Thread

1. boricj · 1786005764 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. dottjt · 1786009622 · focus · HN ↗

      How did they do it back in the day? Was basically everything from the tooling etc. just created inhouse from scratch?

      1. inigyou · 1786011313 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. inigyou · 1786018768 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

            1. monocasa · 1786036960 · focus · HN ↗

               Yeah, the full SDK leaked decades ago when the system was still economically relevant to Nintendo.

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