quote:Original post by Goku705
As for legality, it''s illegal. You would probably have little difficulty finding the compilers (either the official one has been leaked to the public or the console was reverse engineered to develop one for it). Then you can use emulators to test the ROMs developed or you can shell out lots of money to buy the necessary devices to use your creations on the console itself. On the most part, these devices are illegal because they can also be used to play copywritten games. And finally, if you ever felt your game was of commercial quality and wanted to sell it, you''d have no choice but to buy an official dev-kit for the console in question. To release a console game made with non-official tools will probably get you in huge legal trouble.

Carefull...

Pirating comercial games is illegal. Using a copy of a non-free compiler, or console libs that you did not pay for is illegal. Using compilers you have payed for (or were free) to compiler a game for a console is LEGAL! Using a back up device to put it on a flash rom cart and play it on the device is LEGAL!

However, you cannot sell console games without a licence from the company that made the system. (i.e. Nintendo for the Gamecube, Microsoft for the XBox, Sony for the Playstation 1/2)
This is not with out debate though. If you use a free compiler (or one you have bought) home brew libs (as opposed to leaked illegal libs) and don''t place the companies logo on it, you are in a sort of grey area.
There was a company (forgot the name) a while back that made some NES (Nintendo Entertainment System.. the early one ) games without the dev kit or license, and then sold these games. The only thing to my knowledge that they could have done illegally, was if they happened to infringe on patents when making the actual physical cartridges.
Don''t let that make you to enthused about making unlicensed games though, they don''t sell very well. And a company the size of Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo has enough well payed lawyers to win a lawsuit again you for spilling mountain dew on the instruction booklets.

For all those that have been saying that each console has it''s own API.. you are almost right...

There isn''t really any API on a console. XBox and Dreamcast being exceptions of course.

On consoles, the system does it''s initial boot, loads your game, and then turns over complete control to you game. You use registers and interupts, and directly write to the screen and anywhere else.

There are the libs used for the systems though, that are similar to API. They are a bunch of low level functions that are compiled into your game so you dont'' have to write them. On many systems though, programmers have found that the libs are too slow so they write their own.

While the libs may seem like API from a casual glance (they are both prewritten functions for low-level operations), they are far far far different.