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."

Comments

Coding environments used to be a bit less elegant

[Tangential]

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.

A lot of programming was done without a keyboard

[stx23]

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

No keyboard? That's nothing!

[freax]

I once had to use ClearCase.

QED

Re:One of the best NES games ever too

[Aighearach]

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.

Re:Coding environments used to be a bit less elega

[Joce640k]

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)

Re:Coding environments used to be a bit less elega

[EvilSS]

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...