Making a SNES game in 2020 using modern tools
drludos.itch.io
drludos.itch.io
Here is an article I've just published about making a brand new game for the Super Nintendo (SNES) console using today's technology. It starts with the various steps to designing and program the game, and then details how me manufacture new cartridges (with box and manual) for a console whose commercial support ceased more than 20 years ago!
I hope you'll enjoy it, and don't hesitate to ask me if you have any question!
Or do you carts only work on a modded SNES?
These days, the SNES CIC algorithm is fully understood, and you can program an ordinary microcontroller to run either the "cartridge" or "console" ends of the algorithm for every region, or even for a cartridge to detect at runtime what region the console expects. See https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic
Today, there are several different lockoutchip available on the market, including the opensource "SuperCIC" one: https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic
For Yo-Yo Shuriken, we used the CIC chip made by Infinite NES Lives (a great producer of NES and SNES hardware supplies!): http://www.infiniteneslives.com/snessupplies.php
And I wrote two other articles like this one, that try to cover "how the console works" and their limitations I faced during each project:
- Making a Game Boy Game in 2017: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DoctorLudos/20171207/311143/
- Making a Mega Drive /Genesis game in 2019: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DoctorLudos/20191019/352537/
I hope you'll enjoy them too! :)
For the Nintendo 64, this is way beyond my current programming skills (3d and all that). But I know that Matt Philips (who made the incredible Mega Drive game Tanglewood in 2018) was toying with N64 development and sharing about his experiments on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigevilboss
For people interested in some of the tricks, tips and approaches that went into building games at the time (mainly in the late 80s to late 90s), I can highly recommend GameHut on YouTube.
The nintendo DS was such a success, and it did not have fast hardware.
Even if it's a little expensive and not fast, being able to run free games and software would really be an awesome feature. People say there's no money in it, but hardware is fast and cheap today, so any slow device would be cheap to make.
The raspberry pi is really awesome, but I don't understand why they're not making the final step of releasing a full device. Of course there are many projects out there, but they're not produced in high quantities, meaning not cheap, not well marketed, not always well designed, and often require non-trivial additional tweaking.
I think the problem with these projects is that there isn't really a rigorous, solid systems-software approach to building the base platform for other developers. There used to be an art to designing operating systems and environments/frameworks for others - but this subject has been well and truly usurped by the marketing executives who want to exploit the devs rather than make them successful.
The primary reason to lock down consoles is to prevent piracy, but also to lock in those royalties. If the console was open, presumably most 3rd parties would take advantage of that to reduce costs.
I can recommend you to shopping at Infinite NES Lives, they are selling blank cartridge (loads of mappers variants available) and a tool to "write" the game on the cartridge: http://www.infiniteneslives.com/nessupplies.php
(we actually used their flasher to write the SNES cartridges of Yo-Yo Shuriken, as it works for SNES too!)
With that you can make your own physical release too! :)
I wonder how this was like 40 years ago. Would developers use services similar to this: find a company that makes the mapper you use, send them your binaries and leave them to production details? Or would you design your own boards and use a service to create and assemble them? Perhaps very large companies could even afford build their own boards.
There are some complex/unique mappers out there which makes me believe at least some companies out there were designing those mappers and building their own boards
During the 80's-90's, AFAIK, Nintendo was the only company authorized to manufacture cartridges. So any publisher / developer would have to buy hardware from them. And you wouldn't be able to make a small lot, but you had to buy tens thousands or maybe hundreds thousands of units - this was a large scale business!
From what I've read, the process was indeed: build the final rom, have it pass a thorough QA session at Nintendo, pay for the cartridges and Nintendo will build them for you.
For the NES era, several companies did manage to make their own mappers. For example Konami designed a mapper to add extra audio channels in a NES cart. But, for some reasons, Nintendo didn't allow third party mappers in US and European releases. That's why only Japanese version of games like Castlevania III have such mappers "not made by Nintendo".
And of course, many unlicensed companies did create their own cartridges from the ground up, like Codemaster and Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree. They were not big companies at the time. So I think even middle sized ones could create their own cartridges and mappers if they had the skill inhouse!
Certainly very impressive :)
He live-streams his progress weekly: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZr5Jc9hj6z5mlAYxELq_xQ