>One thing
>I've always wondered is, what do companies do with their
>development kits once they are done working on a given
>console? They just throw them out?
Apparently not - the parent company collects them back, and tries to hide
them in most cases. It is potentially possible to find one of these
things, but there have been people on this list looking for them for years,
without success. It is important to note that there weren't many of these
devices in the USA ever - most of them were in Japan.
>Maybe Vic Ireland has something lying around he'd sell. For
>those of you who are trying to make games, wouldn't it be
>easier with that stuff?
Well, Victor Ireland has been asked (as early as 1995 by list members), and
didn't have it. However, even if he had, a public persona like him would
probably not want to make waves with any of his partner companies. If word
got out that he had done such a thing, who know s what what happen ?
As for it being easier with the dev kit... maybe, and maybe not.
The state-of-the-art in development kits is much further progressed now
than it was then, so the tools of the day could seem quite crude. Again,
if it was so easy, why were there only a few hundred games among dozens of
companies with dozens of staff each, over a 10-year period ?
I actually believe that MagicKit implements a few neat concepts which make
it easier to program this machine, and I believe these things are unique
(ie. labels can have main memory address and VRAM addresses as shorthand,
we have functions and MACROS, and a nice support library). I also believe
that a debugger on an emulator is probably easier to debug with than a real
machine, for certain types of critical errors - and this was not possible
in the original time period.
Having said all that, I belive that the original dev kits had better
support for creating graphics within the concepts of the machine (ie.
background maps, character tiles, sprites, and the specifics of the
palette). But that's something we can create too...