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Homebrew on Consoles Detailed
Yoshi writes "DCEmu have released an article detailing the current State of the Homebrew Scene on all consoles from the PSP to GBA and even to the Next Gen Nintendo Wii, the article explains whats needed to run emulators and games and if its worth bothering for each console."
This article should not have made it to the front page. It's horribly lacking in information and reads like someone wrote it off the top of their head without any research.
For example, under Nintendo Gamecube it says that you can't run homebrew software without a mod chip. Which is weird, because I've got a port of SNES 9x running on my GC to play old SNES games. No mod chip required. All I have is the Nintendo SD Adapter Card and an Action Replay to boot the contents of the SD card. Not to mention you can alternatively use the broadband adapter with Phantasy Star Online to boot from across the network. This has been commonly known about for some time.
I can't speak for the other consoles but if they're coverage is anything like his GameCube coverage, this article is worthless. Judging by the lack of options for the other consoles I think it's fair to assume that this is the case.
I am the author of Dissonance. Before developing it, I had a tiny bit of NDS programming under my belt, a moderate amount of GBA, and a fair amount of PC. I am not a licensed developer, which means that my work will eventually... as you mentioned, be viewed by a very small number of people. However, it's not always about that.
I wrote Dissonance first and foremost, for myself. I've wanted a portable internet radio client from day 1. As soon as the homebrew scene got to the point that it was realistic to code one, I wrote it. I worked day and night getting it out the door, and it felt GOOD when I got it out the door. I had overcome many obstacles, and had a whole lot of fun coding for such a well made system. In the end, my product didn't do me a whole lot of good (yet), but it made me happy to code it, and I got to code something useful for the NDS. At the end of the day, isn't that why we code things for free? To have some fun, and try to make something that's useful while we're at it? My main interest just doesn't lie with PCs. I prefer handhelds, and I like to have a little more to work with than a cell phone.
A well researched and comprehensive article can stand the author being lazy on his grammar and spelling. This thing is painfully inarticulate, cursory *and* inaccurate.
If accepted submissions had to pass an editor karma check, this article would have been posted anonymously.
Even if this post is a troll, I'll answer anyway. When I was younger, I managed to download a (warezed) version of psyq, the developpement kit for the Sony Playstation 1. Using this program, I wrote a PSX version of "the snake game", the game you could find on Nokia 3210 cellphones. I was pretty sure, none of my (real life) friends would care of that homebrew game, so I never bothered showing them. Anyway, even if almost no one that owned a PSX was likely to care of such things ("yeah the snake game running on a playstation, jesus it's a playstation, not an Atari 2600 you know ..."), it was fun to do and very instructing about the inner workings of the playstation.
"Seems like alot of work for no gain."
When you do something like that, the gain is mainly personal. It's a bit like gardening : personaly I wouldn't want to waste time to put seeds of vegetables in earth, expecting to get some crop. But some people like that so what ?
Porting stuff is easy because it's Linux + SDL for the most part. Optimising is the tricky part, and at the moment the second processor in the unit is mostly useless (at least as far as emulation goes) because it has no MMU and a very small cache. It's a fairly capable machine though and I'm pretty happy with mine.
This poo is cold.
There are many reasons people run homebrew. Unfortunately Piracy is one of them. But to say that people only use it for illegal purposes sounds quite short-sighted and fairly ignorant. There are other reasons people write and use homebrew games and applications.
First it is to get the console to do something that people want it to do but, for some reason, it doesn't. The XBox media center is a good example of this. I believe it plays videos, music, and can even download podcasts (I do not own an XBox, so I am not completely certain). These are all legitimate purposes (yes, they can be misused for illegal purposes, but few things can't). Not everyone wants to wait for Nintendo to release software to let the DS stream Internet radio. It may happen, but it probably won't. Why not write it yourself?
The second is to add more games to a commercially dead console. Not everyone can afford new games and in some cases games can be hard to find. There are plenty of free or cheap alternatives. The Atari 2600 has a thriving homebrew scene. I doubt that most of those games and such are for illegal purposes (yes, there may always be some for illegal purposes). The dreamcast also has a large following. It doesn't need a chip (at least for the models before a certain date, I believe). It is, I think, not that hard to write for it since it uses a modified version of Windows CE. And since it uses CD-ROMs as media, any one with a burner can download and burn the disc. Yes, this will lead to some piracy and so forth. But it also means that people are porting many open source games to it, and even writing their own. This means that more games can be played on this great console.
There are plenty more homebrew games than just clones of pong or other 1980's arcade games. The reason why there are so many old arcade ports are because they are easy to write. They are usually used as a building block by developers to learn about the system and how to code on it. If you want to program on a system that you are unfamiliar with, you don't start on something as complex as an FPS or RTS or anything like that, you start small. For game programming, Pong is a good place start. Learning to program on a console is another reason people homebrew. It is a challenge and overcoming intellectual challenges are fun.
Don't start saying that all homebrew is piracy or that letting people write their own applications will only lead to illegal activities. There is a lot of good in homebrew development. Will it be misused, yes. But does that mean that most, if not all, of it is just warez and illegal applications, no. This is the same thinking that put even tighter restrictions on software and development.
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