🕹️ Retro Console & Emulator Programming – NESlides

Hey there, fellow DAE student, curious visitor, or retro enthusiast 👋
Welcome to our Retro Console & Emulator Programming repository — a showcase of what we built during the third semester (2024) at DAE.

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🗄️ About this repository

This repo contains our NES homebrew project, fully written in 6502 Assembly.
The result is an interactive “presentation” app — NESlides — where the player can navigate between slides and shoot every tile on screen, completely erasing the slide if they wish.

It’s a playful experiment that merges low-level programming, hardware constraints, and a touch of chaos.

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🔎 Course Information

📚 Course: Retro Console & Emulator Programming
🏫 University: Howest University of Applied Sciences - Digital Arts and Entertainment
📍 Location: Kortrijk, Belgium
🗓️ Academic year: 2024–25 | Third semester
🎓 Study load: 6 credits
⏱️ Total study time: 180 hours

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👨‍🏫 Teaching Staff

• Co-ordinator: Tom Tesch

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👥 Team Members

• Dylan Burgisser
• Jakub Fratczak
• Ádám Knapecz
• Tuur Martens

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🎯 Learning Goals

• Solves technical problems using a suitable programming language.
• Creates prototypes based on mathematical algorithms (specific to Game Development).
• Follows programming conventions to produce structured, readable, and maintainable code.
• Identifies and debugs errors in existing or newly written code.

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🧩 Course Content

• Understanding Vintage Consoles

  • Study the architecture and design of classic 8-bit gaming consoles.
  • Explore how hardware components, memory management, and CPU limitations shaped early game development.
  • Analyze historical engineering trade-offs and system design decisions.

• Assembly Programming Project

  • Develop a small game or tool in assembly language targeting the studied console.
  • Gain hands-on experience with low-level programming, manual memory handling, and CPU cycles.
  • Work collaboratively in teams to build efficient and functional software within strict hardware constraints.

• Enter C++

  • Transition from assembly to C++, exploring how higher-level languages interact with hardware.
  • Choose between:
    • Building a C++ emulator capable of running the previously developed assembly program.
    • Setting up a toolchain to generate identical binaries from C++ as from assembly.
  • Understand abstraction layers and how modern tools map back to low-level execution.

• Outcome

  • Gain insight into hardware-level computation and low-level programming practices.
  • Build a foundation for future work in systems, engine, and GPU programming.

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⚙️ Project Description

NESlides is a custom-built interactive slideshow for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

• Move between slides using a character.
• Destroy (shoot) every tile — even the text.
• Each slide is stored as tilemap data on the cartridge.
• The presentation is both functional and destructible.

To simplify content creation, we developed NESlidesEditor — a C++ desktop tool that allows easy slide design and NES ROM export.

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🚀 Release

📦 retro_console_and_emulator_programming-neslides-1.0.0-nes.zip
Contains the final NES ROM release of NESlides.
Tested with FCEUX and Mesen emulators.

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🧠 Final Thoughts

This project offered us a deep dive into hardware-level programming and retro system architecture, providing hands-on experience with memory management, CPU cycles, and the quirks of the 6502 processor.
It’s one of those projects that teaches you to respect every byte.

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⚖️ License

This repository is licensed under the MIT License — feel free to explore, learn, or fork anything you find useful.

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Made with 6502 Assembly, genuine retro vibes, and far too many tiles 🎮 — Dylan, Jakub, Ádám & Tuur