Current state of NESDev Main Page and Wiki

So, for the last few years, the main policy on NESdev was to focus all effort to the Wiki, which is easier to maintain (probably because the users just do all the work, the admins/mods just have to remove spams or reverse bad edits), and to leave the deprecated NESdev main page as is, leaving just a big announce that the page is deprecated and redirect to the wiki.

There is also a Wikified main page which is basically the worst of the both worlds : It does not have the charm/style of the original NESdev main page, it is not actively maintained, it lies in a place it does not belong to, and since there was some random edits, NESdev administrators don't have full control over the page. Most of the bad links were removed, though.

I am a mere user so it's not up to me to do important decisions when it comes to how the NESdev website is layed out. But my personal opinion is that the current situation is ridiculous. Info is present multiple times in similar format, which is just terrible. I will also mention the fact that Disch' notes are copy/pasted in the wiki, which is a horrible idea. There is multiple directoins that could be taken in order to make the site organized again, and I don't care either way, but it sounds like doing a major reshaping on how NESdev is layed out is necessary. Personally I'd rise the following points :

• I personally love the NESdev main page, how it looks (dark background) and how it was layed out. I learned everything with that page, and thus it hurts to see it in a so abandoned state.
• Having multiple sources of information is actually GOOD. I am NOT advocating the "let's put everything on the Wiki and let's shut down everything else" fad that has been prevailant in NESdev recently. There is also huge advantages that there is documents written by single individuals that wanted to give their own version of everything, and those documents should remain accessible and unaltered (even if they contains inaccuracies). It is good that mappers are documented several times in NESdev main pages, one time on the Wiki and one time in Dish's notes, separately. The information is presented using different layouts/wording/diagrams and some people could like one better than another.
• However, having the same information copy/pasted elsewhere and then modified to a different version with no clue what's going on is TERRIBLY BAD. I am targeting the duplicate of Dish's notes and NESDev main page here, as well as the mappers which have multiple pages on the Wiki.
• The main page of any site (when you just type http://www.website.com) should not be a deprecated page, period. If deprecated pages should be available, it should be in a sub-folder where it is clearly stated as so.
• If the NESDev main page should be wikified, then typing http://www.nesdev.com should go to the wikified main page, and it'd be good if the fonts/layout could be truthful to the original NESDev main page (although not obligatory)
• There should in NO CASE be multiple "main pages" for the wiki. What I mean is that, if the NESDev main page were to remain within the Wiki, then there should be no two separate main pages.

I think the original idea was for the wikified page to replace the main page, although that never happened. I might be misremembering, though.


I also got started with that page, way before we even had a wiki. I agree that it'd be good if the main page was actively maintained, or at least up to date.


Hard not to agree with that one.


I don't think replacing the main page with a wikified version of the same page is a good idea. I'd much rather see the main page reworked to something new and original, and the old page archived. Of course this would mean that somebody would need to be willing to do the reworking.

I've always thought it'd be nice if there was a centralized place for news about things happening in the NES development community, like what new homebrews are being developed and released. That, also, would require active maintenance, though.

I won't comment on the mapper issue. I don't see a huge problem there.

It seems to me that the forum and we wiki are the main content of this site. As such, the root page might as well just be a simple splash page with prominent links to those things. I'd probably make it look something like this:

Logo, possibly a brief paragraph describing the site's purpose
Link to Forums
Link to Wiki
Smaller link to archived version of old main page
Footer with host information


As for the Disch notes, they were kind of carpet bombed onto the Wiki in an attempt to improve its mapper content (which was very lacking for a long time, and still has many gaps). The intent was that their information be merged into the appropriate article, and then the Disch notes should be deleted. The redundancy is a temporary problem, and one that's simple to fix.

@rainwarrior : So for you, all the documents that does not belong to the Wiki and that are much older have absolutely no value, and should be eliminated ?

Pehaps the information they gives is already here in the wiki, but they give it in a different way, and I think redundancy is good. If for some reason the way the wiki sets things up is less clear for a particular individual, it's good to be able to fall back to the old documents. After all, the old documents are how I learned nesdev, long before the wiki was created.

For Dish's notes, I understand they were supposed to be temporary but they're here from years now. I have absolutely nothing against then, don't get me wrong. But I think they should be maintained separated form the wiki, available for download whoever Dish wants them to be (they are on RHDN for instance, but having them host on NESDEV is not a stupid idea either).

