[amiga-workbench]

Honestly, there's never been a better time to be writing games for those platforms. The SDK's are much improved from the proprietary stuff available at the time and the hardware is very well understood. People have been pulling off some utter witchcraft on the N64.

[crote]

Best of all: there's no hardware rat race.

The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.

This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.

[supertrope]

The makers of Super Mario 64 said 3D graphics greatly increased game development costs.

[echelon]

Kaze and James Lambert are amazing. Kaze's new Mario game looks better than a first party Nintendo title, and James's engines pushes the console to its absolute limits.

I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. It's such a fun and nostalgic console, and the limitations are fun constraints.

The code archeology is really cool too. Seeing Rare's Dinosaur Planet boot up and play after being a lost title. Decompiling all the original titles. Building sequels to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It's such a fun scene.

Then there's Analogue 3D and ModRetro too, which make it fun to play as physical hardware.

[ColdStream]

It was last night, after seeing Linux on the Atari Jaguar, I was just pondering over that whole scene.

Then I decided to throw on Metal Slug X, a classic of the Neo Geo. Then it struck me, "Could I attempt porting this to Jaguar?!".

It would be a great start project to familurise myself with this older stuff again. They both have a 12MHz 68k, it is just that the graphics and audio cores are different. Would probably have to base it off the CD version so that the memory addressing is already handled (it loaded all assets into 1MB RAM - twice the jaguars storage).

It doesn't sound impossible. But the Jags RISC chips were notorious for being a little slow due to limited cache space, so it might not be so straight forward.

Regardless, the scene is jumping.

[dml2135]

Wait, someone actually brought N64 Dinosaur Planet to life? I gotta check this out...

[ColdStream]

Yeah based on a ROM leak from a while back. The game was almost entirely complete before they moved over to the GameCube.

[RajT88]

Even crap emulator handhelds are getting pretty dang good (if you can get the right software stack).

[opan]

Seconding this. Look for something with ROCKNIX support and put that on there.