I'm tinkering with a PlayStation homebrew (voxel space renderer) and development for fifth generation consoles has never been easier.
Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded work.
I am still amazed my own minimalist PS1 tutorial series [1] became as popular as it did, given that prior to it basically all learning material on the internet was written around the decent-for-the-time-but-horrible-now Sony SDK and often based on 30-year-old example code full of 30-year-old C practices (in particular the complete disregard for aliasing and concurrency, which resulted in plenty of headaches once people started using those ancient libraries and example code with modern GCC). We even have bleeding-edge C++ SDK options [2] complete with an STL and coroutine support, so if anybody here wants to try their hand at PS1 homebrew development I would highly encourage checking out the modern tooling we have now.
[1] https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal
[2] https://github.com/grumpycoders/pcsx-redux/tree/main/src/mip...
To put this into perspective for youngsters, that horrible Sony SDK was considered a wonder for its time, and what kickstarted the movement away from Assembly into C for home console development, as main language.
Until then, only arcades had already made the switch.
On PS2, PS2Linux, Dreamcast there was already C++ support, by the way.
I’ve started to adapt my historic accounting of gaming away from hardware centric (console generations) and toward languages and compilers, and the force-multiplication they provided to developers which is tangibly evident in the products. Though these do correlate strongly with orders of magnitude of RAM being made available.
- Physical logic gate era of gaming.
- Assembly era
- C era
- OOP era
- Interpreted languages and game logic living in scripts on top of c++ engines
- Fully Gen-AI era?
FWIW, interpreted languages living on top of a native code engine has been a pretty common theme throughout. It goes back to early PC days (when PC meant IBM, Apple II, etc), where it was common that engine would be written in ASM, but it would implement a VM with all of the game business logic would exist to ease porting to very differnt systems. Almost all the early LucasArts games were written this way (hence ScummVM), Another World, the Sierra Games, etc.
Zork comes to mind. I am pretty sure there are plenty more really early.
> Fully Gen-AI era?
Yeah, no.
Your historic accounting is not to be trusted by any means if “gen-AI era” is something that you really believe is happening.
It's happening whether you like it not, because billionaires love gen-AI and they're the ones who decide what gets made.
I've been on-and-off writing a Zig library for writing N64 games and it's indeed pretty wild how getting working code was as simple as telling the compiler to use LLVM's MIPS III target.
Of course, getting working code that actually does anything useful is a much different story (it's taking multiple days just to write the wrappers for RDP commands, for example; lots of cross-referencing between N64Brew wiki pages v. official SGI docs v. libdragon source code v. Peter Lemon's assembly code to figure out what all the different bitpacked fields really mean and how to best represent them), but it still feels magical that I can just use an ordinary toolchain and not some ancient proprietary monstrosity.
There is something so charming about the N64/PS1 era. They were so unique in their own right and you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was. Two radically different systems at the dawning of 3D console games.
I bought a MiSTer for me and my son and we played the heck out of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Golf. I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore
> "gaming is dead now"
One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of AAA games.
In reality, the gaming landscape has never been better, as game production has expanded in several directions:
- The barrier to entry into game development has been lowered; People who are talented in design but not programming now have the opportunity to create games
- AAA budgets have increased; those who enjoy large-scale productions will find increasingly large games
- There is still a market for old-school games, so plenty of (especially smaller) companies produce retromodern games
Heck, they even still produce commercial Commodore 64 games o_O
Of course, there is less room for radical innovation, but people do not play only radically innovative games. And regardless, innovation still exists today, especially in smaller-scale productions.
My take is a bit reductionist but I have found that there is this huge divide nowadays between the AAA top of the town and the indie games at the bottom.
AAA you know what you are getting, big brash but usually really polished cutting edge stuff but also designed by commitment.
Then you have indie games that are high ambition but also very limited in what they can achieve. So you get a lot of things with brilliant ideas but dont always stick the landing. Two recent ones I have been going through are Skate story and Gecko gods. Both have wonder ambition but you keep hitting those issues when you realise, yeah it is an indie title.
