Why don't devs of 'retro' indie games just make homebrew?

[AppleQueso]

Yeah but can you make a decent, working game on the NES?

It's the ultimate goal so... hopefully! I wouldn't be the first to just dive in headfirst and make a bit of homebrew from scratch.

...So I guess the answer to the question I asked in the OP boils down to simply "because it's harder."

EDIT: I feel like I might be coming across as characterizing devs who make retro style games who don't go the homebrew route as being lazy. Just want to make it clear that I don't mean that at all. Even with high level languages and tools and the like, making a game, especially on your own, takes a lot of time and effort.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

Even if you can do it all in assembly, it's better to spend your time on the important things. More time in the design stage, or more time drawing, composing music, or coding. Making a game is hard work and there's no reason to make it harder unless you really want it to be homebrew.

[Erik_Twice]

I kind of agree with Valkyrie here. I see artistic value in coding for old hardware and it's probably fun but it may very well make everything harder without much of a gain. Unless you are Chris Sawyer, that guy wrote Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 almost purely on assembler!


But more than the coding itself, it's probably the limitations that hurt. Number and size of sprites and not having yellow are easy to work around and are probably well documented but avoiding slowdown or memory leaks look way harder. You also have the problem of game size. VVVVV which is stiled after Commodore 64 games takes 70MB, when most games for the system took less than one. You can cheat, though, I know that the Pier Solar guys have used huge cartridges.

It's cool because you could actually run CD-quality music on a Megadrive if you are willing to!


BTW, I still think that coding for the NES is cool. You should make a thread about how it's going and how you got into it

[Menegrothx]

BTW, I still think that coding for the NES is cool. You should make a thread about how it's going and how you got into it

Me2. The world needs more homebrew games, especially for "niche systems" like Jaguar CD, CD32 and 32X
The people at Atari Age can probably help you with programming related questions, there are whole subforums dedicated to 2600, Jaguar, Lynx, 7800 and 5200+Atari 8-bit computer programming (each have their own separate forums!) and I think most of the best Atari homebrew games were made by AtariAge members.
It would also be cool to see some NES demos from you in the future when you get better.
Like this one

[AppleQueso]

BTW, I still think that coding for the NES is cool. You should make a thread about how it's going and how you got into it

Me2. The world needs more homebrew games, especially for "niche systems" like Jaguar CD, CD32 and 32X
The people at Atari Age can probably help you with programming related questions, there are whole subforums dedicated to 2600, Jaguar, Lynx, 7800 and 5200+Atari 8-bit computer programming (each have their own separate forums!) and I think most of the best Atari homebrew games were made by AtariAge members.
It would also be cool to see some NES demos from you in the future when you get better.
Like this one

I'll post more about my homebrew stuff when I've actually got something worth showing off.

The demoscene stuff is amazing. I doubt I'll ever be good enough to pull anything like that off.

[jfrost]

I kind of agree with Valkyrie here. I see artistic value in coding for old hardware and it's probably fun but it may very well make everything harder without much of a gain. Unless you are Chris Sawyer, that guy wrote Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 almost purely on assembler!


But more than the coding itself, it's probably the limitations that hurt. Number and size of sprites and not having yellow are easy to work around and are probably well documented but avoiding slowdown or memory leaks look way harder. You also have the problem of game size. VVVVV which is stiled after Commodore 64 games takes 70MB, when most games for the system took less than one. You can cheat, though, I know that the Pier Solar guys have used huge cartridges.

It's cool because you could actually run CD-quality music on a Megadrive if you are willing to!


BTW, I still think that coding for the NES is cool. You should make a thread about how it's going and how you got into it

This guy has ported VVVVVV to Commodore 64:

Also, Pier Solar didn't use CD-quality music on the Mega Drive because of huge cartridges. They actually shipped a CD with the game for use on the Mega CD so you could get CD audio. The cart was large because the game assets took a lot of space.

By the way, as I recall Mortal Kombat was also written in assembly.

[Erik_Twice]

This guy has ported VVVVVV to Commodore 64:

Cool

Also, Pier Solar didn't use CD-quality music on the Mega Drive because of huge cartridges.

Never claimed otherwise, I just said that given how you can use a huge cartridge (like Pier Solar does) nowadays you could fit very high quality music in a game.

[MrPopo]

It's actually not cart space that's the limiting factor; it's the capabilities of the sound chip. One of the things the CD addon gives is the ability to play redbook audio, so you can get extremely good music.

[Erik_Twice]

It's actually not cart space that's the limiting factor; it's the capabilities of the sound chip. One of the things the CD addon gives is the ability to play redbook audio, so you can get extremely good music.

The sound chip can actually take it very, very far:

[noiseredux]

so wait, Pier Solar was released on Sega CD as well? I was always a little unclear on that.