BASIC interpreter.

BASIC

Books

  • 8bitworkshop Books - Books that go along with the 8bitworkshop IDE: "Making Games for the Atari 2600", "Making 8-bit Arcade Games in C", "Making Games for the NES", and "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog"

  • Retro Game Dev: C64 Edition - Using modern tools, this introductory book guides you through all the elements required to make two mini games: a space shooter and a platformer, and run them on an emulator or real C64 hardware. Uses CBM prg Studio (Windows IDE)

Community

Misc.

Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome! Please take a look at the contribution guidelines first.

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