Thoughts on developing for older platforms?

[Gizmo]

The documentation / tools available for discontinued platforms like the NES, Gameboy, etc, has increased massively over the past decade, which makes creating games for them far more accessible. What are your thoughts on developing for these sorts of platforms (I'll include other restrictive environments like PICO-8 and graphing calculators in this as well)? If you've dabbled in them yourself, did you enjoy the experience?

[KrazyKoen]

Developing for older hardware is very cool! It's really neat to see older platforms being kept alive and I imagine it's a fun/infuriating programming challenge as well. I've even looked into buying myself a homebrew NES cartridge, though I've yet to go through with it.

[Succy Beverage]

Knowing my basis, I think it's something more people should do, even if it's not directly applicable.

For context; I'm learning coding and programming as a whole and while my knowledge base is still pretty bare in places where they really shouldn't, even I know that my code is probably bloated and inefficient to all shit. Working with a smaller amount of resources in either processing power or r.a.m. or storage or... all of these since they all evolve side by side with eachother I guess, can really make you think way tighter with your code. Ideally anyways, I haven't tried it for myself yet!


in a professional sense; probably not a good idea for alot of obvious reasons, it'd be like making after-market parts for a ford model-t's base engine.(except the ps2, that thing is still going somehow).

[rhyswynne]

I've built a fair few Pico-8 Games (you can see them here), and I have a goal for 2026 to develop for an old system (maybe MS-Dos  , but also NES, Gameboy or Commodore 64). I'd love to do a C64 game, but it seems like most of the development takes place in assembly, which terrifies me!

I love the restrictive nature of the design. My design chops aren't great, so only having 16 colours on an 8x8 screen in Pico-8 interests me. There's only so many out of place pixels you can place! But my pixel art is getting better :).

[TheFrugalGamer]

I LOVE how much more accessible development is for so many platforms these days. Not only are people keeping older systems alive and running (and saving them from the landfill), but it's crazy seeing how many awesome tools and programs people have put on them that we couldn't even dream of when they first came out. If I had told my younger self that I would be making Game Boy games when I grew up (you can see them on my Itch.io page), I would have been able to ride that high up to the current year. Just recently I found someone on Itch.io who made a text file reader for the original Game Boy, and while I'm sure that doesn't seem super impressive, the system is so restricted and ill-suited for that purpose that I dropped them a donation just because of how impressed I was (it's here, btw: Text Reader GB)

I/someone ought to start making a list of all the vintage system game makers I've come across somewhere. I mean there's always C for programming if you want to handle memory management, but there are so many drag and drop engines now that you can target almost any system you like these days and have a much easier time of it.

EDIT: Ok, I got excited and went ahead and made a list. It's on my Free Resources page here:
https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/freeDirectory.php#development

[stellarfieldanomaly]

I was thinking about this today actually.

I think people developing new games and software for old systems is great, I especially appreciate people who develop custom firmware for old systems. For example I recently installed PSBBN on my PS2 and it's like an entirely new console.

That all said, I think developers of fully new games have an uphill battle, it's important that you are leveraging new insights or methodologies in your utilization of the system or your game won't pull much interest away from the polished legacy catalogue of the system. This effect to me intensifies the more modern the console, it's easier to impress with an especially stylish NES game vs a ps2 game imo.

[ABlueRose]

I think it's so cool!   I haven't personally done it myself yet, but I think it would be amazing to make a game and be able to play it on an old console. I've been in some GameBoy inspired jams, and even just the size and color limitations made it an interesting challenge. I know there's GB Studio, but I wonder if there's anything for the DS? I never had a Gameboy, but I still have my DS lite. Hmm, thanks for making this post! I think I'm about to go down a rabbit hole lol

[AY38910]

I mean...I think juanp32 was making a DOS game...and last year I was making a C64 one...and then one of my old classmates was working on a NES game last time I saw him, but that one was 3 years ago...