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

[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.

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.

"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.