Like from before xbox 360, wii etc.. Many of the sites in the faq seem to be unrecognisable as for the subject they were put up their for, atleast when i tried the dreamcast ones. Also, the faq is seven years old and i was wondering if new sites had been established or older ones shut down.
Thank you for your time.
Development sites for older consoles?
None of those are "old" consoles. They are the current shipping generation.
For X360 there is the XNA, which is a sanctioned way to develop for it.
For PS3 or Wii there are various Homebrew sites that two seconds of google will find for you.
Developing homebrew on modern consoles is much more difficult than on previous generations. Homebrew GBA and homebrew Dreamcast were much easier both in terms of development resources required and depth of understanding required to make something entertaining.
For X360 there is the XNA, which is a sanctioned way to develop for it.
For PS3 or Wii there are various Homebrew sites that two seconds of google will find for you.
Developing homebrew on modern consoles is much more difficult than on previous generations. Homebrew GBA and homebrew Dreamcast were much easier both in terms of development resources required and depth of understanding required to make something entertaining.
He said before xbox 360 etc. So he's after PS2, xbox, gamecube etc.
None of those are "old" consoles. They are the current shipping generation.
There doesn't seem to be much interest in the older consoles. Wii and xbox 360 are the easiest to homebrew for in the current gen. PS3 can have homebrew too. XNA on 360 if your willing to pay the developers license (which I think is $99) is officially sanctioned too and won't void console warranty.
Is there any particular reason for the older consoles or do you just not own newer ones?
Author
The main reason is is that i want to create games for older systems is to learn low level programming and learn how best to optimise my code.
The kind of optimizations that worked on older hardware are now effectively slow downs in newer hardware, so don't expect to learn modern optimization from that (unless it's stuff like memory cache, that thing got exacerbated over time).
NES stuff: http://www.nesdev.com/
Mega Drive stuff: http://gendev.spritesmind.net/
...although if you go with the latter I should probably warn you to be wary of what some people say. I know I shouldn't badmouth people, but I lost count of how many times some things were suggested that in practice will slow down the system (like suggesting that games don't need DMA despite being the best method to upload graphics to screen, or saying that bytes are slower than words when in reality they take up the same amount of time to process with the 68000, etc.).
Also for some reason now there's a trend of wanting to use raw VGM dumps for background music... you can imagine how well that's going to work (a lot of space usage, none of the VGM players can do sound effects). Actually there are only two sound engines as far as I know that are competent enough to do both background music and sound effects, and one of them is discontinued and requires signing a NDA to be used =/ (the other one is 100% free though)
NES homebrew development seems more active though, in fact a port of a Flash game is coming out the next 10th, so maybe you may have an easier time there when it comes to getting help.
NES stuff: http://www.nesdev.com/
Mega Drive stuff: http://gendev.spritesmind.net/
...although if you go with the latter I should probably warn you to be wary of what some people say. I know I shouldn't badmouth people, but I lost count of how many times some things were suggested that in practice will slow down the system (like suggesting that games don't need DMA despite being the best method to upload graphics to screen, or saying that bytes are slower than words when in reality they take up the same amount of time to process with the 68000, etc.).
Also for some reason now there's a trend of wanting to use raw VGM dumps for background music... you can imagine how well that's going to work (a lot of space usage, none of the VGM players can do sound effects). Actually there are only two sound engines as far as I know that are competent enough to do both background music and sound effects, and one of them is discontinued and requires signing a NDA to be used =/ (the other one is 100% free though)
NES homebrew development seems more active though, in fact a port of a Flash game is coming out the next 10th, so maybe you may have an easier time there when it comes to getting help.
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