Programming the Neo Geo AES in C (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798190720259)

The Neo Geo AES is one of the most powerful home consoles of its era, and one of the most exotic to program. No background layer. A sprite-only video system. 64 KB of working RAM and a Motorola 68000 at its heart.

This book shows you how to harness all of it, in C.

Starting from a blank project with ngdevkit, the open-source toolchain for Neo Geo homebrew, you will build a complete, playable shoot'em up from scratch: sprites, parallax scrolling, palettes, input handling, collisions, and a state machine tying it all together. Every concept is introduced when you need it, demonstrated in runnable code, and reinforced with exercises, including wiring up the Z80 sound driver and building a final boss from the pieces you've already learned.

What you will learn:

• The Neo Geo hardware architecture: video system, sprites, palettes, sound
• Setting up a modern C development environment with ngdevkit on macOS, Linux or Windows
• Building a complete game step by step: from Hello World to a full shoot'em up
• Fixed-point arithmetic, sprite animation, collision detection, game architecture
• Optimization on a 12 MHz 68000 with 64 KB of RAM
• Running your game on a real AES console via flashcart

No prior console experience required. If you know C: pointers, structs, a while loop, you are ready to program the most powerful home console of 1990.

Full source code for every chapter is free to download at danielherby.com.