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Early Nintendo Programmer Worked Without a Keyboard (arstechnica.com)
Much like IT guys, every programmer has a horror story about the extreme work environments that forced them to hack together things. But as ArsTechnica points out, not many of them can beat the keyboard-free coding environment that Masahiro Sakurai apparently used to create the first Kirby's Dream Land. From the story: The tidbit comes from a talk Sakurai gave ahead of a Japanese orchestral performance celebrating the 25th anniversary of the original Game Boy release of Kirby's Dream Land in 1992. Sakurai recalled how HAL Laboratory was using a Twin Famicom as a development kit at the time. Trying to program on the hardware, which combined a cartridge-based Famicom and the disk-based Famicom Disk System, was "like using a lunchbox to make lunch," Sakurai said. As if the limited power wasn't bad enough, Sakurai revealed that the Twin Famicom testbed they were using "didn't even have keyboard support, meaning values had to be input using a trackball and an on-screen keyboard."
That is amazing, because that was a great game!
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Pretty impressive. I remember hand assembling Z80 assembler and manually entering as hex pairs into a string in a 'c' program so I could vector to it as a device driver after my program loaded. I thought that was labor intensive but at least I had a keyboard.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
I've programmed with switches, with punchcards. This doesn't seem that outlandish.
I once had to use ClearCase.
QED
Early computer users worked without a mouse.
He had to walk 15 miles.... in a raging snowstorm... uphill... both ways!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Sakurai revealed that the Twin Famicom testbed they were using "didn't even have keyboard support, meaning values had to be input using a trackball and an on-screen keyboard
Like certian modern devices you mean?
Did you make a video tutorial?
http://dilbert.com/strip/1992-...
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I read that the initial levels for the video game Doom were created on a grid pad and the coordinates for each wall or object defined in a text file. This was before level editors became commonplace.
Neat, but I think I can beat it. I programmed PDP-8s from the front panel switches. In octal. A little while later, I wrote 8k BASIC programs with DATA statements containing a list of integers. The integers were Z-80 opcodes to be POKEed into memory...
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
Having lived when computer gaming was new it is eye opening to learn how innovative early developers had to be to get around limitations of the systems at the time. Today we take nearly lifelike VR for granted when early developers had to choose between display or sound. I often wonder how much creative programming we don't see in a world of effectively unlimited memory, storage and cpu cycles.
That's nice Grandpa.
Did I mention I once programmed using two wires I shorted together at different lengths of time to gets ones and zeros and had to read back the data on an oscilloscope? It was for a one bit computer and we considered ourselves lucky to have it, as zeros had only be invented a year or two before.
More seriously, while not very fast, a trackball and screen doesn't seem that unreasonable - especially from the perspective that I would expect Sakurai san to spend more time on the game design so to minimize the time entering/reentering/editing the code through debugging. Maybe that's why it turned out to be such a great game.
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IOW you had a C compiler and text editor!
When I was young we had to program Z80 by entering HEX values into EPROMS.
I once had a deadline and a broken EPROM eraser so I had to finish a program by only changing ones to zeros in an EPROM.
(for the youngsters: When you erase a chip it changes to all ones, there's no way to go from zero to one without wiping the chip)
No sig today...
When I started my PhD in image processing, I was given an 80-column, 24-line text terminal to the department microVax (approximately 1 MIP, shared between about 40 people). I was lucky, and got one of the good ones, it had an amber phospher :)
Seriously, the only place to see the results of the algorithm was on a shared display downstairs in the lab - which was in high demand. I ended up doing a lot of terminal-style graphs (mine wasn't a tektronix terminal, so I only had text-like characters) to prove an algorithm worked before actually seeing it.
And now I look at the technological ability of my freaking phone, and I wonder at just how far things have come in 30 years or so...
Physicists get Hadrons!
Link to the original (translated) source: http://sourcegaming.info/2017/04/19/kirbys-development-secrets/
Well, I think the point here is by the time THIS game was developed, use of keyboards was a pretty standard thing in programming. Had this been closer to the punch card era, then yeah, the response could be "at least he had a trackball".
