v2.0.0 - Making the build easy

About 2.0

2.0 is a major update to nes-starter-kit. It changes the build system to be something more friendly for first-time users, as well as actively supporting linux. (Though tools may not be available outside the compiler). This version also fixes a couple long-standing bugs around collisions with sprites, and full-featured debugging in Mesen.

What's Changed

• Build moved to create-nes-game; removing reliance on cygwin
• Linux support: both x86 and arm!
• Bugfix: Locked Door collisions no longer sticky, don't risk getting you stuck. (NPCs can also be made solid now!)
• Bugfix: Extra tile no longer appears in hud above normal viewing area
• Locked door collisions no longer easily escaped or locked into (hopefully)
• Rare graphical corruption when scrolling fixed
• Full support for source debugging in mesen: both C and asm
• New chapter on debugging in Mesen
• Support for creating repo directly from create-nes-game
• Chapters requiring separate branches now have a playable rom embedded on the page.

Full Changelog: v1.0.8...v2.0.0

MMC1 Crash Fix

This release fixes a rare but possible crash when a MMC1 bank switch is interrupted by an interrupt. (nmi)

As part of fixing this, I also changed the set_prg_bank() method to stop returning a value. This feature was generally unused, and it would have been burdensome to keep this functionality after the change. If anyone is affected by this, let me know and I can look at rolling it back in.

Movement and collision improvements

This release changes how collision works by default, which should make it a bit more pleasant for newcomers.

Changes:

• The player is now nudged onto an 8px grid when moving by default (Similar to LoZ)
• The player hitbox now only covers their lower half (16px x 8px)
• Instructions on reversing these changes have been added to the player movement chapter.

Minor variable changes

This is a pretty small release to make working with a commonly-used variable a bit less painful.

Changes:

• currentMapSpriteIndex moved to a real variable (instead of a #define for tempChar1), and defined in source/sprites/map_sprites.h. Just include this file to get that include now, rather than copy/pasting the #define.

v1.0.4: Minor Changes

A few minor changes to code style/etc. (May help in support for newer versions of cc65, going forward) No functional changes from v1.0.3.

Kudos to @ericandrewlewis for the changes/suggestion!

v1.0.3

Various minor bug fixes and changes.

Full List:

• Error screen now shows up more reliably when palette fading is used, etc...
• Text arrow shows up again (was inadvertently removed from screen tiles)
• Sprite performance improvements
• Fix a bug preventing the user from switching audio to a different bank
• Fix the type of the frameCount variable to be unsigned byte instead of unsigned int, since the internal counter is not a 16 bit value.

v1.0.2: First official release

This is the first official release of the guide + game.

In the future, any notable changes to the game or tools will be listed here.