60 Day Gamecube Development Contest

An anonymous reader writes "The site Cubehacker.com, a GC development page, is hosting a 60 day development competition. The goal of this competition is to boost interest in developing homebrew applications and games for this powerful little console."

Comments

OK

[Apreche]

I'd love to, but where do I get development tools? It's the same problem with the Nintendo DS. I would love to make so many things for it to maximize its potential, but the tools are unavailable. Nintendo, its one thing to make hardware with capabilities for new amazing innovation in gaming, its another thing to restrict that potential by limiting access to development tools. If you let anyone who wants to make Nintendo DS games, the system will flourish even more.

Re:OK

[xanderwilson]

First rule shows the way: All entries submitted must be built / compiled with the unofficial SDK/Devkits made available by the development community!

Re:OK

[Paladine97]

Please visit my site for Gamecube programming information. It includes information on gc-linux as well as general Gamecube programming. I also have links that describe how to build a cross-compiler.

Re:OK

[Anonymous Coward]

"First rule shows the way" That's the nice way of saying, "Read the Fucking Article."

Re:OK

[Boglin]

There are economic and historical reasons why Nintendo will never do this. As is well documented, Nintendo's main source of income isn't hardware sales, but licenses to use the platform. It's completely true that Nintendo would have more developers and probably sell a lot more units due to all the cheap games available. It's also completely true that AT&T could become the number one cellular provider by not charging for service; it's just economic suicide.

The other problem is a matter of history and personal bias, so it may not be as certain as the economic issues. The big video game crash that killed the Atari, Intellivision, et al. was partially brought about by the fact that anyone who wanted to make a game could do it - even if they had bad ideas. The market was flooded with thousands of crappy games and it was difficult to find the true gems amongst the garbage. When Nintendo released the NES, the wanted to avoid those same mistakes and put restriction on what could be released for their platform. While the most famous examples are the company's notorious censorship, they also had debugging requirements. They even put a limit that you couldn't release more than six games a year. The result was that Nintendo flourished where others had fallen. Now, you could argue that modern games require such vast resources that the shovelware of yore is no longer an issue. However, considering that licensing was one of the ideas that brought the company to the power it has today, they aren't going to abandon it until after the ship has already sunk.

Hope the contest finishes

[Craig Maloney]

I hope the contest finishes before the next "Gamecube is dead" story hits Slashdot... whoops, too late. :)

Re:Substantial hardware investment required

[Paladine97]

You don't need a subscription to PSO. I bought it used and have never be on their servers once. It is a rather rare game so expect to pay $40 for it used. The BBA can be found for as low as $20 new, probably a lot cheaper used on eBay.

SD Memory adapter can be constructed with the correct parts and a bit of hardware knowledge. Total parts shouldn't exceed $10. SD cards obviously range in price based on their size. Action Replay goes new for about $30 but again eBay could probably be used for a better deal.

So in the end you're looking at about $50 or so as an additional investment. The cube is $99 so it's not too bad in the long run. For XBox hacking you need the $149 XBox + $50 mod chip so the price for homebrew is comparable.

Re:Substantial hardware investment required

[tepples]

I bought [PSO] used and have never be on their servers once.

Do the PSO tools, the SD card tools, and the compiler tools work well under Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP? I don't want to have to spend money replacing my PC's video card, scanner, and the rest of the peripherals with ones that work well in some distribution of GNU/Linux for PC. Or by "GameCube Linux" did you mean running most of the tools on the GameCube itself and having it mount my PC's hard drive over Samba?

SD Memory adapter can be constructed with the correct parts and a bit of hardware knowledge.

I'm a software guy. I'd love to learn more about hardware, but I don't have that kind of money for tuition.

so the price for homebrew is comparable.

Two problems here:

• GBA homebrew is still cheaper, as the PC based emulators (VBA, no$gba) are reasonably accurate and run at full speed even on an entry-level PC.
• There's a GBA compo going on at the same time. I would have to quit my job and forgo its income in order to have time for both GBA and GCN homebrew.

If you're not good enough for the Cube

[tepples]

The problem with a GameCube competition is that the standard of production quality on a system with 3D capability is often too high for a project produced by an individual. That's why there's the PDROMS competition designed for simpler systems such as the NES, Game Gear, Genesis, Game Boy Advance, etc., where an individual project could still compete.

"Crash"

[tepples]

There was never a PC game crash.

Bull. PC games crash, freeze, lock up, etc. much more often than console games do because unlike a console, which is a piece of fixed hardware, a "PC" is a collection of components that poses a much more nebulous target for quality assurance. The fact that a console and its Licensed titles will Just Work(tm) keeps the console makers in business.