I got into embedded development as a hobby in the early 2000s. I used to think that embedded development in the 80s and early 90s (before the pic16f84) was a nightmare, and that you'd have to UV erase an EPROM every build cycle or something. Then I read The Art of Electronics 1989 edition and the authors said that developers just used RAM for uploading and testing code. Not near as bad as I thought it would have been.
whoa, you had EPROM programmers? We had to use a lead shield with a tiny hole in it over the chip window and hope a cosmic ray would come through and flip the correct bit for us! A simple hello world could take 4-5 million years to write. Ah, such a simpler time...
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
it[s hinesty not tat hard
When I say EPROM Programmer, I mean it was an EPROM programmer to us. To everybody else it was just a bunch of wires and crocodile clips with a 9V battery.
(NINE volt battery? You were lucky...)
No sig today...
woah, you had a universe?
after 1 hour a trackball onscreen keyboard sounds pretty good
(for the youngsters: When you erase a chip it changes to all ones, there's no way to go from zero to one without wiping the chip)
In other words, if someone makes a mistake and flips the wrong 1 to a 0, the only way to fix that mistake is to reset the entire EPROM back to all 1s? Heavy..
System and method for trans-compiling video games For when you absolutely, positively have to port a game and lost he source code.
If someone hasn't already brought that up, they should!
love is just extroverted narcissism
woah, you had a universe?
Yes, but I compiled it myself. Unfortunately I forgot a minus sign in the gravity implementation so it got all clumpy and I'm gong to have to pull the plug on it. Thanks for reminding me.
Kirbys Dream Land came out way late in the console's life. More than a decade after release.
Early programmers worked on porting shit like ice climber or hogan;s alley.
When you erase a chip it changes to all ones, there's no way to go from zero to one without wiping the chip
In my day, we didn't even have ones, we had to make do with "l"! Spoiled kids these days.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I walked 5 miles to and from school - uphill in both directions - through snow most of the year and rain the rest.
Any device can be hooked up to something else. I remember misusing an Atari 800XL computer and an EpsonFX-80 dot matrix printer with tractor feed as a printing console (the dot matrix printer had an "interactive" mode where it would print out the current buffer when you waited more than a second or two and roll the paper up until you could see what you typed, then roll it back down when it needed to print more).
That way, I could be programming on the regular console (a NASCOM II hall effect keyboard, the sturdiest and most ergonomic keyboard I ever possessed with something like 60 keys, and an 48x16 character display hooked up to a 12" monochrome monitor) while a friend of mine worked on the printing "terminal", both using a multitasking target-compiling FORTH system I had mostly written myself.
Don't tell me it would have been impossible to create some link and programming environment using a text terminal or its emulation on a more modern computer in 1992. My setup was at least 6 years older than that and I was not much more than a kid then.
There's a realistic solution to this. Duplicate the trackball encoder pulses and button with a microcontroller. Attach a keyboard to said microcontroller. Map encoder counts to a screen key position map in the code. When a key is pressed, output the appropriate number of x-y pulses based on the from-to position in the map and push the button. Include increment/decrement buttons to allow adjustment for offsets from various sources, such as accumulating rounding errors between the screen and encoders.
If by impressive you mean fucking retarded, then sure. This is just a classic case of programmers not fixing an obvious problem.
I have no sympathy for that laziness. Call me a troll, but they should have first focused on adding keyboard support. That would have made their development 10000x easier in the long run even though adding keyboard support would have taken a significant amount of resources. I see this shit every day at work -- cutting corners because it's "too hard" to do the right thing, and you end up spending 100x more effort with workarounds.
HA! yeah, i don't think they should be patting themselves on the back for gimping their developers either.
https://www.xkcd.com/378/
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
You had a battery?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And the snow was up to HERE in the server room.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, it's on a reel of metal magnetic tape. Just needs to find a working reader.
And we had to mine our own coal for the steam engine.
You had a battery?
Well don't leave a hanging.
You had a steam engine? We had to get marketing to aid us if we needed hot air!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sounds as masochist as using a tablet to text post here, nowadays.