I agree. Particularly NESTECH.TXT by koitsu is well written, and new discoveries since its release are documented.

Older docs also serve to document when we learned what.

NESTECH.TXT is the Bible of the NES developer, no less. I would never been able to start any NES development without this document, and it's terrible French translation by Cryspisix (which by the way he called his own doccument without thanking Koitsu. Nowadays this sounds terrible, but back then it was terribly useful ).

Not at all, I was referring to the disch notes pasted into wiki itself. They should be folded into the articles, and not presented redundantly the way they are.

Documents that were used as reference, or may provide clarification, should be linked as references in the relevant articles. I try to provide citations like this when I edit the wiki, but I recommend that you add reference links to articles where you see they are lacking. Linking to the disch notes would be nice if we could do it, but unfortunately I think the only coherent form is a ZIP file on RHDN at the moment?

Where information is out of date or incorrect, it absolutely should not appear on the wiki, unless as a cautionary note about legacy incorrect implementations. Citations of old articles that have known deficiencies should probably have an appropriate note attached too.

All I really want to say is: Failure to DRY basically guarantees that before long you will have multiple copies of the same information that differ from each other. Ideally, one would be correct, but in practice usually both are wrong, and in different ways.

Now that you mention it, this funny black box fell off the site not too far away



Can I keep it pleeeeeease?

Ok, now this is official, I'll never edit or even read the wiki anymore. I'm just upset. It is a huge pile of mess with multiple pages of info about the same thing, or info about different things merged, and any try to change anything is systematically rejected by others, so it's condemned to always remain the big pile of disorganized junk it grew to be.

This is not the fault of anyone and I'm not accusing anybody to behave badly or to have done anything wrong with the wiki. Actually all of us worked really hard to do our best. The problem is that we do it in different ways, and have different tastes and opinions. As long as there is nobody that is devoted to take the "final" decisions as a "chief" and says "the wiki will be organized this way", it is doomed to remain a pile of garbage like it actually is. So from now on I'll officially say the wiki is a terrible/unreliable source of info and won't look up anything there anymore, and I recommand everyone from not doing so any longer.

The technical-complexity over result ratio is really not worth it.

Then I guess I need to be this chief.

What decisions need to be made? I can think of a few:

• When to keep Disch docs on the wiki: Leave them there until the standard format docs have become adequate
• Organization: We need Wikipedia-style infoboxes for the mappers.

Oh thank you so much. Now I see the light of hope that the wiki might become decent one day (although nothing is less certain). As for the decsions you take, I don't care anymore I've taken mine for the next 6 months at least. After that we'll see.

The problem with mappers is that there's so many of them than if you want to change the layout of mapper page you have to repeat the same work 100 times which is not acceptable. Also it's ambiguous what even a mapper is : Hardware on cartige? an iNES number? or a software coprocessor that handles the bankswitching? it's actually all 3 at the same time. This gives me headaches.

Actually the problem is that Banshaku was this chef at the start be I guess he grow tired of this and isn't active anymore.

All of those things are mappers, I think?

If you're just interested in iNES mappers, there is a category and convenient grid for just those. Articles don't have to be 1:1 with mapper numbers (though we should have a redirect for every iNES mapper, if they don't have a dedicated page), I think it often makes more sense to discuss several related mappers on one page.

Try to keep a consistent set of information at/near the top of the page (currently the "Overview" section), with prominent links to related mappers if strongly relevant. If a page becomes too complex, consider building a summary or convenient table near the top to simplify getting to the information you need (or otherwise attempt to re-organize).

Notice: Changes(*) that were made to Disch's notes in the NESDev wiki were reviewed and incorporated in the original document in romhacking.net.

From now on, it's strongly not recommended(**) to make any edit to pasted Disch's notes in the wiki in order to avoid confusion. Instead, edit the wiki page directly or edit the Disch's notes that are on romhacking.net.
Any edit to Disch's notes on the wiki is very likely to be deleted and lost in the future.

Also I apologies for having been upset earlier. I however see that many positive changes to mapper's page were made recently, great work guys. I still won't participate for a while by fear of ruining everyone else's work, though.

(*) I reviewed changes so that sensible ones (the vast majority) were imported. A couple of changes that didn't significantly improve the quality of the document were not committed.

(**) It's definitely up to the moderators of the wiki, tepples in particular, to decide which policy to apply there. This is just my personal recommendation.

