Hello,

Over the past year, I have been gathering dev kits for classic consoles from around the net, fixing them up to get them in a working state, and then wrote small game samples for each. The samples will compile out of the box.
You can find them at

http://sebastianmihai.com/ccd

I am currently up to 14 different systems.

Enjoy!

Are the dev-kits for the emulators or for the hardware? because there is a significant difference between how an emulator runs a game than how the actual console's hardware would. Say you develop a game and are testing it with an emulator, encounter a bug, and fix it. But the bug is only there because the emulator is not accurately emulating what the hardware is doing, so then the game will only work with the emulators' glitches, and would be unplayable on the actual hardware. Perfect example: http://byuu.org/bsnes/, http://sites.google.com/site/zeldaparallelworlds/, bsnes is a low level snes emulator that tries to exactly emulate the actual hardware, and has the best compatibility with snes roms(only one game will not work because the game cartridge itself has an extra processor in it), and Zelda Parallel Worlds is a complete overhaul of LttP, when playing Parallel Worlds on bsnes, there are graphical glitches galore, because the developers debugged and developed with an emulator that took shortcuts in the emulation thus causing differences in what is desired and what is displayed when on 'actual' hardware. Just food for thought.

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It's not truly yours, until you void the warranty.
Most of my problems: "I can fix that! ... oops".

The emulator issue is a real problem, but I think that most people are going to be running on emulated platforms. Out of all the systems on that page, I think the Speccy is the only one you'd stand a chance of getting your own code running on these days.

Very cool project though. Welcome Sebastian!

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Sorry if i came off as overly critical on my earlier post, that is not the right way to greet newcomers :doh , I just wanted to point out that emulation and hardware very different. It is still interesting nonetheless. :)

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It's not truly yours, until you void the warranty.
Most of my problems: "I can fix that! ... oops".

Yay for geeks and engineers! Technical details have a higher priority than social fluff.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

That's not entirely true.
If they are very different then the emulator is a failure. The point of an emulator is to emulate the HW, so in theory if the emulator is accurate enough, the results on the emulator should be the same as the results on the hw.
The problem is that many emulators out there are not fully accurate, so you get inconsistencies.
However, for many of the older consoles there already are very accurate emulators like bsnes as you pointed out, and for nes there's nestopia/nintendulator/ and some others.

It is likely that no emulator out there is 100% accurate to the hw, but the differences between an accurate emulator and the hw usually occur when you do illegal or hacky stuff with the system, or do something that demands cycle accurate timing. I.e. reading addresses of memory which are supposed to be undefined/indeterminate; or doing illegal instructions which the hw wasn't designed to do; or relying on the ppu to issue a vsync on an exact ppu cycle.. etc..

Anyways you are correct that you should test on the real hw, and can't expect an emulator to be fully accurate. But if you test with different emulators and they all have the same bug, it is a strong indication that it is something wrong with your code/game. I agree that testing on emulators and the real hw is different, but i disagree with the emphasis that they're 'very' different, unless you're testing with inaccurate emulators.

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Check out my blog:
http://cottonvibes.blogspot.com/

Exactly. With a caveat: You can't always take into account that the system hardware has been "modified" indirectly by any piece of "hybrid" software. For example, take the SNES and games that employed the "SuperFX Chip." The SuperFX chip was basically a plug-and-play hardware mod -- without its functionality, certain games such as StarFox, which relied on SuperFX, would not have been possible on the base hardware of the SNES.

If you emulate the SNES perfectly, but don't also emulate the function of the SuperFX chip in some way, a game like StarFox simply wouldn't work as expected (if at all).

There are similar instances of this type of occurrence for many other systems, especially those which rely on hardware ROMs (i.e. game cartridges). That said, there are cases with the Commodore 64 that are similar. Even though games were often distributed on floppy diskette, the 1541 floppy drive for the C64 -- an external peripheral with its own internal CPU, that could be used to facilitate DRM-like purposes -- would require emulation along with the C64 itself to accurately emulate those games.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

The real hardware vs. emulator issue was something I considered when I started doing all this. I decided to only worry about the hardware if/when I needed to, because of two reasons:

- Most of these will be run on emulators
- Even if some won't run on actual hardware, it is unlikely that the gap between the current non-functioning state and the "works on hardware" state is very large. This means that not a lot of effort would be needed to get them in a working state

Out of the current 17 projects, I know that the following do work on real hardware:

- Balanced Diet (GBA) - tested this myself
- Mowleco (ColecoVision) - tested by an AtariAge member
- Neo Thunder (Neo Geo CD version) - tested by a NeoGeoForLife member

I have just added a new homebrew game on Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGPC). The game is called NGCollector, and it simulates the life of a Neo Geo collector!

Read more about it at http://sebastianmihai.com/main.php?t=63

That is awesome! Rob a convenience store to feed a retro hand-held gaming habit, I approve

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

Two of my games are now on cartridge!





More at http://sebastianmihai.com/main.php?t=64

Woot, looking good. Congrats

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Very cool. I assume you've printed the manuals and labels yourself, but how did you get the code onto cartridge?

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

I would hazard a guess that flash carts were used... that, or maybe homebrew clones with EEPROMs.

Or maybe he has access to the original equipment used to manufacture those particular cart factors?

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

They're sacrificed carts with EEPROMS.
By the way, if anyone knows of someone, or some website that can create cartridges for other systems (NES, SNES, Sega, etc.), give me a shout.