There is a middle ground but it is so hard to find in between those two extremes.
Maybe that's why it's dead. Do you know what triggered the first video game crash? It was a flood of so low quality games that people gave up on the whole video gaming industry. No one wanted a game or a console until Nintendo rescued the industry with the NES lockout chip enforcing their quality control.
it should instead say "AAA gaming is dead now"
All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm.
Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they are gonna get recognized by the world at large and find success, just like small budget films.
My game library gets older by the day and I prefer it that way, but love it when an indie game bubbles to the surface and gets beloved by enough fans to break into the news cycle. Itch.io is the only place I look for games anymore unless something I need for the collection hits GoG finally.
This is a very rose tinted take. AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s.
Go look up the development of Sonic Xtreme in the 90s. A brutal development process in the 90s that led to more thsn half the development team camping out in Redwood City Sega office building for months until they all got so sick half the team went on medical leave. Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
>Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
Going by interviews with the team over the decades, they had clashing personalities and poor leadership.
> AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s.
Honestly it's probably always been brutal going back even to the early days of Atari. Companies like EA have spent three decades destroying beloved studios for profit, only to now be chewed up and spit out by PE/VC bastards themselves. A fitting end really.
But they released the game and the game was good. Unlike today.
> it should instead say "AAA gaming is dead now"
> All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm.
The production ethics and the product are two distinct aspects.
Regarding the product itself, definitely the AAA gaming industry is, like Hollywood, a dysfunctional production model, but that doesn't mean that it's dead in terms of quality - some franchises do maintain high quality (Doom has been exceptional in this sense) but even in terms of new IP, in average, there at least couple of high quality entries in average, every year. Things could go better, but they're certainly far from "dead".
Main issue with AAA gaming was studios consulting people who wanted to tell gamers what they should want, using their capital on paying influencers and media to demonize said gamers for rejecting their games and so on.
That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market.
A big reason why many east asian game studios are doing so well by rejecting that tried and failed formula from the West.
You don't have to go full GamerGate non-sense to find plenty of issues that are hurting the AAA market. Private equity, shareholders, and greed have been far more damaging to gaming.
why can't you see that their greed has enabled the dynamics that brought AAA market to its where it is ? you dont think PE has influence on media with their vast resources ?
PE wants profit, why would they hurt profit?
> That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market.
Honestly, the hell kinda remark is that?
It’s nothing to do with sexuality or “companies telling you what you want” but everything to do with companies putting out complete and utter slop and people ACTUALLY buying it all. They wouldn’t waste all that time and investment money if they knew there wasn’t a market for it, but guess what? There is.
Gamers seem to have the memory span of a goldfish. Horse armour? Bad. GTA VI at 80 bucks and no physical release on consoles? OMG YAAAAAASSSS GIVE ME MORE OF THE SAME HOOKER-SEX SIMULATOR WITH CRIMINAL ACTS SPRINKLED ON TOP!!!
Don’t complain about gaming companies’ behaviour if you keep giving your money to them.
Hell with emulation the sky is the limit now too. I’d be bummed if my steam account exploded today but I’ve got countless other options available to me. Whenever I hear people act all snobby and claim there’s nothing to play today i tell them stop playing modern games and go play all the old games that are allegedly so much better and perfect. How they can’t find anything among modern Indies in particular is beyond me, but hey, emulation’s right there waiting for them. Hell I have RetroArch on my iPhone. I was playing a PSP game all last week on mine.
I love that. My wife and I are hopefully having kids soon and that's one thing I really want to encourage. Not to say that modern games aren't any good, but there's an increasing lack of respect for the player's time and wallet. The goal is shifting to maximizing value because they're getting more expensive to produce, but increasing the game price itself is a cardinal sin. Not to mention that live service games just out-earn non-service ones.
