Before we start animating sprites around the screen, I'd like to introduce you to how background graphics work on the NES. We explored the mechanics behind background graphics in Chapter 9, but in this chapter we'll look at the actual code required to display backgrounds.

The Background Pattern Table

First, you'll need graphical tiles in the background pattern table. The PPU has two pattern tables for tiles, one for sprites and one for backgrounds. In the previous chapters, we added some tiles to the sprite pattern table. Now, we'll need to add tiles to the background table.

For this chapter, I've updated the CHR file to include some pre-made background tiles. There are tiles for numbers and letters (to allow us to display text to the player), solid-colored squares of each of the four palette colors, and a few "starfield" tiles. You can view (and edit) these tiles in NES Lightbox. Our long-term goal is going to be the creation of a vertically-scrolling shooter game in the style of Star Soldier.⊕
Star Soldier, developed by Hudson Soft and released for the Famicom in 1986 and the NES in 1988, is a vertical-scrolling shooter series.

To make use of these new background tiles, we will need to write a nametable. By default, the attribute table will be all zeroes, meaning that every tile in the nametable will be drawn with the first palette. To use other palettes, we will need to write an attribute table as well.

Writing a Nametable

First, let's figure out where to put our new tiles in the nametable. We only need to write to nametable addresses where we intend to place a tile — everywhere else, the default background color from our palettes will be used. In NES Lightbox, click a tile from the right side of the screen, then click anywhere in the large area on the left to "draw" with the tile. Here is the example background that we will use:

Once you have an arrangement that you like, you can save what you have so far to a .nam file. From NES Lightbox's menus, select Nametables → Save Nametable As..., then choose a filename and a location to save the file. To reload your background later for editing, open NES Lightbox and select Nametables → Open Nametable..., and select the .nam file you saved earlier.

When you hover over any tile in the large left pane, the status bar at the bottom of NES Lightbox shows you useful information for writing nametables and attribute tables. As discussed in Chapter 9, the NES has four nametables, the first of which starts at PPU memory address $2000. The bottom status bar of NES Lightbox shows the "nametable offset" and "attribute offset" for each tile position — that is, how many bytes beyond the start of the nametable or attribute table it is. To make things easier, it also shows the address of the tile location in each nametable and attribute table.

We can use this information to fill out our nametable. As you might remember, the nametable is just a series of tile numbers; palette selection occurs in the attribute table. To create the nametable, we need to write the appropriate tile number to each nametable address as displayed in NES Lightbox. Let's start with the "large" star tile (tile number $2f, as you can see by hovering over the tile in the right-side "Tileset" window and looking at the status bar at the bottom of the application window). From hovering over the places where the large star tile is used, we can see that we need to write the value $2f to the following addresses in PPU memory:

• $206b
• $2157
• $2223
• $2352

The process is the same as what we have used before for palettes and sprites: read from PPUSTATUS, write the address you want to send data to to PPUADDR ("high"/left byte first, then "low"/right byte), and then send the actual data to PPUDATA. Previously, we have used loops to do this, taking advantage of the way sequential writes to PPUDATA automatically increase the address by one. This time, though, we need to write to totally non-linear memory addresses, so we'll need to repeat the process in full for each background tile. Here is the code to write the first "large star" to the nametable:

46
  ; write a nametable
47
  ; big stars first
48
  LDA PPUSTATUS
49
  LDA #$20
50
  STA PPUADDR
51
  LDA #$6b
52
  STA PPUADDR
53
  LDX #$2f
54
  STX PPUDATA

The one thing we can do to save on the number of commands we need to enter is to store the tile number in a different register from what we use to read PPUSTATUS and write to PPUADDR; here we are using the X register for the tile number, so that subsequent writes of the same tile to the nametable will not require re-loading it.

We can use the same procedure to add the two varieties of "small" star ($2d and $2e) to the nametable. To use different colors for the tiles, we will need to write an attribute table as well.

The Attribute Table

Background tile palettes are set via an attribute table, which uses one byte to store palette information for a 4x4 square of background tiles. To change the palettes used for a particular tile, first hover over that tile in the left-side nametable display and note the "Attribute offset" for the tile. Next, we need to figure out which 2x2 area of tiles (top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right) the tile we want to change is part of. To help with finding the boundaries of an attribute table byte, click "Attribute grid" at the bottom of the nametable display. This will overlay a red dashed-line grid that shows the boundaries of each 4x4 tile attribute table byte's coverage area.

As an example, let's change the palette used to draw the first "large star" in the nametable. By hovering over it in the nametable viewer, we can find the attribute offset ($02), and by looking at the attribute grid overlay we can see where within the 4x4 set of tiles our chosen tile is located (here, the bottom-right 2x2 area).

