Slashdot Mirror
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."
Will there be anything (expected to be) fundamentally different about the Nintendo DS Lite? I have heard so much good stuff about the DS, I may buy one of the Lite's when they're available.
:)
It's always nice to be able to expand the uses of hardware in ways the developers never intended.
Registered Linux user #421033
I mis-read the headline as "The state of Hebrew on Consoles", which would have been just as interesting. The right-to-left reading would be a challenge.
Of course, it's possible this challenge has been met already. Not being a Hebrew-speaker, I never looked into it.
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.
*throws an editor at the article*
My spelling and grammar are quite bad but the article made me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.
The Wii-equivalent of 'Mount and Blade' would utterly, utterly rock (M&B is a simple down-to-earth fighting game RPG'ish which gets simple fight-dynamics sooo right)
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
The DS benefits because it can also run homebrew that was developed for the GBA, and consoles from the NES and earlier are emulated well. The SNES and Genesis emulators are just in their infancy, however.
Besides the emuilators, there are a lot of good homebrew games and applications, including most of the usual favorites from linux distributions. Congratulations to the coders of the DS homebrew scene for making such progress on a unique system!
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.
The "article" (which is actually a forum thread) says, and I quote, "The State of Homebrew On All Consoles", which is a complete lie. What's missing from the forum thread?
Atari 2600? Check.
NES? Check.
Game Boy pre-GBA? Check.
Sega Master System? Check
Sega Genesis? Check.
And there are probably some that I've forgotten as well, but at least I'll admit it.
"Because we are the only dedicated Homebrew Network on the web covering just about all scenes"? STFU and GTFO, you suck.
FC Closer
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 ?
The Wii is interesting because the dev kit is only $2000. That puts it well within the range of an avid hobbiest. If I had a really good idea come to mind about a game using the wiimote I'd consider getting one.
It would be interesting to see what kind of legal agreements come with that dev kit. Can a group a homebrew coders get there hands on one and start churning out free games? Will there be an easy way for us to play these games?
Kyle
BASE Conflict for Quake 3
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.
I've got one, and I'm pretty happy with it. Right now it's got a pretty good number of emulators running at or near full speed (the Genesis emulator in particular is great, and there's a very accurate PC Engine emulator that just hit 1.0 that does most games full speed with sound). Some emulators are still coming along though, which should be expected somewhat with a machine that's only about 6 or 7 months old. There are also some pretty good "interpreters" out for it (ports of Doom, Commander Keen, Quake, and Duke3D are all notable.) Batteries are a bit of a sore spot for some people, but if you can get your hands on some good 2500mAh NiMH rechargeables, you can expect about 5-6 hours per pair. Not great, but better than a PSP's battery life and you can swap them out when they die. Like I said, I'm happy with mine but it's got its quirks so it's not for everyone. Do a bit of googling and find out if it's for you.
This poo is cold.
So it is not entirely true as in the article that Nintendo doesn't care about the homebrew scene. Not suprisingly, PSP commercial games often don't fit on its memory stick but most Nintendo handheld games can fit a dozen to a flash card.
This makes it a lot easier to pirate GBA/DS games then PSP games.
The DS had a revision that forced a new key but I am just not sure wether that revision happened to be the DS Lite. For sure the DS Lite is of the new version however so the answer is still yes. If you check the sites you will find some advice on checking wich firmware you got with your DS. Color background in pictochat if I remember correctly.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Can the average person just go online and buy rewritable cards for the Atari 2600, NES, 8-bit Game Boy, Sega Master System, and Sega Genesis?
You can purchase 2600 and 5200 homebrews here:
http://www.atariage.com/store/
A 7800/2600 "CuttleCart" (which allows you to play games from a MMC card) can be purchased here:
http://www.schells.com/cc2.shtml
You'll note that the CuttleCart3 will be for the Intellivision. There used to be a cart called the "IntelliCart" that used a serial cable, but it's been unavailable for several years. There doesn't seem to be anyone releasing Intellivision homebrew carts despite the thriving homebrew community. So you'll need to find a used IntelliCart, or purchase a CC3 when it comes out.
Homebrew Odyssey^2 games can be purchased on PackRatVG's site here:
http://www.packratvg.com/o2hbrews.html
Even more O2 homebrews, along with Colecovision and Vectrex homebrews can be found here:
http://www.classicgamecreations.com/
Note that O2 homebrews tend to be a lot better than many of the original games.
