There is a new fork of GB Studio, the popular Game Boy game engine, called BB Studio that can now target the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). BB Studio is described as:
“BB Studio” is a heavily-hacked version of the awesome GB Studio by Chris Maltby.
It replaces the Game Boy target with the NES (the Game Boy’s “Big Brother”).
You are strongly advised to already be familiar with the original GB Studio, before trying out BB Studio.
If you are looking for the original GB Studio, the friendly downloadables can be found HEREand the source code can be found HERE.
There are some differences you need to be aware of when developing a NES game instead of a Gameboy game:
- You have more screen space: 256×240 instead of 160×144. This can change the look and feel of your GBC game quite a bit, for better or worse.
- The edges of the screen will be partially cropped on a real TV – this varies depending on TV model.
- You can only use half the number of background and sprite palettes in a scene. (for now)
- NES background palettes also require the first color to be the same across all 4 background palettes.
- Typically black is a good choice for the shared background color – but your mileage may vary.
- The exception is palette 7. This is only used for UI, and has 4 unique colors.
- The NES has a limited number of total colors, and the RGB colors entered in the UI will be automatically converted to NES colors when building. They may sometimes be off from what you intended.
- The next version will have an option for specifying NES colors directly, to remove the guesswork of RGB -> NES color mapping.
- The NES graphics chip allows much fewer sprites / scanline than the GB/GBC. So you need to be much more frugal with placing sprites on the same horizontal line.
- The 6502 CPU may struggle to keep up with the double-clocked GBC CPU. If your game already tends to lag when running in monochrome DMG mode, it will probably struggle on the NES as well.
- More optimizations are planned for the next version.
Key Links
You can learn more about GB Studio and BB Studio for the NES in the video below.