Tag: z80

GB Studio & BB Studio

GB Studio, by Chris Maltby, is fairly well-known now, isn’t it? It’s a free and open source solution to fairly easily making Gameboy roms on your own, that are properly termed not romhacks but homebrew. It has its own website and it’s available on itch.io. It was what Grimace’s Birthday, which we linked to last year, was made with.

GB Studio, from its platformer template

Now there’s a heavily-modified version of GB Studio, called BB Studio, that produces NES roms in a similar manner! It’s made by Michel Iwaniec, and can be gotten from Github here. It’s recommended that you be familiar with GB Studio first, and to read the list of caveats on the page. Particularly, the NES supports fewer sprites per scanline than the Gameboy hardware does, and runs at a slower clock speed. BB Studio is also “early alpha software,” meaning, it might or might not work well for you at the moment.

While we’re on the topic I should also mention NES Maker, which isn’t free, but it also isn’t “early alpha software,” and at $36 isn’t expensive either, and is custom-built for generating runnable NES games.

The Rise and Fall of the MSX

The MSX standard was something devised by Microsoft, a specification for a Z80-powered 8-bit microcomputer for the home market. In the style of CP/M machines, and later PC compatibles, any company could make their own MSX machine, and in Japan over 20 different companies did, along with succeeding standards like the MSX2 and MSX+. It made a bit of headway in Europe too, though not nearly as much. The US space had already been taken up by the Apple II line, the Atari 8-bit machines, and especially the Commodore 64. It causes me to wonder, if Jack Tramiel hadn’t made the C64 so inexpensive, selling for around $200 for most of its life, then the MSX could have easily come over here and become a thing.

Note that, despite the friendly play button circle, this is not an embed. Clicking on the image will take you off-site.

Information on the MSX and the wealth of games for it has become better known in the West in more recent years. Konami, especially, backed MSX machines heavily, and a number of games like Castlevania, Gradius and The Goonies had MSX versions, which often had substantial differences from their Famicom cousins.

Today’s find is a 54-minute video on the MSX’s history and legacy by re:enthused. It isn’t on Youtube this time though! This time it’s hosted on the Peertube instance fedi.video. So you won’t have to worry about ads this time. Still though, nearly an hour. There’s a lot of interesting information in there!

Peertube embedding doesn’t seem very viable in WordPress, so I’m going to scrreenshot the thumbnail and link it to the page. Here:

SjASMplus

No image this time. There’s nothing to take a screenshot of! SjASMplus is, simply, a cross-platform assembler targeting the Z80 platform, the processor that runs many classic arcade games. (I refuse to say “powers,” that’s not what that word means!) If you have interest in writing new games for old arcade platforms, it’s something you’ll need.

It’s the holidays still, and I’m trying to unwind a bit. I’m failing, but at least the effort is there: the effort to reduce effort. Maybe someday.