I don't know much about the NES homebrew scene, but I do know there are a lot of them. Look around and you'll probably be able to find carts for purchase.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The granddaddy of all consoles does actually have one of the largest active homebrewing scenes.
Just a random selection of links:
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/print/a/4849
http://www.atariage.com/2600/programming/
http://www.alienbill.com/2600/
They mention that it's unfortunate that there's no legal SDK for the xbox. This is mistaken, there is. OpenXDK isn't perfect, but I've been using it for a while in my quest to get my favourite compiler to create xbox executables natively.
It's been a long time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"but its also a Pocket PC type device so you get the best of both worlds"
did this guy bother to check anything at all? The Zodiac ran Palm OS. It says so right on their front page
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
The term Homebrew is probably a holdover from the '70s homebrew computer club, where the likes of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Woz and other mainstream computer founders would get together and display their own computers, or computer programs. It's a part of our computing heritage, so it can easily be applied to computerized games, though I do agree that the term is probably used a little too much in place of DIY.
What you lack is a frame of reference.
Read again and compare to the DreamCast entry.
The basic difference is that, on DreamCast, you only need to burn the homebrewed software you need, put it into the DC, and it just-works(tm). Any stock machine is designed in a such way that you can boot anything you want on them. (Maybe it was initially designed so, to enable e-zines to ship CD with their issues. The protection for games is provided by protection code in the games and the fact that games don't come on CD-ROM but GD-ROM which were, at that time and in SEGA's mind, much harder to read - Note: they guessed wrong).
You don't need to buy anything, except empty CD-R to burn whatever homebrewed softs you want to test.
All other home consoles need some hacks to get homebrewed stuff running.
XBox can be hacked in a way that makes it able to boot what ever you want in a persistant way. But :
1- This prevents you from going on XBoxLive.
2- You have to do some hacking, be it chip- or soft- modding, before you get your console permanently in this state.
Your GameCube exemple is worse. If you want to run some homebrewed code, you need to : buy special equipement (either card reader or broadband adapter) and software (either Action Reaplay or a game) and everytime before you run your code, you need to either use something that's basically a soft-mod (Action Replay) or to exploit bugs in a game.
It can't even be made permanent. If you want to be able to boot watever you need (which is the point of this article), your only solution is to put a mod chip inside the box (and thus void the waranty). Otherwise you're stuck at doing obscure voodoo tricks each time you want to run something other than Nintendo-licensed product.
That's their point : in the realm of home console, DreamCast is the only thing that let your run whatever you like. Other consoles don't. You need to either do obscure trick, or do hard/soft modification that can get you expelled (or void your warranty).
So in this perspective, their article doesn't lack that much information. Maybe, it just fails to mention that some hacking technique (soft-mods or bugs exploit) may make the mod-chip un-necessary.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The up front fees to become a console dev don't cover the actual cost to the company. The hardware you'll get costs a few bucks, the software costs them a few bucks, and just getting their time so they can get it to you and get you up and running on it costs more than a few bucks.
When selling one of these kits, N is certainly expecting to see some back-end revenue from the license fees when you sell your game. So giving away a game is probably not going to fit into their plan.
Additionally, the legal agreements will restrict you from doing a lot of things, and probably require you to get an ESRB rating (which isn't free). It'll also keep you from sharing info with others, if it's like typical agreements.
Additionally, $2K is a lot, and this is slashdot, people don't even like paying $500 for dev tools (Dev Studio), $2K is far out of the ballpark.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
GBA link cable multiplayer and DS wireless multiplayer are forms of LAN party networks. (A LAN party is a local-area network restricted to one room.) LAN-party and residence-area networks are local-area networks. LAN and Internet in turn are networks. Thus, simultaneous multiplayer video games are either single-head or network or (in the case of your Halo) both.
That's called turn-based, and very few popular genres that aren't also publishable in the form of a board game admit turn-based design.
Same-room normally refers to gaming that does not involve an Internet connection.
The problem here is that only two platforms make it feasible for a homebrew developer to sell copies of the shared-view simultaneous multiplayer game that he or she has developed, namely Windows and the Dreamcast. The problem with Windows is that there aren't enough families willing to connect a PC to the TV, meaning the equipment for four players cost well over 2,000 USD (four PCs plus four monitors). The problem with the Dreamcast is that 1. it's not yet emulated on the PC and 2. the "coders cable" for loading programs into Dreamcast RAM is limited to dial-up speeds, creating a major bottleneck in the edit-compile-send-test cycle.
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.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment