Looking for a Console which is ideal for starting Game Development.

another vote to dreamcast, easy to work with and developer friendly...

 

I dont mean to jack the thread, but I didnt really wanna make a new one....

Can some of you lost links for how to get started on stuff like GBA,DS,Dreamcast dev. and stuff?

 

Well, if you're looking to make retro games and whatnot, you can't go wrong with the dreamcast, since I don't think you'll have to spend time or money messing around with hardware. If you're willing to forgo seeing the results of your work on the real hardware (without making some special cartridges/cables or buying them from somewhere), then the gameboy advance is an absolute dream to program for. I can't comment on the DS, but I'll bet it's also great (although I don't know how well the DS emulators are working!).

Actually, there's nothing retro about either of those game systems...

 

yes, that is possible, depending on what your specs are..

 

What about GP2X/Wiz?

 

If you want to learn Sega Genesis, 32X or Sega CD; I have posted their Tech Docs and a 32X SDK. ->here<- Please keep us posted with any homebrews you come up with!

 

Charles Macdonald's MD docs are the best, official docs aren't as good IMO

 

TmEE, are these any publically available and free to use however you want, music/sound drivers for MD? That's something that bothers me when I think about console development is that you pretty much have to program your own sound/music engine and tools to make music for it. SNES does have that XMSNES which looks nice, NES does have Famitracker but it's not meant to be used in a real game. So how's the MD?

 

There are quite a few options, with various features and limitations :

Pascal's adaption of MSV Tracker http://www.pascalorama.info/article.php?news=30
This one is limited to 4 channels for music, Kaneda's driver improvement allows for PCM and PSG SFX too.

Shiru's Turbosound FM Music Maker http://shiru.untergrund.net/software.shtml
It has a very nice interface for making music, but there is no support for PSG nor PCM, and no SFX support in the driver. Good for music, not that good for game stuff.

XPMCK http://jiggawatt.org/muzak/xpmck/
This one is MML based setup, allows FM and PSG, and PCM but only in VGM files, so no PCM on MD. No SFX support, so good for music but not games.

There is also XM2SMPS, XM3SMPS and XM4SMPS, converters to get XM files to SMPS format (SMPS is sound engine that Sonic games use). Its useful when used right, but no tools for SFX and stuff.

Last but not least, my MD Tracker. It is made for game environment, it has a tracker for making music, SFX editor, lot of data conversion and management tools etc etc etc. only problem is that it is not publically available and its not too user friendly, plus its all MS-DOS software... it is used in Pier Solar and the Great Architects™

 

Only thing I like about the official docs is the VDP section, of course when I use it WITH the macdonald guide. It just helps with clarity if nothing else, giving visual examples of each register. The memory maps are also good Be sure to read up on the rom format so that you can get interrupts right though. Before I read that, I thought that besides the first 8 bytes of the vectors, it was a bunch of junk =P

Edit: About music, don't forget GEMS, although it is pretty crappy =P

 

GEMS is not completely useful as it requires the HW it came with...

 

I'll branch out and say a Jtagged 360. You can use the SDK, and not have to spend the insane amounts for a dev kit to be able to test your code. compile xex, put on usb, run from usb, see what happens. And a jtagged 360 can be had for a little more then the price of an arcade and XNA sub, but it's cheaper because you do not have to pay for the sub each year.

Hawk

 

From what I can see from most homebrew developers, the Wii and PSP are also great dev platforms. I prefer the MD though =P.

 

Do you have plans in the future to make it available and make improvements? It would definitely be useful for MD homebrew developers as having sound and music makes any creation drastically more interesting.

 

Seeing as I have been getting a lot of crap lately that I only ask for stuff and never give anything, I'm gonna up something in a few hours that might help you out if you want to pursue N64 coding.

 

It gets improvements from time to time, but only public version would be a package for musicians which is useless for games (no SFX, no nothing, just vanilla music playback)... stuff useful for games will most certainly require signing a paper, things will remain free when no money is involved. Thing will not get 100% available in full form, well, maybe the current version(with possible changes) after I'm done with the complete rewrite of the setup (since I have less than 300 bytes left for code and things are really ugly right now...)

 

Suprised nobody has suggested what I do for iPhone devepment.

Sign up, get the SDK, run MacOS in a Virtual Machine (in XP), install SDK, off you go.
The iPhone emulator works fine with the samples from the SDK, though I have a good spec PC.

 

I make a living out of iPhone programming and I wouldn't recommend it as a fun way to learn console programming. From a gaming perspective it's poorly documented and a pain in the ass.

 

Is the Sega Saturn really difficult to program if your just doing 2D stuff on it?

 

Does anyone have a few links to dreamcast dev resources/documentation or anything helpful?