Hand-Coded ASM Powers Homebrew SNES Game

Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Super. Hand-Coded ASM Powers Homebrew SNES Game. It’s that console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, that [Inkbox] has decided to delve deeply into as he crafts a game in assembly using all the hardware tricks he can.

Hardware tricks he’ll need, given he’s limited to the two 64 kB RAM banks and 3.58 MHz Ricoh 6502-based CPU. Even the 4 MB limit he sets for a historically-accurate homemade cartridge seems positively claustrophobic by modern standards. The game he’s after making is a top-down adventure game a la Zelda, and [Inkbox] gets right into the weeds explaining how the SNES works as he shows his work in this nearly hour long video.

If you’re looking for a deep dive into the architecture, along with how it is meant to be used, you could certainly find worse sources. Everything from the different graphics modes to what registers handle sound are covered in this and the previous video in the series. We can’t help but call out his dedication to open source — the SNES Sound Engine he has put up on GitHub looks like it could be a real asset to anyone else doing this kind of homebrew.