Once the big structural changes stabilize, and wiki edits slow down to a couple dozen a day or fewer, feel free to make changes in good faith because I'll be able to patrol recent changes again and fix what you may have inadvertently broken. So don't panic, and be bold!

I know this is 4 months old, but can I bump it back into conversation?



Exactly what I was going to say.

When you click on the main page and see that everything is over 5 years old, a new person might think, "oh this website isn't being maintained, I better go somewhere else"

I still think this is an issue that could be discussed further.

BTW, I designed a few websites (many years ago). I wrote all the HTML by hand (as opposed to using a web design tool), because I'm a nerd.

The "programming guide" and "reference guide" sections could use some updating, certainly.

I mentioned it in a recent thread, but it's probably more relevant here:

To prevent search engines from linking to outdated documents directly, can we make an exclusion for the collection of documents hosted from the main page? (robots.txt or whatever)

I couldn't come up with any google searches that linked to any of these directly, I'm just responding to the claim that it happens in the thread I linked above.

I find it very odd that the main page is outdated, not particularly useful, and containing incorrect information (Is this accurate? I've heard that it does.)

Is it just waiting on someone to take the initiative to design a front page? Clean links to the forum and wiki would be much more helpful.

I can understand that a lot of people have nostalgia for the front page the way it is (nostalgia blinders?) but as someone who has joined in the past year, I have to say it's an eye sore, and not an inviting place to land as your first stop to see if it's possible to make an NES game. The forum and wiki look good though.

Yes.

I'm more concerned that it looks like no one's updated the page since 2004. It might turn off new visitors.

In the interim, I propose moving the old front page to something like "old_docs.html" and then making a new front page that links to forums, wikis, and compos.

But then the last time I asked for a second or objection to a reorganization, I got a bunch of seconds but didn't get objections until the change had already landed.

Good point, do you want to do another poll?

Maybe a longer time before implementation? Making sure everyone has a chance to ring in.

Looks like the topic was posted on the 27th and Bregalad is lost by the changes on the 28th.

I doubt this one would affect people near as much though.

Personally, I know when I first started, I had a lot of pessimism about how possible it even was to develop NES games. The main page does no favors on this.

I still stand by the sentiment that NES development seems inapproachable as a beginner. Even if the actual programming is too complex to grasp at first look, I think a beginner should get an inviting sense that making games for NES is possible and has and is being done. If you google "NES Development", the main page is the first result. Then there's the NES Development Tools page, which is on the Wiki so it looks better, but it's too long, it's not curated, as a beginner, I don't know what's what and it looks mostly like a bunch of hacker tools. This isn't beginner friendly.

I'm not sure why these two are the first to come up, but if that's inevitable, I think the pages could be utilized to appeal to beginners.

I think the main page should be warm and inviting. I'd imagine a light background and maybe even some pictures of homebrew characters. People might identify and say, "I know that game! I want to do something like that!"

I think the tools page would be for the better if it was targeted toward the beginner and waaay slimmed down. At the same time, maybe add some new background information on what an assembler is and maybe the differences in options, before presenting the three main options available. I'd take out all of the text tiles. Those are only "tools" by a loose abstraction. Most of the software is outdated. There could be like... ten tools there. And it could give the beginner a sense that there are things which will do what they want, rather than feeling like they're swimming in outdated 90s info.

Yes, that's exactly what I'd like to see.


Perhaps, though the forum organization affects a lot of people here use on a daily basis. I don't think anybody here goes to the main page of nesdev.com every day; it's more of a honeypot trap for noobs. ;P


Please become a wiki editor and contribute!


By the way, since it was hinted at in the other thread, I do think we should preserve all those documents as-is. In a lot of cases when revising the wiki or documenting other things, it's important to be able to dig into old documents to see where misinformation came from. When you're digging through old emulator code and you want to know what the hell a "Namco 106" is, for example. Knowing the history of a mistake is very helpful in unravelling it.

If you want to fork old documents and make better versions of them, I won't stop you (though I'd rather just push to the wiki, personally). I you do, though, can I request that you don't just go and replace the old ones? (Add a "2" on the end of the filename or do something to distinguish versions at the very least. )

Here's my quick and dirty mock-up of what it may look like, at least to get the old docs out of the way. I've even tuned it to look fine on the narrower screens of phones. I want to make an "IRC" button, but I'd also want a sixth button for aesthetic balance.

