Designing for other then the computer?

#1 Well, in an abstract sense, developing for a console is just like for a PC. You just have a fixed spec sheet for your machine, which helps a LOT. The overall architecture can be quite a bit different (a la PS2), so you usually implement your game architecture a bit differently than you would with a PC game.

In a specific sense, you use a custom tailored compiler and linker, and sometimes a custom tailored develoment environment. Write your code, compile to a binary, blast to a ROM module and test (or burn a CD and test, or run the binary under an emulator, or, or, or...). At some point you'll create a master, from which all the shipping games are dup'ed from. Check out the codewarrior site and look at their tools for console development.

Note that I've never developed for a console. :-) Not yet anyways. I'm sure others can shed a brighter light.

#2 Brian,

You have not, but you should :), you checked out those links?


John

#3 Tyler

I just noticed your the same person that emailed me. Right now i'm trying to develope a gameboy advance title. To do this my team requires an emulator, and a compiler. Theres many gameboy advance emulators already so that won't be hard to find. You can code in C++ or assembler. The problem is because Nintendo never gave the full specs (As in you have to be a 3rd party developer to know all the details) its hard to code perfectly for gameboy advance, also the avaliability of librarys. The best thing to do is code it as close as possible so it is at most portable. You can then test your code on the emulator or wait for flash rom development tools which will be soon avaliable via www.lik-sang.com. This allows you to burn your game onto a flash rom and directly test your game on the gameboy advance hardware.

Don't count on the information above to be 100%, I did some research on it and thats what i've found.

http://www.agbdev.net/gbadev/

The link above should fill you in more on how to develope for Gameboy Advance. You can buy one on Ebay :)

cya

John

#4 ok, and what about designing for gamecube, or n64?

but for now I am just going to be programming for the computer