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| Writing a new game to run on emulated hardware. Anyone tried it? |
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| EightBySix:
Would be an interesting exercise. Would it have to be done in machine code, or maybe a more modern environment exists. I guess a mame driver would have to be written too. Thoughts? |
| paigeoliver:
A few people have written new games to run on old arcade hardware and that is generally the sort of thing you test in a emulator right up until you are done. Off the top of my head I can think of Clay Cowgill doing a breakout game on Tempest hardware. I don't know if Mike personally wrote them but Mike Doyle's 96 in 1 multipac kit has recreations of Space Invaders (very faithful) and Super Pac-Man (not as faithful) that run on Pac-Man hardware. |
| paigeoliver:
By the way, if you are going to do this then I suggest targeting either Pac-Man hardware or the classic Williams hardware (Defender/Stargate/Joust/Robotron) as those platforms are super common and people make multigame kits for them, so perhaps you could get your game incorporated into one of them. Oh just thought of another one, D2K a Donkey Kong sequel. |
| SavannahLion:
The question is super broad and it's hard to really answer that question without getting into specifics. The homebrew scene seems to be more prominent on the console scene. Something "simple" such as hacking a Japanese only game to display English text all the way to a full blown game written from scratch. I don't usually go out of my way to hunt down homebrew games unless it's an English translation of a Japanese game. One of my biggest pet peeves about many homebrews is that the author forgets they're writing a game on an emulator, rather than making effort to target real hardware. Quite often, you'll come across a homebrew that only works on a specific emulator and specific version because the idiot takes advantage of bugs in the emulator that often gets fixed later. It really depends on the capabilities of the target hardware, the age of that hardware, and the available tools for that hardware. Paigeoliver's advice is very sound. Existing hardware designs are an excellent starting point. I usually decide on the hardware first. What do you want to write for? 6809? Z80? x86? There are so many. Then decide on what the supporting hardware is. Once you have the hardware, then you decide on what tools to use are available to you or write your own. Keep this in mind though... write it for the hardware not the emulator. It is absurd that some emulators have reached a point that games are written specifically for them but cannot work on the real hardware. Some emulator authors are aware of this and actually won't patch their emulators because of this. Pretty scuzzy if you ask me. Fabricating a virtual hardware system using an emulator for a hardware that never (or never will) existed in real life is a bit of a waste of time if you ask me. Why go through all that effort when you can go straight to the heart of the hardware you're developing on or use an existing framework for existing hardware anyways? |
| ark_ader:
After coding a pong clone in C#, I always wanted to make a hybrid game like Asteroids and Arkanoid. In this day and age your work would be more appreciated on modern hardware than z80 or 8609 Assembler. I wouldn't bother with MAME drivers and just just code it for the PC in C++ or C#. You can port it to Android later on if you want to. My 2c |
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