Anyone know what resources developers actually used for programming consoles back in the days of the NES/SNES (and even the PSX)?
Nowadays we have a lot of resources and open source games, but it's still pretty hard to make good homebrew. Was it just a matter of the mindset of the time that most programmers don't have anymore?
Usually a simple 6502 assembler, debugger combination with an integrated editor on a dedicated PC, hooked up a cable into some kind of magic box on the target NES. In the UK at least a system called PDS was popular though it wasn't uncommon for development houses to have custom written development environments.
At that time, if you were lucky, you'd have a 20Mbyte hard drive on the PC and 600k or so of Ram.
In our case we had written a few custom graphics tools but in the main graphics were either hand drawn onto graph paper, or drawn in deluxe paint on the Amiga.
Some of the Japanese companies had very peculiar rules.I know of one well known company who kept their programmers and artists in entirely separate offices. Artists would burn their finished graphics onto an eeprom and the poor programmers would simply be presented with the rom images to do what they could with.
> Kirby's Dream Land was developed by Masahiro Sakurai of HAL Laboratory. Much of the programming was done on a Twin Famicom, a Nintendo-licensed console produced by Sharp Corporation that combined a Famicom and a Famicom Disk System in one unit. As the Twin Famicom did not have keyboard support, a trackball was used in tandem with an on-screen keyboard to input values; Sakurai described the process, which he assumed was "the way [game programming] was done" at the time, as similar to "using a lunchbox to make lunch."
Quite a while ago I wrote up a stream of consciousness impression of the development experience for PSX and later consoles. The PS2 section is probably most relevant to your question :)
