Slashdot Mirror

I thought a "pro" meant anyone who gets paid for his work. I was paid for my work on Thwaite and RHDE: Furniture Fight , two NES homebrew games that I developed using GIMP, Python, ca65, and other pro quality development tools for GNU/Linux.

Because destroying what looks like decorative bamboo to an untrained eye is not anywhere close to what you described.

JFK customs inspectors removed and smashed eleven handmade flutes (or thirteen, according to some stories). That's not the level of destruction that should ever be allowed without multiple sign-offs by supervisors and speaking to the owner of those items to determine whether the items fall into one of the many, many exceptions to U.S. import laws (which they did). Anything less than that level of care clearly crosses the line into gross criminal negligence territory.

Do you really think a clarinet or violin would be seized and destroyed based on one story of decorative bamboo?

This same airport, back in 2006, seized and destroyed a grand piano valued at over two hundred thousand dollars and severely damaged a second one. This is not just a single story. U.S. Customs has a long history of destroying things.

A good, modern C compiler is a lot better than you to find serendipitous optimization points in structured code

Provided that a developer can find and afford a "good, modern C compiler" targeting a given platform. What's the state of the art in compilers for 6502-based* microcontrollers again? Last I checked, code produced by ca65 was fairly bloated compared to equivalent hand-written assembly language. And I'm told that for years, GCC severely lagged behind $6000-per-seat Green Hills compilers.

* Why 6502? Maybe I'm making an NES game for the competition. Or maybe I need to code a hash table for the storage controller in a Terminator.

There are probably still tens of millions of NES consoles out there, yet Nintendo no longer licenses development of new NES games.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't new NES games being released.

I liked going through their piles of used video games back in the late '90s. I ended up with one of their Virtual Boy store demo* units for $20 (they had lost the key to the unit and I had to pry around just to get it open), most of the Virtual Boy games sold in the US, most with box and instructions, for $1 or $2 each (not all at the same time), and maybe around 15 copies of Christmas Nights for Saturn for $1 each, about half of them with the original CD sleeve.

*link untested because blocked here

I saw the questions section, but I found very little in the way of proof. There is no picture of a test cart's PCB to verify against, and the in article they refer to verify this claim has nothing more than front facing picture and a passing mention of the cart. Do you have a verifiable Zelda test cart PCB picture to compare against?

Someone on the NintendoAge forum who owns a yellow Zelda test cart said that it has the same PCB as the production cart.

You can see a photo of the production Zelda PCB here.

The ability and the need (programmers of embedded systems may be an exception).

That and dedicated TV games, which commonly use an architecture not unlike that of the Nintendo Entertainment System. New games are still being developed for the NES, and many are roughly the size of Turbo Pascal or smaller.

Missile Command can't be played correctly without a big trackball

I've tried to make Missile Command work with a directional pad. Did I fail?

Battlezone can't be played without the two sticks that mirror real-life tracked vehicle driving

Na naa, na na na na na na na na Katamari Damacy! (That's Japanese for "every console since 2000 has two sticks.") Plug your Xbox 360 controller into your PC's USB port, map the axes, and you're set.