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2 years ago

Ever wondered how devs measure performance on real a NES, which has no dev kit? A common way is the change the "color emphasis" while an operation is executing, during rendering. This effectively draws colored bars representing how long something takes.


Here, Green represents the player update. At the start of the "player_update" function, which is running while the TV is drawing the previous frame from top to bottom & left to right, I tell the NES to tint everything Green. At the end of the function I stop tinting Green.

image.png

This tells me that to update the player, it takes *roughly* 15 scanlines of the video frame. I have about 260 scanlines to finish all the work for the next frame to maintain 60 frames per second, so this one function takes about 6% of my CPU budget for the frame.

image.png

The game in the video is a new, untitled, NES homebrew I am working on.

Follow for more updates on that game, and retro console development in general!

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MASSIVE Game Boy Homebrew GIVEAWAY! We're giving away physical copies of 4 new Gameboy games to 1 winner! From Below is on sale NOW: http://shop.matthughson.com 🚨 ENTER HERE: https://twitter.com/matthughson/status/1710641131590221843 🏁Giveaway ends Oct 11th 11:59PM PT

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@ryon is a Jolter to Watch, game dev, programmer, and artist who worked on Five Nights at Friedrich's! Follow @ryon before the quest ends on July 15 and you'll get Coins!

"Ghost Piece" is now available in From Below Pocket via a "patch/hack" for anyone interested! It comes with the game when purchased on itch.io! Warning: It's very untested, and probably has perf issues. 😅 https://mhughson.itch.io/from-below-pocket/devlog/617249/ghost-p…

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When making games on the NES, nothing is easy!

With a LOT of help from the #nesdev Discord, I was able to clean up the seam above the status bar.

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Time is almost up on a new GAME BOY and NES title!⏲️

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Big news for From Below (NES) and From Below Pocket (GB) physical editions!

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