Sorry If I am in wrong place to ask this:
I was wondering, how software/games were developed/made for consoles in the past, using what: a PC, Mac or maybe C64 ? maybe some workstation ?
The consoles can be Atari 2600, NES, Sega Genesis and PS1.
I know that there can/could be many ways to do this, but what were the go-to ways they developed games for these consoles?
Thanks in advance.
For PS1, the devkits were mostly in the forms of ISA and PCI cards, with software for Dos/Win3.x/Win9x.
Graphic software was available for SGI workstations and audio software for PowerPC Macs of the time, with dedicated NuBus and PCI cards.
At some point, development of SNES games was also done on Macintoshes, I believe.
As an evidence, there's at least a Nintendo emulator for the platform (Silhouette).
https://www.zophar.net/macintosh/snes/silhouette.html
https://archive.org/details/silhouette-snes-mac-dev-kit
Anyway, game developers of other studios likely wrote their own tools loosely based on the SNES documentation.
It's hard to say how exactly things were done after so many years.
The Argonaut people (Starfox series, SuperFX chip) started with nothing more than this.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-04 … ing-of-star-fox
Over the years, most SNES programmers tried to bypass the slow CPU more and more, though,
by using DMA, the SNES chipset and special chips (SuperFX, Mario-1 etc).
Now to the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis..
Some official dev boards were made for 386/486 PCs.
They had software for both MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 (see Shane McRetro's YT videos).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak-G2ouUytk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9zQueGP4iI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMvG31AtV0U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLfNgKutK-g
The Sega TeraDrive and Amstrad MegaPC also contained MegaDrive hardware, by the way.
The Teradrive could even access the MD hardware!
Nowadays, you can easily program little games and applications for the MD/Genesis in BasiEgaXorz and run the off a flash cart.. 😁
https://segaretro.org/BasiEgaXorz
Edit: I forgot to mention something! Developers used to use their own flash carts..
They either used flash carts based on several UV-erasable EPROMs that they programmed with a prommer (EPROM programmer) - or -
they used RAM-based flash carts; EPROM simulators, so to say. These could either work as simple subsitutes for EPROMs (using battery-packed RAM chips)
or in the form of more sophisticated models, which could be connected to a PC and modified on-the-fly (while the cartridge was running in the console).
rmay635703 wrote on 2020-06-16, 20:12:
Wow, thanks a lot for sharing! Very interesting stuff! 😎
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