If you would start programming a video game for a retro system now, which one would it be and why exactly? Give me your honest thoughts if you have them.

#RetroGaming #Gaming #VideoGames #GameDev

@darth Probably the Dreamcast. While the PS2 was much more my favorite system and in general was superior hardware-wise (particularly if one could properly utilize the hardware which wasn't always easy) but I'm given to understand that the Dreamcast had a really good SDK and easy to work with APIs. In retro terms, it's probably among the nicest choices to actually deal with.

If I had infinite skill I'd go with the PS2 though. That thing just had the right balance of so much...

@darth I (as complete programming noob) would go for some portable handheld like GBA (more likely) or PSP. Just because I love concept of playing while waiting or traveling.
If I would target couch gaming, I'd go with PS1 solely because it was my childhood console and I still use it (and emulate it) during free evenings.

@nazokiyoubinbou I am also considering the potential audience

@darth Audience-wise, it might be better to go further back. 16-bit era may be the best balance. SNES/SFC gives the best options graphically and Genesis/Megadrive gives the best options for arcade-style performance. (There are plenty of other great systems like the PC-Engine and its CD-ROM addon, but if you want lowest common denominator, this would probably be the way to go.)

SNES was definitely my favorite of that era, though the CD games are hard to beat for music and data size.

@j4n3z I have heard that GameBoy has a big homebrew scene nowadays. Not sure about GBC and GBA but GBA is definitely capable and awesome

@darth Virtual Boy. That system never reached its full potential, although VB Wario Land came close!

@nazokiyoubinbou I will tell you a secret. I am thinking about Amiga 500 / SNES. But I am worried that SNES games aren’t easy to distribute to players unless we are talking about emulation.

@Oregon_Pacifist is that one color system? I never tried it

@darth Ah, I thought we were talking consoles and didn't think to include PCs. Well, personally I was more in the "IBM Compatible" scene and I think it gets underestimated if you consider really late 80s into the 90s when Amiga started falling behind, so that would be what I would choose, but of course one should choose what they love there.

Emulation is actually a great advantage though. It's possible to emulate the SNES on practically anything with a chip inside it and emulation means you get a guaranteed fixed system that doesn't change with guaranteed same results on all hardware.

Actually, I imagine in regards to the Amiga, likely more would be emulating than running it on real hardware anyway. *Shrug* But it's harder to emulate (I think it even requires the Kickstart?)

@darth yeah, it was the first system to display games in stereoscopic 3D. The games had graphics in black and shades of red. I loved it though!

@darth dreamcast. The coolest at its time and the coolest today, 25 years later. There’s no retro console with a bigger aura than the dreamcast

@Oregon_Pacifist looks interesting

@nazokiyoubinbou this is, there are quite a lot of Amiga owners who want to play on real hardware and it doesn’t need cartridges so that part is convenient for distribution. And yes it is a computer but it’s the closest possible computer to what consoles are. It’s a fixed system. You insert a game and then turn the hardware on and you play.

PC is the one I eliminated because we still use PC’s nowadays. It’s a perpetual platform 😆

@OnceUponAGoblin I am sorry I missed it

@darth yeah, from consumer POV it is perfect platform. You can emulate it even on rp2040 and even original console itself is really pocket size.
As far as I know GBA is more capable for 3D games which might be interesting for some titles. And PSP has analog sticks which I take as step up in controls.
I really seriously consider purchasing some ARM emulator or DIYing my own with RK3566 and targeting up to PS1 era games 🤔

@darth Well, Amiga got a whole lot more complicated later on, but the 500 is pretty stable of a target I guess. I'd still consider it more PC than console by far. I'd have to look to stuff like the MSX/MSX2 or something to get to areas that are harder to define. (Well, since, we're talking Commodore, the C64 of course might fit that harder to define list.)