And yes, the pattern has been to push new versions of documents to the wiki. For example, PPU scrolling is based on loopy's "The skinny on NES scrolling" with a simple case and diagram of a scrolling seam at the top.

I would change "old docs" to "archive", and "endorsed by" to "affiliated with".

And from a design point of view, the 8-bit style red font on "NES info..." might look good in other elements on the screen, perhaps as Titles "Wiki", " Forum" (as a graphic)

(I'm assuming "lorem ipsum" will be replaced with some other text).

Looks pretty good for a start. That doesn't mean I think it's ready to put up, but I feel like it's a good direction.

Hopefully if we leave this up we'll get some of the more artistic members picking at it for a bit.

I like the click boxes that change color when you hover. I think they should be the same size though. Personally I think I'd go for making them all around the golden ratio rather than square, especially since there will be six.

Perhaps a option to balance it when IRC is added could be tutorial. I know the tutorial is unfinished now, but even a blank square would hold the spot for the time being.


Also, does anyone else have an opinion on the dark/light, matter? Most web users prefer light pages, according to this entirely non-scientific looking survey image:

The forum is dark but the wiki is white so I don't see why the front page HAS to fit into either. Dark pages relieve eye strain over long periods. I can see that and I like the darkness for the forum. We spent a bit of time here. But I think we should think about the purpose of the front page. It's not really even for us. We're already here, diggin' in the opcodes. The front page is for beginners, the new, the curious. The front page, I feel, is for someone who's always loved NES games and has a bunch of ideas and wants to see if it can be done. I think it should appeal to the widest group of people possible. Honestly, I don't think somebody even has to be particularly great with computers to make a great programmer. Even if someone comes into the community with no interest in programming, but art talent, that's valuable to us. They just need to see it's a vibrant community. In no small way, I feel the dark page hurts that on first impression, which is very important.

The reason is, presumably, to make it feel more NES-like, since I...can't actually think of any light-BG menus on the NES.

Looks pretty good to me. I wouldn't spend ages trying to perfect it at this point. It seems already functional enough, and we can make it better with time.

Unrelated: Is it possible that we could start hosting the NESDev compo page on this server?


That's definitely the case for me. There are a couple of valuable documents there though, just to name a few:

http://nesdev.com/6502_cpu.txt: Fairly good document about cycle-by-cycle behavior of the CPU. With some minor mistakes, I believe.
http://nesdev.com/apu_ref.txt: blargg's APU reference. Yes, ~the same information (and then some) is in the wiki, but here it's organized in a straightforward, unambiguous manner.

Maybe we should have a wiki page for links to docs like this, possibly with errata?

Kirby's Adventure comes immediately to mind.

The proposed thing looks fine to me, I don't care so much about how it looks, what colours it uses, etc., just the reorganization that puts the old crusty docs on the shelf where they belong.


I would suggest real text instead of graphics for most things though, because text is auto-translatable, searchable, audio-readable, etc. --there's a lot of usability you lose if you replace text with a graphic. (The existing site emblem seems fine though, since there's not really important textual information in it anyway.)

Is it spelled 'colour' in Canada? I thought that was a British thing. Also, I like it dark-blue. I would also like it off-white or gray, probably. Just not pink or lime green or magenta. I remember the old days of the internet... Everything was black backgrounds and white text. I do think bright white is hard on the eyes.

You know what would be super f-n awesome... if the main page was a playable JavaScript game, with 8-bit graphics. I'm thinking space invaders shooting at the Nesdev logo. Probably won't happen, but a boy can dream.

The Tetris 2 title screen is the first one I thought of. Also RHDE Shop/Stock screens and Action 53 and 240p test suite activity selection, but I'm biased.

In any case, I'm putting up my prototype today, as it already appears to be an improvement in at least one way. If you have design suggestions, link your HTML mockup and we might see what can be included.

I think perhaps sometimes I feel like I need to be (too) vocal on matters like these because I'm one of the few people here without a programming background and I'd just like to make sure an outsider's opinion gets voiced on matters almost entirely concerning new, prospective users. That, and I feel like people judge websites very quickly these days.

Yeah it would definitely be an improvement in my opinion. I started messing around with it a little last night. Just some really minor stuff. I made the boxes the same heights, I changed the fonts and the colors.

The colors are subjective of course and I don't even know if I'm crazy about the ones that I picked. But I'm willing to make some revised comps with different color/font combinations if anyone has any suggestions.

