1980-1990's Game Development Software/Hardware Kits Info?

Hi all,

I'm doing some research into the game development kits of days gone by, and was wondering if any of the locals here could help me out.

I'm looking for any information (links, product names, images) relating to NES, SNES, Master System, Megadrive/Genesis, N64, and Saturn development hardware, compilers, and general processes.

All and any input is appreciated.

Regards,
B.

 

Here's a pic my old Genesis dev board. It plugged into the cart slot of a standard Genesis and connected to the PC with a parallel cable. The debug software ran on Windows 3.1. We used something called the Sierra C compiler but I mostly coded in 68000 assembler.

 

I miss the days when a SDK was 4 files on a floppy.

 

PDS 1 was on 1 * 5.25" disk
best dev system ever.

 

Here's some info and images for misc. consoles.

SNES:
http://www.dforce3000.de/snes/emuse1.jpg
http://www.dforce3000.de/snes/emuse2.jpg

Misc Nintendo related:
http://shiggsy.gbadev.org/

Misc stuff:
http://assembler.roarvgm.com/
http://oldengineer.com/gallery/main.php
http://www.lingjr.com/

 

here's an ultra64 dev system, apparently a complete N64 board inside an sgi indy, which was a pretty hot box at the time (mid-nineties):http://schrotthal.de/sgi/ultra64/full_shot.html

 

This is what I used to develop my old Speccy stuff on ..



(Wired up to an Interface One via RS232)

(It's a Tatung Einstein, btw... it could cross assemble Z-80 stuff like shit off a stick. And it was awesome... never again did I have to re-load my source code off tape when my program crashed )

 

Ahhhhh fond memories, used one of these at Ocean and later at Icon Design, pretty much most of the Manchester area dev co's used these as development machines..I even bought one for myself when I started freelancing before PC's and PDS became available. Was such a cool computer.
The Z80pio had a tendency to pop from time to time if the rs232 cable was unplugged with power still on. Soldering in a chip was a bit of a chore so we would mount a socket plug on the board so that when they did blow you just plugged in a new one.
Generally though they were dead reliable and had really cool but clunky keyboards. must have written a dozen projects or more on one of those thins.

 

Personally I loved the Einstein keyboards. Still got my machine, though the 3.5 inch disks were so unreliable that no-one used them much, or not after they lost their first lot of work. Mine used externall 5.25inch drives. I loved the way that the 256KB (heh) "Silicon Drive" (external ramdisk) could be put in the machine simply by flding the ribbon cable over and putting it inside the casing since there was so much room in there.

Also had the most robust power supply ever. You can flick the power switch off and on quickly and the thing wouldn't even crash...

I even released a couple of games for it, since it was pretty much just an MSX with the ports moved from 0x98 / 0x99 to 0x8 / 0x9 ( or was it the other way round? Long time ago ), plus an extra "MOS" ROM. Dead easy to work with.

 

Some more on the SGI N64 dev system:
http://n64.icequake.net/mirror/sgi-dev/sgipics.htm
http://www.yntproject.net/index.php?section=u64

 

yeah I had a similar set up at the office, remember when Dave Whitaker decided to use my Tatung one lunchtime and switched it off to play some game or something...of course everything in the ram disk was lost and entire mornings work...and somehow he managed to convince me it was my fault for not saving to the floppys. It was a valid point but none of us did as saving source to the floppies took ages so was quicker to run from the ram disk.

I liked the keyboard too, it had a reassuring heavyness about it that nothing else at the time had.
Oh and they were 3" disks, same as the amstrad used. Odd things but can't honestly say I had an issue with them apart from speed.

 

We used the Amstrad PCW Word processors (when they came out) for Spectrum and Amstrad games, nice hi-res csreen.

 

Doh, meant to type that, I was even picturing them in my head ( including the neat trick where the drive LED glowed either red or green depending on whether you were reading side A or B ) but I guess my fingers are programmed to automatically append the ".5" when dealing with 3.x disk strings. Sigh.

 

I remember one kit (was it CD32?), was the board and a CD Rom drive mounted on a piece of plywood.

 

I still remember 3" disks being 5 pounds a shot. I wasn't a dev back then, though.

 

Here's my N64 SGI installment :
http://www.yntproject.net/index.php?section=u64
EDIT : the same URL has been posted before

and here's my N64 dd kit:
http://www.yntproject.net/index.php?section=64dd

I also have a few flash cards for SNES, along with a SRAM cart which I plan to r-e to interface to my PC's Parallel port one day