Game Console Programming

[Nick]

I'm thinking towards the future and I would like to work with consoles and handhelds more than Macs/PCs and I was wondering how many free SDKs exist for consoles.

There is of course a free PS2 SDK that was just released at http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16484 but what about Xbox, the original PlayStation, GameCube, SNES, N64, GameBoy (all flavors)? Are there ways that average people can work with these systems without breaking too many laws?

I think I saw something for GameBoy a few years ago where a custom cartridge could be hooked up via USB to a PC for programming and such but that lead to the use of ROMs (for emulators) just being loaded up on to these cards (which held hundreds of them) and thus to a copyright dispute.

[Max]

Yeah, there is a free GameBoy Advance SDK for Mac OS X. Web site here (http://gnufoo.org/gbasdk/gbasdk.html) But it's still beta. Since there are very good emulators, GameBoy Advance video game development with a Mac should be easy. And as far as I know, there are no Mac OS SDK for N64, PlayStation 1 or XBOX.

[Kevin Lindeman]

The PS2 Dev kit would rock, except that you need to either have a mod chip installed in a PS2, and figure out how to burn a disk that is readable by the PS2 with the mod chip, or skip the mod chip, and use a program that loads it into the PS2 with a USB cord, which I couldn't find Mac versions of the software that does it.

[Max]

or skip the mod chip, and use a program that loads it into the PS2 with a USB cord

Tried that. Didn't work. :(

[Zwilnik]

Believe me, for PS2 programming, the proper devkit with debug capabilities is somewhat useful. It's also kind of expensive though :(

[Carlos Camacho]

Aaron, perhaps you can enlighten the Nick. Is it more important to get your hands on the SDKs, or more important to study fields/languages/subjects which will prepare him to develop for what ever system is on the marketplace when he is ready to go into the working world?

[Najdorf]

Aaron, perhaps you can enlighten the Nick. Is it more important to get your hands on the SDKs, or more important to study fields/languages/subjects which will prepare him to develop for what ever system is on the marketplace when he is ready to go into the working world?

Somehow I feel I know the answer you expect...

[BinarySpike]

I once saw a computer that looked like Mac os X windows but not Dock a start menu at the bottom.
(all the buttons on the window are on the left and the same color as Mac)
The computer was hooked up to a GameCube Debbug Station. all I know of the application I saw running was that it was a game engine but as far as I know is that it was not public game engine.

I was thinking about working for Nintendo but with this new release of DS
I think I'm going to work more on Mac because I can feel in my bones that they're
going to release a new system over GameCube and I don't have enough "resume"
to do anything big... yet

BinarySpike :cool:

[OneSadCookie]

You can't rotate the world with glRotatef!!!

Nonsense, Weatherscape XT (http://www.weatherscape.tv/) does it hundreds of thousands of times each day :p

hmm, the site has vanished :blink: Darn website restructuring :(

[Zwilnik]

Somehow I feel I know the answer you expect...

Turning up at a job interview with a homebrew PS2 game on a CD would be pretty good, but more realistically you're better off spending the time on a good game demo on a platform where you've got the proper tools and learning how to develop, rather than how to hack together something with dodgy tools. If you got a job developing on an actual PS2 devkit, you'd probably find it completely different from the homebrew kit.

It will be interesting to see how this homebrew PS2 kit compares to the actual Sony ones though.

[Max]

Video game developers like video presentations more than video game demos because they don't have time to play the demos, and because video presentations usually show the best parts of your work.

[KenD]

I was wondering about the usefulness of this free SDK kit. Tinkering with it just for fun and to learn is of course fine and there's a coolness factor too. But an idie developer is not going to make money on developing console games. It's hard as it is to compete on the Mac platform. Trying to compete on a console must be flat out impossible. If it's even legal to develop for them without a license.

But it could be fun of course.

KenD