But if we're talking retro, PC is actually not eliminated because DOS/Windows 3.x and even to some extend the early Windows 95 era is completely different. In fact, generally speaking, you can only run DOS stuff on modern systems via emulation. (It's possible to get a DOS system up and running on a modern CPU, but lots of caveats, including lack of hardware support and dealing with PnP would come up.) Some 9x stuff doesn't work.

@nazokiyoubinbou I did a small research today and I am unsure if I got it right but apparently C64 and NES have the biggest active communities today. Funny enough they have a similar CPU, but for some reason I am slightly put off by 8-bit. I guess I skipped it for the most part.

@darth Yeah, NES is probably one of the absolute favorite platforms out there. Tons of stuff chooses to emulate its style even when they don't make an actual thing to run on its hardware. But it does have a lot of limitations. Some are severe and it's amazing devs did as well as they did with it. But they had something like a decade to figure out all the tricks. You probably don't want to reinvent that wheel... (A thing a lot of devs today forget is that it wasn't the limitations that made the games on these things good. It was devs going out of their way to make something that surpassed the limitations via imagination or tricks.)

This is why I picked the 16-bit era over that. The limitations are much less severe and you can create something so much bigger with 16-bit.

@nazokiyoubinbou I am not here to defend my potential choice, but I am still unable to convince myself into SNES or MegaDrive. Although SMD might actually be interesting to me as I have a small bias towards Motorola 68k 😂

@darth The Genesis/Megadrive is a good system. I guess I like it a bit less due to its graphical limitations (the SNES just looks so great that its games still look great even today without needing so many visual filter to compensate whereas the Genesis/MD has issues with dithering and etc to compensate for its low color capabilities) but really you can't go wrong with either.

SPC chip for the win too though! But yeah, I know some like the charm of that Yamaha FM chip.

@nazokiyoubinbou as I understand it, Amiga gives me the most freedom (being a computer and all) but it’s quite a lot limited (A500) compared to SNES in terms of visual presentation, but A500 has a faster CPU so I guess it depends on what kind of game is being made. While SMD is somewhat in between with having a fast CPU abd plenty of hardware sprites for an action game, but less colourful than SNES.

I must admit being Amiga fan I find myself playing an awful lot of SNES games 😂

@nazokiyoubinbou though, even if I do go with A500 I can still “remaster” my game for A1200 later.

BTW did I not follow you last year or something like that? You changed instances or something?

@darth Just bear in mind that it's also more limiting in availability. Yes quite a few people here have actual running Amigas, but for the most part most would have to emulate. That gets prohibitively difficult in some cases with the requirements (like the Kickstart ROM) and design expectations as well as much tougher hardware requirements.

An emulator for an actual console can be built right into something (license providing) and will run on a toaster. There's probably already a build for toasters somewhere. (You probably play using the dials to move and the spring to jump.)

@darth That is a possibility. I have two accounts now. This one is intended to focus more on interests and such because politics are such a thing right now. I don't use the other one to talk about stuff like emulation or etc.

@nazokiyoubinbou I understand the limits of Kickstart piracy :) and that usually stopped nobody. Personally I have a real Amiga so I didn’t have to tinker with this legal challenge, but I also know that FOSS kickstart exists that ships with emulators and it seems to be not bad. Perhaps, if I would pick Amiga, I could test my game on FOSS kickstart in parallel with the real one.

I am not starting anything tonight, I am collecting ideas in my head. Maybe I’ll pick SNES in the end

@darth I didn't know about the FOSS Kickstart. That solves a lot of problems!

You'll still run into limitations of emulation in general for Amiga. It's a lot more limited in options and performance even considering libretro.

But in the end you should make what you want of course.

@nazokiyoubinbou I kinda quit social media for the most part (in January) but every now and then I tend to miss it so I drop back in to see how things are 🤷

@nazokiyoubinbou don’t get me wrong, this is my favourite kind of conversation. When people with knowledge and arguments fight me 🥰

@darth It is fun to discuss things of this sort of nature. I won't lie though. I'm hardly an expert on Amiga emulation. I've gotten into it a little bit, but most of the stuff I found interesting on Amiga had PC-DOS ports and typically those supported advanced MIDI synthesizers, so I always go where the sound is. 😁 (That and I just know DOS and PCs better all around with more nostalgia there I will admit.)