I hope it works out. I can see it working in the reverse: I play n64/ps1/ps2/gamecube games with my kid, they go to school and their friends are playing fortnight or valorant, and then you become the bad guy for trying to be an obstacle in that.
Don't forget NES, SNES and Genesis. 2d games are way easier for small kids like 3-4yo. I personally would recommend Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in World of Illusions as you do Coop and can save the kid a lot.
I was surprised that children that didn't grow up with the graphic revolution, does not seem to care about graphics. They don't seem to care they are playing 40-30 year old games.
One thing that's absolutely shocking is how "hard" it is to actually play games these days. Sit down with anything modern and between software updates, EULAs, load times, network congestion, etc. it can easily be 15-20 minutes before you actually do something; especially if you're an infrequent player.
Pop in a game on N64/Gamecube and you're controlling the character within 10 seconds every time.
The modern upgrades for those generations really make them great - the 8BitDo kit to make an N64 controller wireless, N64 Summercarts, replacing the optical drive in Gamecubes with a memory card reader...
of course with the GameCube your 10 seconds is significantly Ur into with the big long dyobololodololo dobololodelolodelolode PLOP
That's true for the big-advertising-budget AAA slop games. Go do a search for "best indie games 2025" and you'll find more amazing games made just last year than you could spend several whole years playing.
Let your kid go over to their friend's house to play Fortnite or Valorant. And let your kid's friend come over to yours to play Mario Kart.
I think as adults we get locked into a few things. I remember as a kid I would play anything I had access to and liked. Now it's more of one or two games at a time.
I dug out the Wii I bought for my daughter for my 6yo grandson. He thinks it's great...it's about the only thing that he'll put down Roblox for.
I heard that Roblox is itself a slop platform to the point where someone AI copies every single popular game onto Roblox full of micro transactions, and the Devs of these games are saying they'd rather you pirate the game than play the crappy Roblox knock-off of it.
Wouldn't surprise me. It's an endless stream of ruthlessly annoying, seizure inducing 'games' seemingly trying to one-up each other as to how over the top silly their visuals and audio track can be while having virtually the same gameplay for Every Single Game. Add to that, it's filled with every dark pattern imaginable to try and trick kids in to paying for something, anything. Seems like it was from the start designed to be the perfect slop utopia.
Btw they're getting sued for actual child labor violations as it turns out all the dark patterns they used to entice children to make games for them amounted to actual employment, paid in company scrip which is obviously illegal and super illegal when the employee is a child.
The only thing surprising about that is someone might be held accountable. Maybe good news?
As a lifer of gaming (with a wife with similar tastes), prior to having kids my friends and I would have the discussions about "raising our kids right on the old games". I can't claim to be some classic purist, my last 25 years of gaming has been 90%+ Halo, with other competitive shooters and hardcore racing sims, but we still own almost all of our old systems.
My oldest is 7, and my youngest almost 5, and they came into gaming in a round-about way. My sister was visiting when the oldest was 3 or 4, and asked to play "an old Sonic 3D game". So, I pulled the Dreamcast out of storage, hooked everything up, and she played for all of 15 minutes before getting bored. However, my daughter was enamored. Immediately asked to play and even knowing how janky old Sonic was, I obliged.
Honestly, the rest is history. I'm not exaggerating when I say that our living room TV currently has a Dreamcast, a Gamecube, an Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and Switch hooked up to it. Both girls are huge Sonic fans, and play everything from rereleases of the Genesis games, to every brand new Sonic game that comes out, along with a whole mix of other age appropriate games (3D Marios, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart all being staples in our household).
My point in all of this is that if you expose them to the older stuff at a young age and it clicks, they'll explore the gaming landscape in their own way. I've also got an 11 year old brother that plays Fortnite with his friends every day, but also is trying to collect every single Lego game that's come out since they started the Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. series of games. Kids will like what they're going to like, but having parents that are enthusiastic about the breadth of what the medium has to offer will encourage them to dig being the modern offerings.
