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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

A Starfox cartridge was used to make a homebrew devkit for SNES Doom

The development was challenging for a few reasons, notably there were no development systems for the SuperFX chip at the time. I wrote a complete set of tools - assembler, linker and debugger - before I could even start on the game itself.

The development hardware was a hacked-up Star Fox cartridge (because it included the SuperFX chip) and a modified pair of game controllers that were plugged into both SNES ports and connected to the Amiga's parllel port. A serial protocol was used to communicate between the two for downloading code, setting breakpoints, inspecting memory, etc

https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/

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It is really asstonishing how dev hostile those game consoles were. Like, "we know how to do it but invent it yourself".

Nintendo could have released sane sdk:s and not make every dev studio figure out what works. Like, maybe share a toy version of the source of Super Mario and Zelda or whatever to show how an engine is made.

The games would surely have been prettier as a result.

They did have SDKs (well, an assembler and linker) as well as devkits and extensive documentation. The problem was you had to enter an extensive agreement and pay a hefty amount for the privilege of using them. It made sense in that era, as you had to have the cash on hand to order a minimum of 10,000 cartridges (also manufactured by Nintendo) anyway.

Nintendo was dev hostile as well.

In Argonaut's case, Starfox 2 was canceled (but still completed) because they didn't want SNES 3D games competing with the soon-to-be-released N64

And then they shot down Argonauts 3D platformer demo, saying they would make their own, causing them to create Croc instead.

In a way it made sense because you didn't want to end up with Sega where they kept trying to extend the old platforms. But they weren't looking to create a new in-between or add-on system like the Sega CD or 32X

TBF you can’t exactly begrudge Nintendo for wanting to end up with SM64 instead of Croc.

That version of history is in contention. The devs of Croc are adamant they basically invented 3D platformers and Nintendo stole their ideas, but the timelines with the first builds of Super Mario 64 rule in favour of Nintendo.

Oh I didn’t realize they made Croc. That was a good game.

> It is really asstonishing how dev hostile those game consoles were...

What's actually astonishing is the range of things that seem strange at first, but are actually very clear and logical, IF you also understand the historical context. The path that led reasonable people to make these decisions. Here, see the comments elsewhere about how licensing worked for physical cartridges (they were expensive -- open source cartridge games doesn't make much sense). Plus a dash of copy protection and especially, read into the video game crash of the 80s. This was part of the plan to avoid shovelware (which arguably made Nintendo the success it was).

> The games would surely have been prettier as a result.

What are you basing this on? 80s and 90s era console hardware was quite restricted, and the software we got did I think all that the hardware could do.

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