This is the second entry of the openNES project series aimed at recreating classic video games for the Nintendo Entertainment System on an open source basis. The purpose of these projects is to get more enthusiastic people interested in programming for the NES by providing code examples and providing a starting point for developing new games from scratch.
This particular project aims to rebuild the classic game Pong. Unlike the first openNES entry (openNES Snake), this project will not use a third party library (namely Shiru's NESLib) in order to encapsulate deeper hardware knowledge. The code is loosely based on the nesdoug tutorial series, which provides a deeper insight into hardware programming on the NES than using pre-build NESlib functionalities.
The project has been coded completely in C, (except some Assembler functionalites from the nesdoug tutorial series) and the cc65 cross compiler (for further references see the Toolkit section).
This project is licensed under the zlib license. See also the attached LICENSE file.
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cc65 cross compiler v.2.5 - A freeware C compiler for 6502 based systems
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Tile Molester v.0.16 - A tileset editor, for designing tiles/sprites
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NES Screen Tool v.2.04 - A tool that allows to create and edit NES nametables, attributes, palettes, patterns (tiles), and metasprites
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FamiTracker v.0.4.2 - Famous tracker for producing music for the NES/Famicom-systems
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FamiTone2 v.1.15 - Lightweight Audio library for music and sound effects.
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Doxygen v.1.8.12 - Code documentation tool for C/C++ projects
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FCEUX v.2.2.3 - Famous NES emulator in the homebrew scene with many debugging utilities.
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nesdoug tutorial series - A great tutorial series which teaches you how to program the NES with C, only using the cc65 cross compiler.
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NesDev Forum - You will always find friendly, skilled and helpful people in this community, who are willing to help with problems you are facing during your project.
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Nerdy Nights tutorial series - Even if it is based on introducing you to assembly, this is the classic lecture for understanding the NES architecture for many years.
To build a .NES rom from the project's sources, execute the build script at build/build.sh from the build directory or the script build/build.bat if you are working on Windows. Note that these scripts depend on the cc65 cross compiler, so you need ensure that this is available on your system.
This project provides VS Code Development Container configuration at .devcontainer/. Via this configuration, you automatically have a complete development environment for developing NES games.
Feel free to fork this project and extend its content. If you find bugs, please submit them as issues so we can discuss together how you can fix them. All your contributions need to include explaining Doxygen comments in order to share your knowledge with future contributors and maintaining the project's code documentation.