A FOSS Online Course on NES Game Dev

[IsharaComix]

Hi everybody! It's been a long time since I last mentioned anything on this forum - I've been in school and doing a lot of work that's kept me out of the game development scene.

Recently, however, I've been working on a project that I think would be of interest to this group: a web-based course that teaches game development specifically for the NES. It's modeled after the Massively Open Online Courses on websites like Udacity, but (unlike these courses) "Open" in the sense of actually Open Source (all course content is under the GPL ). I call it #8bitmooc. I'm posting it here since it's not really a game, but still focused on game development and is actually open source.

Unlike articles on wikis and videos on youtube, this course is... or rather, will be... a full educational experience, with carefully crafted educational video lectures and readings, interactive programming assignments, and a complete development environment that will allow students to export the projects they make to play them in emulators and share with their friends. Not only does this teach more people programming, it might be able to add some fresh, legal freeware ROMs to the gray culture of hardware emulation. Right now, the infrastructure for the course is finished (development environment, chat rooms, etc) and all that's left is to author content (lecture videos, exercises, textbook pages).

The website is up with a prototype of the system, and you can even see what the development environment looks like (just copy and paste my pong source code and assemble it to see it in action).

I wouid love to get some folks' opinions on the project! If anyone is interested in talking about it, I'm IsharaComix in the Freegamer chat room. I also run a blog that covers all of the fun development hijinks of the project.

[qubodup]

Sounds exciting!

But...

"I have to say after four months of work, I hate #8bitmooc."

So I guess that site is not growing.

[IsharaComix]

Oh, believe me. It's growing. That was just a joke blog entry referencing how, as a programmer, I get impatient with a project that I feel like I could start all over again and do much better. Yet, if I do that, it'll just end up delaying my release.

We've all got projects like that, right? We just have to remember that "Done" is better than "Perfect".

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[Evropi]

I've been covering NES music and when introduced into the world of emulation, I've found that NES is a basically a bunch of proprietary hardware designed to run proprietary software. There is no mention of freedom anywhere and Nintendo never cared about freedom. I'd say avoid everything Nintendo produced if you care about your freedom.

That's not what it's about. It's really about the technical challenge of writing code at a very low level with many, many hardware limitations.

It's not about supporting Nintendo. There's dozens of FOSS implementations of the system out there, usually in the form of high-level emulators.

[devnewton]

It's really about the technical challenge of writing code at a very low level with many, many hardware limitations.

Making good looking game running at 60 fps with HTML5 or Java are quite good technical challenge today

[Evropi]

It's really about the technical challenge of writing code at a very low level with many, many hardware limitations.

Making good looking game running at 60 fps with HTML5 or Java are quite good technical challenge today

Agreed! The worst is WebSockets. We have seen browser support improve by leaps and bounds at Lichess, but it still requires the player to refresh the page every so often. Still better than back in 2010, which is just 3 years ago when you think of it. Not a performance issue, but absolutely critical for a non-P2P game that requires constant, uninterrupted connection to a webserver.