Early Nintendo Programmer Worked Without a Keyboard (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday April 27, 2017 @05:20AM from the within-the-constraints dept.

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."

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Re:A lot of programming was done without a keyboar by Roger+W+Moore · 2017-04-27 10:00 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Well, I think the point here is by the time THIS game was developed, use of keyboards was a pretty standard thing in programming.
That just shows the only hardship they had to deal with was their own short sightedness by not providing a simple means to program the device using available technology. That's hardly something to brag about.