Thank you for unfucking the clickbait headline.

I wrote the only first-person shooter on NES.

I can wholeheartedly recommend C for 8-bit platforms, endorse 6502 assembly as brilliant and rewarding, and tell anyone new to retro game dev to pick any other system besides the NES. It’s a fucking nightmare. VRAM is only accessible during vblank and will jank up your screen if you try doing too much per frame. The sound chip will eat inputs if you try doing sample playback. Splitscreen of any kind is nightmarish without a mapper chip. Everything has errata - VRAM reads will return junk once per frame, because go fuck yourself. Every color that’s not blue is ugly, anything saturated has “dot crawl,” and the palette grid is a bitbanging headache that only gets hidden by CRT overscan.

None of this is aided by cc65 being a jumped-up assembler macro. It is instant. It’s the fastest goddamn compiler I’ve ever used. But some C will generate absolute dogshit assembly, for reasons inscrutable to mortal men. There’s documentation - it’s wrong. It tells you how to put variables in zero-page and it’s lying. There’s a fastcall convention that still shoves registers onto the stack. There’s no sane way to place things at specific memory addresses, or even page-align arrays, which you’d think might be kinda fucking important for a compiler suite that supports one architecture. But I really cannot overstress how stupidly fast it is, to where checking any of this bullshit by modifying and rebuilding is quicker than any debugger.

So.

Uh.

If this setup eases any of that - great. Otherwise start with a Game Boy game and GBDK.

Two for three.

Governments accepted crops. Long after the invention of currency, governments still took their cut in wheat. What kind of money is a peasant going to have? All the king’s horses eat grain. This obsession with tax is a weirdly libertarian lens on a history that’s mostly anthropology.

Fungibility is the fundamental value of currency. Gift economies and informal debt only work if you see the same people on the regular. Anywhere too populous or chaotic requires a medium of exchange - some stand-in for that liquid value. And since it’s a pain in the ass to assess variabile quality, all pressure encourages commodification, and only caring about quantity.

Currency is almost inevitable from these pressures. Even functional goods like “knife money” became symbolic coins. If the point is saying, here is a knife, not necessarily a knife we both agree has suitable innate worth, then the idea of a knife is sufficient.

I mean how would taxes explain the rai stones from Yap? There’s these giant cartoon wheels that change hands without moving. People just agree, sure, that one belongs to Seema now.

Currency divides the value of an economy. It can only represent that total value.

… but printing more would fix problems if all the new stuff went to normal people. It would give them a larger share of their economy’s total value, at the expense of billionaires. The usual trouble is that those rich fucks also get all the new money, doubling down on how they have all of the fucking money.