Edit: removed example link

I usually prefer dark backgrounds in general, but my only serious criticism is that the medium blue on dark blue on white is hard to read.

Thanks for making the change to the main page. I think this is a big improvement.

I second this.


It's interesting to see that that seems that a pretty large majority prefer the black background. That's pretty neat.

Small suggestion: Could you make the whole "button" into a link? Right now it highlights the div and its caption when mouse is hovered over it, but only the text is clickable.

I'll get to that when I think of a good CSS solution. Margin in CSS is sort of finicky.

But anyway, I've been looking into usability of this site. If a site is not usable on mobile devices, Google will demote it in results from searches that are performed on mobile devices. I worry that Google is demoting our site for not being mobile-friendly.

By default, web browsers for mobile phones assume that the page is formatted for a 980px-wide viewport, lay it out for such a window, and zoom it out to the screen's width. This usually produces unreadably small text. A website can override this assumption by placing the following element inside its <head> element:

This reduces the viewport width to the width of the device, usually 320px to 480px wide for a phone, or bigger for a tablet. (In CSS, 1px is not a pixel but instead roughly 1/2700 of the distance from the eye to the display.) And at this viewport width, the browser doesn't need to zoom out, which causes text to be readable.

Another common problem is making links too small and putting them too close together. With the demise of the stylus everywhere but on Nintendo devices and Galaxy Note phones, input on mobile devices usually means a finger. Links too close together (less than about 40px) may cause the browser to have to zoom in to confirm which link was intended, or they may cause the user to activate the wrong link.

The front page of the site is mobile-friendly. The page has a viewport tag, which causes the browser to give text a readable size, and links are big. It also has a media query breakpoint, so that it'll put one "button" across the width of the page instead of two if the viewport is not wide enough for two.

The archive is also mobile-friendly now that I have added the viewport tag as well as a CSS rule that adds some margin above and below <li> elements to push links farther apart. But the "Site Index" at the top will need a redesign to use <li> instead of <br> to separate items. It has been suggested to move the archive to a page on the wiki, with an available prototype.

In my opinion, many user interface design techniques to convey information on a phone's small screen are also useful to convey information in the 224x192 usable pixels in the safe area of the NES picture.

For the 3rd time Don't worry about it. If some small modifications can remove the nagware then so be it. In other case, just ignore it. Since it's not a business don't worry about the demotion thing.

I would think the real concern in demotion is potential beginners not finding easy access to good info and thus, us getting less homebrews overall.

I understand your concerns but.. How many active nes developing community exist? To my knowledge, and I could be wrong, nesdev is the only one. I'm sure by searching you would find it eventually or from other sites linking to it.

It's feel more like the google "thugs" wanting you to do things their way. I don't see the point. If you can update it with a simple non time consuming update then fine, let's do it. If not, not worth it.

I suppose nintendoAge is another one, since homebrewers go there and people ask technical questions, and bunnyboy's tutorial is there.

I don't think it's an issue of competing with other sites, but rather in competing for the limited patience a potential beginner has.

I can totally empathize with someone who gets overwhelmed and discouraged when they go looking for information on a topic, and the information is not well curated and is not presented in an easy way to understand. When every other word is something you don't know, it can be easy to not see a place to begin.

Best case scenario if a newbie finds a bad site, is that they try it, and then eventually come here and we have to take time to sort them out.

Worst case scenario is that they just give up because what they find is confusing, or misleading.

If I search for "NES Development", the first three results are NESdev. That's good. After that is the Bob Rost document which is terribly outdated.

I think it's a lot to expect someone without familiarity to search "NES Development" though. "NES Programming" turns up this first: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/NES_Programming Not much there. I didn't read to confirm accuracy. Probably largely a dead-end though to make a game if someone doesn't come in equipped with a lot of the fundamental logic. Then there's one NESdev link, and "Programming that 8-bit beast of power, the NES", which is hosted here, but outdated, right?

"Making an NES game" doesn't give any NESdev results. Same with "How to make an NES game", "creating game for NES", or "design NES game".

Would it be possible to target some of the potential "newbie" search phrases?

LOL

You forgot Ten EASY ways to Make NES Games. Number 7 will shock you!

Wasn't "Sack of Flour, Heart of Gold" part of a school project? For the "schoolteacher" angle, we could try to contact Bob Rost and get the tutorial updated.

Just wanted to mention that the forums and wiki briefly were copies of the front page...

i had made a change to the proxy service that the control panel for the server did not like... that was my bad