NES Software

Documents

• How to clean Game Paks

Programs

These programs are designed to be run either on a real Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Family Computer, or Dendy Junior system (with a homemade rewritable cartridge) or in an NES emulator such as Nintendulator, Nestopia, or FCE Ultra. (They will most likely not work in older emulators such as NESticle.)

Password save demo

In the NES's original commercial era, not a lot of games could save because the common way to do so (battery-backed SRAM) was expensive. In fact, the cost of battery save is thought to be responsible for the cancellation of the English version of Mother (the Earthbound prequel) and the NES version of SimCity. Even in 2010, similar solutions (power management IC, ferroelectric RAM) are still expensive, and flash is designed more for machines with big RAM, which the NES is not. So the workaround remains the same as it did in the classic era: password save.

This program demonstrates how to encode a 32-bit number representing the state of a game into an 8-character password and then decode and validate it. It also includes a password entry form suitable for customizing in your own NES games.

Download Password save demo (18 KiB source and binaries)

Russian Roulette

Load the revolver, spin the cylinder, pull the trigger, and hope you don't die. Or play it safe with an NES Zapper.

Download Russian Roulette 0.01 (13 KB source and binaries)

Concentration Room

An accident at the biochemical lab has released a neurotoxin, and you've been quarantined after exposure. Maintain your sanity by playing a card-matching game.

The table is littered with 10, 20, 36, 52, or 72 face-down cards. Flip two cards, and if they show the same emblem, you keep them. If they don't, flip them back.

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LJ65

LJ65 (formerly Tetramino) is yet another clone of the popular Russian block game. This one allows two players and has tighter play control than most Tetris® brand games, especially compared to Tetris for NES. Version 0.41 fixes some more issues that crept in as Bottom rotation was added.

Download LJ65 0.41 (113 KB source and binaries for both NTSC and PAL NES)

Development and ROM hacking tools

PC programs come with reasonably portable source code and a binary for Microsoft Windows.

DPCM ripper

18 rips compressed audio waveforms out of many NES games. 81 encodes RIFF WAVE files to NES audio format for use in NES homebrew. Both are command line tools. An example of how to play back a DPCM file on an NES is also available.

Download dpcmrip-20031113.zip (20 KB C source and binaries for Windows)

Download 81ex.zip (35 KB C source and binary for Windows and asm source and binary for NES)

Pin Eight NES Tools

These tools comprise a multi-format tile editor, NES nametable editor, and PackBits RLE compressor (C) and decompressor (6502 assembly language). Because the tile editor and compression code are useful for more than just the NES, I have placed them on the PC page.

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