>I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore
This is interesting, as I was about to say that gaming has never been more alive than it is now - but it's true that at least the developments in hardware are not nearly as exciting as they used to be in the past. Maybe that's what he's feeling?
The hardware thing is a yes and no type of deal. Yes next gen hardware is largely boring but retro gaming hardware is amazing right now. I recently acquired a r36s which is an amazing system and apparently can also run things like Undertale or Stardew valley (yet to try out this part). I'm having a blast playing the Pokemon games.
I'm a bit of an old-timer now (almost 45), but I enjoy a lot of the classics on GOG. And at a price that can't be beat. Totally no interest in playing modern games.
“Old timer” “44 years old”
Now come on. The greybeard act was never believable nor interesting.
I demand Sega Saturn representation in this list!
> you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was
I always felt the same about the look of PS2 games
I grew up playing diablo II and super smash bros (super nintendo before that!). While I don't have as much time for it these days, gaming couldn't be farther from dead, IMO. There are incredible games and worlds being created both from AAA and indie studios alike.
It's interesting people have this perspective, there are some Numbers that support it. But there endless layoffs, studios closing and it's impossible to get a game dev related job at the moment.
How did they do it back in the day? Was basically everything from the tooling etc. just created inhouse from scratch?
The same way it's done now with current generation consoles: the manufacturer would provide you with SDKs and development hardware once you paid them a decent chunk of money and signed an NDA. Prior to the fifth generation it was common for the SDK to be just an assembler, debugger and register-level hardware documentation, leaving the implementation of a kernel and game engine up to the game developer.
Sony however decided to provide a full C toolchain based on GCC as well as a set of very high level libraries that abstracted away basically all aspects of the PS1 [1], all the way up to implementing a ready-to-go 3D engine and MIDI sequencer. This was an unpopular move as the libraries were slow, inefficient and most game developers were used to having full control over the hardware, but it also allowed inexperienced devs to get started quickly (as proven by the thousands of low budget PS1 titles that used the high level APIs) and eventually contributed to the popularity of the console over its peers with worse tooling.
Sony would eventually go on to release some slightly lower level documentation for certain aspects of the console as well as APIs that better mapped to how the hardware actually worked under the hood. It wasn't however until years later that the hardware would be fully reverse engineered at the register level [2], and it took even longer for most homebrew to move away from the official SDK (which only really started happening a few years ago as accurate emulators and homebrew SDKs started popping up).
[1] https://psx.schnappy.xyz/sdk/Psy-Q/DOCS/LibOver47.pdf
[2] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/
Crazy then that the Bleem and Bleemcast emulator were so early!
It may actually be helpful to emulation. There's a technique called High-Level Emulation, where instead of emulating the hardware registers that are twiddled by the SDK function, you recognize the call to the SDK function itself and emulate the whole function in one go. This can provide a massive speedup over low-level emulation, but relies on the game primarily using the SDK. This was also used to emulate the N64 on Windows 95.
https://www.retroreversing.com/playstation-2-development-har...
The Dreamcast dev kits came with CodeWarrior as an IDE iirc.
They had stuff, but it was all proprietary. The N64 was a stripped-down implementation of the technology used on (high-end) SGI graphics workstations of the time. SGI certainly had all the required tools.
The N64 SDK docs, if not the SDK itself, leaked at one point. I would expect that by now the whole thing has leaked long ago.
Come to think of it, it must have, because the bit-perfect recompilation projects are using the exact compilers from the SDK.
You can buy CDs of the SGI SDK on ebay.
Recompilation projects aren't bit perfect, only decomps. They use a recompiled version of the compilers for Linux so that they don't need to emulated with QEMU like they used to, though.
Yeah, the full SDK leaked decades ago when the system was still economically relevant to Nintendo.
Yeah, pretty much.
They provide the devkit hardware, the specification technical documentation and the tool chain to compile the binary.