Which system is the easiest (and hardest) to dev for?

Which console systems are the easiest and hardest to develop for?

I would guess that, of the current systems, GameCube is the hardest because of all the different dev bits you would need to do anything usefull (although the sega 32XCD and saturn and the atari jaguar sound like hard to develop for too purely based on the complicated hardware they have)

As for easiest, my own thoughts is that the GBA is probobly the simplest of the current systems, no idea if there is something else that is easier.

 

Yup, GBA is probably the simplest. PS2 is pretty damn complex, because the architecture is non-standard. The Gamecube isn't too bad, just a plain old PPC and ATI chip. Xbox is simple if you are a PC dev, for obvious reasons (DirectX, x86)

 

Personally i think the Xbox is easiest for myself, but that's because of my background. For the average person i'd recomend GBA.

Saturn has to be a real bitch, i've seen the code, but i don't know anybody with a complete setup to code anymore.

The hardest, hands down, has to be Virtual Boy. I have no idea how that works, but considering i can only think of 3 complete setups (assuming Assembler's setup is complete) it has to be the hardest to code for.

 

At least the 32x has native C libraries from doing some research on the PSYQ cart, but the 512kbyte RAM is just too small to do a whole game completely out of C, IMO...

 

It really depends on what you mean by "easy". By far, the Gameboy is the easiest to program for. The hardware is simple, there are billions of examples, and nothing "feels akward".

But if you mean by easy in "I can only program in VB/Delphi/Java", then the Dreamcast will be your baby. Even when not coding for the Windows CE platform, the development environment is very much like a lot of PC development suites.

 

P.S. The Gamecube uses an ARM, not PPC processor. Its one of the things keeping it cheap.

 

No mate, it is PPC:
http://www.nintendo.com/techspecgcn

Both the Ds and GBA use ARM however, GBA using ARM7 and DS using an ARM7 and an ARM9

 

I have never seen someone complain about the T&A difficulty aspect of PS2 programming before...
:sexy2:

 

From all the systems i've seen, I would have to say saturn (its a bloody mess) & N64.

God the N64 TMEM puts the ps2 issues to shame.
Not to mention the many different microcodes to use the gpu.

Easiest is definantly GBA IMO (easier then PC via DX or OPENGL).

Speaking of Virtua Boy, I've yet to see the official SDK but the homebrew one felt very close to GBA coding. Was VB coding like the early start to GBA coding? (never messed with a gb/gbc so i have no opinion there).

 

Oh god, please don't start that rumor... :banghead:

 

the_steadster: You are right sir. I had a momentary brain fart about the Dreamcast.

 

No worries mate :thumbsup:

 

The Genesis isn't too hard to develop for - you can choose to work in ASM, C, or a variant of BASIC called BasiEgaXorz. The only access control is that on all but the first revision Genesis 1 (with the EXT port), you have to satisfy the TMSS security by writing the string "SEGA" to a certain memory location (somewhere in the $A00000 region, IIRC). The only thing that is really lacking is the fact that there isn't a fully-developed music routine (by "fully-developed" I mean including a tracker interface for creating music), but there are several tools to create Genesis graphics.

There's also a small SegaCD dev scene, but it's a harder machine to dev for.

 

Atari Lynx had 64K of RAM and your screens, tiles and sound had to go in there. So, if you wanted a lot of frames for your main character, you had to download on the fly. The problem? It was a serial cartridge and you could only start a read at the beginning of a page so you had to split all your frames and put them at the start of a page... SEXY.

Atari Jaguar with theit own designed RISC processor... that had lower hbus priority than the 68000 so you had to do a loop doing divide instructions so the RISC chip could get onto the bus. Oh, and R30 & R31 were made index registers for said RISC chip but guess what? It didn't work. Oh, they also had a pack & unpack command to convert 5:6:5 RGB into 8:8:8 but you could do it faster than the instruction so you never used it.
The only good idea was 6 bits of green since green makes up 42% of white light. Everything else, a heap.
The CD drive had no proper controller so you had to read from 16K before where you wanted and 16K extra at the end. Then you had to encode the data so you could find the position it had ACTUALLY read. I used a modified version of GCR with the unused codes pointing to the start & end of a 256 byte block then at the end of the block a 16-bit pointer to the start of the page... and it never worked properly. Even Atari couldn't get it to work... so the project was never released... goody!

 

Oh, best machine would have to be the Colour Gameboy. Man, you could get that little beast to really punch above it's weight!

 

on topic: my choice to start console coding with the n64 wasn't the wisest...

 

So nearly 3 years later, what would you say about the current gen of machines?

What would you suggest as the easiest/best route for someone wanting to learn game development on current hardware?

Xbox 360 and XNA Game Studio.

PSP with custom firmware and the open source dev kit.

Fiddling with the Wii or DS.

Or something else entirely different?