Ask HN: What's the most fun you've had developing for an older gaming system? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the most fun you've had developing for an older gaming system?

10 pointsasyx6 comments

I went on a nostalgia trip recently and got my old gaming systems from my mother's attic / bought new ones of the systems I sold trying to make a little game for them.

I was wondering what your most fun experience was writing homebrew games or apps for systems that are not current gen. I'd not define "fun" more specifically. Doesn't matter if the hardware itself is fun, very good dev tools, a system that is just very suited to your project or just a crazy nostalgia trip that made you feel warm and fuzzy. Any project where you enjoyed your time is interesting to me.

I'd include everything up to including PS4 / XBOne (including handhelds) and any general purpose computer where the experience is distinctly different from a modern computer.

Thanks!

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I had a lot of fun making a small hack-n-slash for the Sega Genesis. I did it in pure 68K assembly, but there is also a framework called SGDK that lets you make games in C.

Making a game from scratch in assembly was eye-opening. I used to wonder in amazement how programmers made games in assembly for the 8/16-bit systems, but now I've learned that it's....just programming. It's even pretty fun!

My favorite part of this project was that I had to consult old scans of Sega programming manuals from the 90s in order to do drawing, scrolling, etc. Lots of fun bit operations required to communicate with the hardware back then!

All kinds. The NES is probably my all-time favourite. Amiga is very fun. More recently I've been working with the New Nintendo 2DS XL (what a mouthful).

The devkitPro [0] folks do an excellent job maintaining libraries and build chains for retro (and some not-so-retro) systems. Drop them a few bucks if you end up trying it out and like it. They're doing impressive work.

[0]: https://github.com/devkitPro

Not 100% retro but I've had a lot of fun doing Tiny Code Christmas[1] the last couple of years on TIC-80 [2]

For actual retro system. 68000 assembler on the Atari ST is fun or for a slightly different challenge the Amiga

[1] https://tcc.lovebyte.party/

[2] https://tic80.com/

It's not an "older gaming system", but developing maps and mods for the original half-life goldsrc engine was great

The first time I clicked open the "worldcraft.exe" file leads me into the wonderful door of level design. Sadly I did not pursue deep into the field.

I used to play pretty much every silver and gold mods on tenfourmaps. Neil Manke's mods are my favs.

TL;DR: Octo[1] and OctoJam were cozy little highlights despite the grimness of the pandemic years.

Octo[1] targets variants of CHIP-8, an ancient virtual console. The language is so different from daily work that even its annoyances were refreshing. Yes, that includes having to overwrite parts of instructions to get desired behavior.

The maintainer has moved on[2] to working on Decker[3], but I'm still grateful for his dedication. He underestimates his contributions to encouraging a new generation of emulator developers. I haven't had time to do a deep dive into emulation beyond CHIP-8, but I've enjoyed making:

* A little Mastermind-like game (https://pushfoo.itch.io/safecracker)

* A terminal-like text library (https://pushfoo.itch.io/termlib-demo)

Others have done far better. Timendus even wrote his own linker toolkit to build a multi-tasking operating system[4]. If you're interested, there have been some rumblings of an October event of some sort now and then on the EmuDev Discord server to fill the gap left by OctoJam's end.

[1]: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo

[2]: https://beyondloom.com/blog/octojam.html

[3]: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker

[4]: https://timendus.itch.io/chipception-os

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