Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Keeping Score on the NES


@john2001plus
8 minutes ago (edited)
It has been 25 years since I wrote video games, but I never bothered with BCD numbers.  I was aware that they existed, but the whole time that I was doing machine code from 1976 to 2000, I never bothered to learn how they worked.  I assumed that they were a leftover from when 4-bit processors were doing math on calculators.

How then did I display scores?  I converted binary numbers to decimal digits.   I didn't know about the Double Dabble algorithm.  The more complicated way to do it involves a bunch of compares and maybe some division.

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