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

Posted by msmash on 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."

21 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. One of the best NES games ever too by DarkOx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That is amazing, because that was a great game!

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    1. Re:One of the best NES games ever too by F.Ultra · · Score: 2

      So Windows 10 in other words.

    2. Re:One of the best NES games ever too by Aighearach · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first BASIC for the Altair and forgot the bootloader, so Paul wrote it on the airplane using just a tape punch. (the code was delivered on punched tape)

      So you're at least down the street from something related by blood to a true factoid.

    3. Re:One of the best NES games ever too by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

      Kirby's Dream Land, the first in the series, would have been for the Game Boy. My understanding from the article is that the GB development was done on a Twin Famicom, even though the sprite hardware and CPU were quite different.
      You may be thinking of Kirby's Adventure for NES/Famicom. Which was an excellent game for that console, and fairly late in the life of the NES.

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  2. Coding environments used to be a bit less elegant by Tangential · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  3. A lot of programming was done without a keyboard by stx23 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've programmed with switches, with punchcards. This doesn't seem that outlandish.

  4. No keyboard? That's nothing! by freax · · Score: 5, Funny

    I once had to use ClearCase.

    QED

    1. Re:No keyboard? That's nothing! by freax · · Score: 2

      Okay. That doesn't sound as bad as having to use it..

  5. Full Circle then by nukenerd · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:Full Circle then by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      It reminds me of 1997. There was one guy at work that didn't know how to use a computer, but he kept repeating things he "learned" online from conspiracy websites. It took awhile to figure out what was really going on; at first we thought he was trolling us. (we used the word prank back then)

      Eventually we figured it out; he had WebTV. He did not have the wireless keyboard that cost an extra $50. He just had the WebTV remote. So a URL with 32 characters would require something like 300 button presses. Mostly he just surfed Geocities from the links on the Home Page, and he could follow from one conspiracy site to the next with the "link exchange" widgets that were popular back then.

  6. obligatory dilbert by dfn5 · · Score: 2

    http://dilbert.com/strip/1992-...

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  7. Doom... back in the day... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Doom... back in the day... by jcfandino · · Score: 2

      Possible those where the first maps to test the engine and not the actual levels that ended in the final game.
      Romero made a level editor for the NeXT computers they had, and that's what they used.

  8. Re:Coding environments used to be a bit less elega by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

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  9. Re:A lot of programming was done without a keyboar by yodleboy · · Score: 2

    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".

  10. Re:Coding environments used to be a bit less elega by EvilSS · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

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  11. i also wfrk wifhout a keynoard by FFOMelchior · · Score: 2

    it[s hinesty not tat hard

  12. Re:Coding environments used to be a bit less elega by Joce640k · · Score: 2

    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...)

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  13. Re:DATA strings in BASIC with Z-80 instructions by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

    That's easy. The hard part is running between the keys of the 40 metres wide keyboard.

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  14. Re:Image processing by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

    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...

    Between Windows 10, FaceBook, Twitter and all the spyware and marketing-infested crap, I'd say "too far".

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  15. Re:Image processing by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was given an 80-column, 24-line text terminal to the department microVax

    And I'm typing these very words on a 79-column 25-line text terminal on a N900, using elinks. It's too much pain to use a graphical browser with only 256MB ram (built-in microB is insecure, unmaintained and can't even do SSL anymore; modern "slim" browsers need 1-2GB minimum), elinks works fine.

    Still better than a modern Android/iJunk dumbphone.

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