Progress update

June 3, 2021

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Time for another update on how things are going! The past two weeks featured a lot of work on Chapter 14. In order to have moving sprites, we need to make use of zero-page RAM - which means I needed to write about what page zero is and why you might want to use it. (As a quick teaser, the designers of the 6502 thought of zero-page RAM as an additional 256 registers for the programmer to make use of.) To make the drawing efficient, at least from the perspective of reusable, easy-to-read code, we also need to learn to write subroutines - assembly's version of what other programming languages would call "functions". Subroutines have their own quirks and pitfalls, and I'll briefly describe some of them in this chapter, but some of it will have to wait until we start making heavier use of the NMI handler.

All of this is to say that I hope to have Chapter 14 wrapped up within the next few days, at which point we'll have a player ship on a starfield background that automatically moves from left to right and back again. I thought about including some basic "easing" to make the ship animation more fluid, but this is already turning into a long chapter and I think it would be better saved for a later date. Once we have sprites moving, I think the next chapter will be on background scrolling, which should wrap up our deep dive into NES graphics (for now). Then we'll take a look at how NES controllers work, which will let us build things that seem a lot more like "games".

On a more random note, I've decided to change the site's font from et-book to Computer Modern, a.k.a. "the TeX font". It has a more "airy" feel and because of its relatively large x-height, it seems easier to read. Let me know if you disagree! I also made a few tweaks to the code syntax highlighting color scheme that I hope should have better contrast and fit better with the rest of the site.