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vintage videogame tech
the_alt
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
I'm interested in vintage video gaming, by which I mean early 80's. I like the old hardware. I also have a cursory interest in programming. I'm looking for information on how the classic games were programmed and developed. Any information would be appreciated, I'm especially curious about how games were transfered to carts. Did nintendo and sega issue special development kits to third parties? Would any of that vintage hardware be available somewhere, could a collector get ahold of some of that old equipment? Thanks and thanks.
Josh
Josh
the_alt on
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yes and yes.
http://www.beggarprince.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_TeraDrive
I know dreamcast SDKs used to pop up on ebay with regular frequency but the older ones will likely be much harder to find.
Check out the forums at atariage.com to start. There's even a version of Basic for the 2600 and I've seen threads on what hardware is needed to make physical cartridges.
I'm pretty sure there's a solid Colecovision homebrew community too but I wouldn't really know where to start on that.
Games were manufactured as mask ROM, meaning there was no "transfered to carts" at all; the chips came out of the foundry with the game already on them (unlike, say, modern DS cartridges, which are write-once NAND flash memory). Some companies used rewritable cartridges as devkits but more typically there was a special version of a console, so you could also have some debugging features. These will be very hard to find nowadays.