@nazokiyoubinbou yeah we are both somewhat nostalgia driven. But Amiga can play samples too (there is a floppy limit in play) so this tends to make up for some interesting musical composition.

This is probably my favourite Amiga 500 game intro: https://youtu.be/tLOT1QeOJAc?si=rN6PP3JaVn_Dnh8O

@darth Oh I didn't mean stuff like tracker formats. Though PC games did do those too (OMG, One Must Fall...)

I'm talking about kind of before or at least separate from that. MIDI was the basic thing that simple hardware could always do (especially since it offloaded most of the real work to the soundcard.) But then really good MIDI synthesizers by companies like Roland, Yamaha, and others came out and what were simple instructions began to translate to really nice sounding music. One famous example would probably be Secret of Monkey Island which famously was among the early games to use the MT-32 well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20

One thing that was neat for me though was going back to games I'd played over and over back in the day with OPL and hearing them with wavetable synthesis.

@nazokiyoubinbou NGL that monkey island version you linked sounds absolutely amazing. This one I grew up with, I guess. Kinda faded memory at this point https://youtu.be/FpmpBLANYwM

@darth The MT-32 is an interesting hardware. It's much less advanced than later MIDI synthesizers and it is much worse at certain sorts of sounds, but with something like this it gives a really interesting balance of just synthy enough sound to be really amazing. Games had to really use it well for it to work though. For everything more generic, SC-55 or XG or etc all worked out a lot better. (See Doom et al.) Instrument sounds are much worse on MT-32.

I think tracker music was probably a lot more work or something I guess. All I know is it was never as popular as might have been nice. Probably doesn't help that it usually has very low quality samples though... (Not that they can't do high quality samples, just they usually were optimizing for size and performance I guess.)

@darth it’s also the easiest to mod today. Grab one, change the power supply, the fan and replace the cd drive with a sd card emu and it’s an awesome and quiet console. Can’t recommend enough.

@darth One Must Fall btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0FNUDLdT4A

@nazokiyoubinbou pretty good! Makes me wish to reconsider a retro system

@darth Hehe, well... technically the SNES SPC sound system pretty well resembles that of a tracker audio format...

Actually, I've heard a game or two come up with something kind of vaguely tracker-ish on the Genesis once. I forget what it was though.

And of course anything PC can do tracker formats.

@darth@silversword.online Maybe PICO-8 or TIC-80 because I love the idea of fantasy consoles. And working with those limitations must be really rewarding if you finally do a cool game.

@szkodnix I played/tried a couple of TIC-80 games yesterday and it’s good. But my childhood bias is drawing me towards 16-bit

@darth@silversword.online Here in Poland we jumped from 8 bit famiclones straight to 32 bit PSX (there were options to get a legal SEGA system but it was extremely expensive) so 16-bit games are still quite unfamiliar for me, or at least I don't have as much nostalgia.

@szkodnix I’ve had a Micro Genius with Super Mario Bros cartridge and later Amiga 500+ so that’s where my 16-bit childhood memories are feeding from

@darth it’s a fantastic game. If you have a way to play it in 3D as intended, that’s the best experience.

@darth I know this might not be consedered "retro" as much, but i would like to submit the Nitendo Wii (not WiiU, the Wii)

For two reasons:
- Motion Controls (A third dimension with nothing as crazy as VR)
- Family Local playing (It kinda feels like every person needs their own device now, instead of being able to play split-screen)

@vidak so after considering everything I am thinking about porting Wizard of Wor from C64 to Amiga

@vidak I will try both and see where I stand. I think learning the particulars of the hardware is a bigger challenge than Assembly itself.

@vidak Blitz Basic, in my case. That one I am using.