Recently I got an internship doing back-end PHP and Python stuff for a website for my university. It’s a really nice job that I find fun and I’m thankful to have. But… at the same time, doing all this high-level web dev stuff has given me a big itch I need to scratch. That itch being the fun of low level bit fiddling.
itch.io’s weekly game jam email came in my inbox and it announced the Mini Jam 4. It was a 48 hour (well, a bit more actually) jam where the restriction was to have graphics like a Game Boy. My perfectly logical and sound reaction to this was to make a Game Boy homebrew, because that seemed neat to do. The themes were “seasons” and “flames”.
I’n not a programmer, but I can imagine old consoles like the Game Boy are great platforms to use to expand your programming skills.
Hacking retro consoles (I prefer Atari Lynx and Jaguar) is fun and should be teached in universities. It helps to learn how to code small and efficient.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/7/19/12227806/pocketchip-review-portable-linux-computer
Its a shame that C.H.I.P. died.
A while ago I got here on OSNews an ad for https://kano.me/store/eu …I’m thinking about getting the Pixel Kit (but it’s out of stock :/ …while now I could really be tempted by it’s lowered by 30€ price, to 60€, the same as it was on Black Friday week; oh well, I’m sure the price hopefully at least as low as 60€ will return), looks fun. 🙂
I don’t think so. Those programs for old consoles are less complex and less efficient than today’s text editor – full of shortcuts that will explode in your face if you try to make any bigger change to the game’s logic.
Well, for coding small and efficiently, there is always embedded systems.
Man.
I was looking at a flier from the local electronics store today, with Raspberry Pi’s, Arduino’s, etc – and now add to that this pocketchip device
I can’t help but imagine how awesome it would have been to have all those things to hack on when I was a kid.
Also – has the font changed on the site in the last 24 hours?
I feel like it looks a lot nicer – something has changed.
Looking better every day!
Better? Nearly unreadable 🙁
Font size was reduced, obviously
Shouldn’t the platform be ditched because it’s name is sexist?
You’re speaking about people who ditched their brain in favor of hysteria ?
If they’re so hysterical, why do I see more pre-emptive counter-hysteria than the people who are supposedly so hysterical?
LOL.
Do you guys know the actual historical source of the term hysteria?
If so, good work!
If not, look it up – it makes this comment chain way better!
If you want to try working with similar resource constraints on newer hardware, the Arduboy has 2.5 KB of RAM and 32 KB of ROM to work with.
How is it better?
Guessing (I just learned of it now 🙂 …looks fun / might get it too): Arduboy is by default programmed in Arduino C so it’s easier, and even with an option of saner/easier assembler than that of ~Z80 in Game Boy, being based on Arduino / Atmel AVR microcontrollers.
Also it’s smaller / credit card sized, easier to always carry with you (though I carry my Game Boy with me everywhere anyway in my shoulder bag 😛 ); and it has OLED display so with ~backlight, something the Game Boy lacks…
The more I learn about old 8-bit consoles and computers the more I want to try my hand at writing a small game of my own for one of them. Then there’s another part of me telling me that I’ll never have the patience to code anything in Z80 or 6502 assembler. Even BASIC feels too clunky and primitive. I still plan to read the article series. Who knows, maybe I’ll feel inspired enough to give it a try.
There was a series of YouTube videos back in 2016 called “The Game Boy, a hardware autopsy”. Or, well, it was supposed to be a series, but only two (and a half?) videos were released. I hope it’ll be continued one day even though it doesn’t seem very likely. I think it can still be used as an easy-to-understand introduction to the GameBoy hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC008MpfclY6ap-QGzoTMNKg/videos
“great platforms to use to expand your programming skills.”
it’ll help you get more comfortable with bit twiddling, sure, but not much else in terms of making you a better programmer. In reality, these often translates not to making you a better programmer but instead to the platform being a huge PITA to develop for with a whole bunch of one-off platform-specific knowledge not really that applicable elsewhere. However, writing a game that’s portable across various platforms that shares a common code base, i.e. make your game work for Nintendo GameBoy *AND* Sega GameGear with sharing as much of a common code base as possible, *that* will make you a better programmer.