Slashdot Mirror
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!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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
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?
But at least had a keyboard.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
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.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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!
Early computers had a switchboard instead of a keyboard, and the mice had to compete with the rats for nesting space.
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".
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.
uphill... both ways!!!
When I was a kid I also had to cross a hill. Uphill both ways, and walking downhill right after doesn't actually make the uphill part any easier. Luckily I only had to walk 1 mile.
it[s hinesty not tat hard
You just took things too far. "Early computers did not have switchboards because most of them were women". See what I did there?
The era of the current topic is the Nintendo NES/Famicom/GameBoy period. When freeze128 said "Early computer users worked without a mouse", I replied that computers of that same era at least had a keyboard, unlike that early Nintendo programmer.
#DeleteFacebook
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...
after 1 hour a trackball onscreen keyboard sounds pretty good
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.