Each byte of the attribute table holds palette information for four 2x2 areas of background tiles, using two bits for each area. From left to right, the eight bits in an attribute table byte hold the palette number for bottom-right, bottom-left, top-right, and top-left 2x2 areas.

In this case, we want to change the palette for the bottom-right section of an attribute table byte, so we will need to change the leftmost two bits of the byte. By default, the attribute table is all zeroes, meaning every 2x2 area of the background uses the first background palette. Let's change our tile to use the second palette (01) instead of the first palette (00). To change just the bottom-right 2x2 area, and leave the other parts of this 4x4 area with the first palette, we would write the byte %01000000 to the appropriate PPU memory address ($23c2). Here is what that would look like:

158
  ; finally, attribute table
159
  LDA PPUSTATUS
160
  LDA #$23
161
  STA PPUADDR
162
  LDA #$c2
163
  STA PPUADDR
164
  LDA #%01000000
165
  STA PPUDATA

Remember that this will set all tiles in that 2x2 region to use the second palette. In this case, the background tiles we are setting are relatively far apart, but if your backgrounds are more "busy" you will need to think carefully about where to change from one background palette to another. When you select a palette (by clicking any color within the palette) before placing a tile in the nametable display, NES Lightbox will update the underlying attribute table and update all tiles in the affected 2x2 area to use the new palette, which can help you identify potential attribute table clashes.

Additional Changes

As our games start getting more complicated, the simple reset and NMI handlers we started with will need some minor changes to prevent strange (and difficult to debug) graphical glitches. In our reset handler, I've added a loop that sets the Y-position of all sprites off the screen (i.e. any value larger than $ef). The state of CPU memory can be random at startup, which could result in portions of the OAM buffer at $0200 having fake sprite data. This loop hides all sprites off the screen until we explicitly set them ourselves, which will prevent these "phantom" sprites from being visible to the player.

17
  LDX #$00
18
  LDA #$ff
19
clear_oam:
20
  STA $0200,X ; set sprite y-positions off the screen
21
  INX
22
  INX
23
  INX
24
  INX
25
  BNE clear_oam

Second, our NMI handler will need to set the scroll position of the nametables. We will cover scrolling in detail in a later chapter, but for now just know that we are setting the scroll position to display the first nametable, with no scrolling. If we did not explicitly set this scroll position, we could accidentally display a combination of nametables at an unpredictable scroll point.

9
.proc nmi_handler
10
  LDA #$00
11
  STA OAMADDR
12
  LDA #$02
13
  STA OAMDMA
14
  LDA #$00
15
  STA $2005
16
  STA $2005
17
  RTI
18
.endproc

Finally, now that we are using both sprites and backgrounds, we need to set all eight palettes. To do so, I've expanded the palette definitions in the RODATA segment as follows:

192
palettes:
193
.byte $0f, $12, $23, $27
194
.byte $0f, $2b, $3c, $39
195
.byte $0f, $0c, $07, $13
196
.byte $0f, $19, $09, $29
197

198
.byte $0f, $2d, $10, $15
199
.byte $0f, $19, $09, $29
200
.byte $0f, $19, $09, $29
201
.byte $0f, $19, $09, $29

The first four palettes are background palettes, and the second set of four palettes are sprite palettes. Note that I have also changed the colors used in the first sprite palette to make the "spaceship" look better.

Since we now need to write more than just four palette bytes, I've changed the loop that writes palettes to use CPX #$20 (16 values) instead of CPX #$04.

Using NES Lightbox Projects

Before we move on to this chapter's homework, let's look at the "Project" functionality of NES Lightbox. A "project" is a list of files that make up a working environment (tileset, palettes, nametable) and the currently-selected tileset bank. The project file uses full paths to each file, which means that project files are unfortunately not portable between different computers.

To create a project file, select Project → Save Project As... from NES Lightbox's menus. Choose a name for the project file and click "OK". Any files that you had previously opened will be saved as part of the project file. Any tileset, palette set, or nametable that had not previously been saved will be saved with the name of the project. If your project is named "starfield.nesproj", a nametable that had not previously been saved would be saved as "starfield.nam". Once you have saved (or loaded) a project, you can select Project → Save All Project Files to save the project's .chr, .nam, and .pal files with the current data in the application.

To restore your work environment later, select Project → Open Project... and select the .nesproj file you saved earlier. If any of the project's files have changed location on disk, you can edit the .nesproj file with any text editor - it is simply a JSON file that contains the path to each file.

Homework

To help you get started, download all of the code from this chapter. Here is what our project looks like so far running in an emulator:

For homework, add a new tile to the background pattern table ("Bank B" in NES Lightbox), use the new tile in a nametable, and update the attribute table for the new tile to use more than one palette. You can use the .nam file provided to get your NES Lightbox environment set up quickly. Be sure to save your modified .chr file and to re-build all .asm files each time you make changes.