FOR MANY PLAYERS, NINTENDO’S 8-BIT HARDWARE WAS THE DEFINING CONSOLE OF ITS GENERATION. WE SPEAK TO NES DEVELOPMENT VETERANS ABOUT DEVELOPING THE GAMES MILLIONS GREW UP WITH, AND FIND OUT HOW A NEW GENERATION OF CODERS DEVELOP FOR THE SYSTEM TODAY
The Nintendo Entertainment System, and its Japanese counterpart the Famicom, need no introduction – if you’re reading this magazine, you’ll know that the 8-bit hardware catapulted Nintendo to a position of global leadership in the videogame business, and hosted the first iterations of countless classic series. Though marketing played an important role in this commercial and cultural success, it wouldn’t have been possible without the hardware. After all, the ColecoVision and the Atari 5200 were less than a year old when the Famicom launched in Japan in 1983, and the 3DO and Atari Jaguar were on the market by the time developers finally abandoned the NES in 1994. A machine simply can’t stay relevant for that long without hardware that’s flexible enough and capable enough to keep up with the changing tastes of gamers. But the NES wasn’t just a titan of its time – plenty of developers are creating new games for the hardware, pushing it harder than ever with modern development tools.
Two CPUs and their derivatives dominated the home hardware scene of the Eighties – the Zilog Z80, as seen in the ZX Spectrum, ColecoVision and Master System, and the MOS Technology 6502, which featured in the Atari 5200, Apple II and Commodore 64. Nintendo’s engineer Masayuki Uemura opted for the 6502 for the NES, primarily because it was small enough that a chip could also include sound capabilities. In 2016, the late engineer told Retro Gamer that this choice caused “a huge problem within the company” as Nintendo’s hit arcade game Donkey Kong had used a Z80 and the source code couldn’t be reused. Consideration for any programmers outside of Nintendo wasn’t a priority, as the company didn’t initially intend for third-party publishers to be part of its business model.
Of course, the success of the hardware in Japan and North America eventually necessitated third-party development just to keep up with demand for new games. The system didn’t have the same impact in the UK, which is why programmer Paul Machacek didn’t encounter one until 1988, when he joined Rare – one of the few UK developers to concentrate on Nintendo’s system. His previously published games had been written for Z80-based computers, and he was initially tasked with writing for the Z80-based RAZZ arcade board, but he was soon asked to work on a NES project. Fortunately, Paul was familiar with 6502 assembly code from his time as an Oric-1 owner. “I picked it up pretty quickly again,” he says, “but forgot about all the number juggling you did on it compared to the Z80 as 6502 has so few registers, but alt
