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[Cthulhu32]

The TigForums Homebrew Creator's Club Presents
Meeting 0: Planning Stages
Planning stages, suggestions welcome.

[LOGO NEEDED]

Introduction:

    The Homebrew Creator's Club is a special club devoted to the development and teaching of classical game development systems. Members will learn skills completely useless in the real world, and devote hours of their lives on hobby projects purely for the fun of learning and creating something new. The creations HCC members make will not in them any money and they will not change or even influence the gaming industry. This club is purely here for the fun of a challenge and trying something different from the average day of a programmer.

    Being a low-level development oriented club, the HCC is geared toward programmers who enjoy challenging their brains and programming on systems that do not always behave how they should. Artists, designers, and sound engineers are welcome to join the fun, although most discussions will gear toward the tech oriented side of console development.

Goal:

    Create completely legal roms for old and new systems including the NES, Nintendo DS, Super Nintendo, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Microsoft Xbox, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Sony Playstation 1, Sony Playstation 2, Sony PSP, etc. Learn old and new tricks for developing on old hardware, and push chips to their limit. Impress nostalgic friends, and completely bore the younger generation with tales of old.

    Once a month I will post a challenge, and throughout the month you can respond in the thread with anything you want. Feel free to post comments, questions, builds, source code, etc. I'll also be creating demos with everyone else so it will be a challenge. These rules are pretty flexible, even though I will do a system a month, feel free to concentrate more on one system and skip a month or work ahead and share your knowledge of other systems.

Tools:

    Legal Only, no leaked SDKs, no licensed signed code. For example, the Xbox XDK leaked allowing authors to write XEX's containing signed Microsoft code. These XEXs cannot be publically posted because the signature belongs to Microsoft, and they will sue the pants off of you. But homebrewers posted an Xbox linux xex creator, so if we get to Xbox we will be using the legal version.

    Windows, Linux, Mac, it doesn't matter what OS you are in as long as you can compile. I'll be giving links to tools and tutorials, and possibly post replies to "how do I?" if I know the answer without 15 minutes of googling :D Also other members feel free to post interesting tools and techniques, as I am using this partly as a goal to get better at ASM.

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Feel free to post suggestions, comments, ideas, that you're interested, whatever in this thread.

[Cthulhu32]

So the format will be pretty much what I have above, I'll introduce the system, give goals, and link tools/cool videos and links. I'm trying to finish up a Gamma IV entry with Phubans right now, so this will not officially start until February. If this sees little to no interest, no worries at all, its just sort of a fun experiment.

I'm 95% sure the system for February will be..... Gameboy/Gameboy Color! They use the same processor, the only difference is a palette look-up table.

For my tools I will be using GBDK (and maybe WLA-DX if I dive into ASM), here's some links to get you started if you want to work early. The challenge will most likely be draw a title screen with background music to keep it simple to start. That way we can ease ourselves into the homebrew goodness.

GBDK Compiler - http://gbdk.sourceforge.net/
Awesome Gameboy EE class video -


ECE 238 Spring 08 Course (for assembly) - http://cratel.wichita.edu/cratel/ECE238Spr08
More tech info - http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/showtopic14330.htm
Emulators - No$gmb http://nocash.emubase.de/gmb.htm  Visualboy Advance http://vba.ngemu.com/

[Hideous]

Mmm, totally looking forward to this.

[r.kachowski]

agreed. february just became more exciting

how about we all chip in 2 or 3 dollars and put the best creation on a game boy flash cart   

[skaldicpoet9]

I am very interested in this but what would you say the learning curve is Cthulhu32? I am just starting to program in C and am taking a course this semester to introduce C++ (which I admit might be a little advanced for me at this time (but I am sure I can handle it). I would love to participate though, if I felt that things weren't completely over my head.

[Cthulhu32]

I am very interested in this but what would you say the learning curve is Cthulhu32? I am just starting to program in C and am taking a course this semester to introduce C++ (which I admit might be a little advanced for me at this time (but I am sure I can handle it). I would love to participate though, if I felt that things weren't completely over my head.

Well, honestly I'd say just dive on in it and ask questions when they come. Thats what I want this to be here for. I actually started programming on the Gameboy Advance right about the same time as you, back when libgba was full of bugs and libnds/devkitpro did not exist.

Gameboy/Gameboy Color is entirely in C using the GBDK, so as long as you are comfortable with arrays, function calls, binary operations, and things in that nature you should be fine. The challenge should be relatively simple, it will just be a bare minimum which you could probably finish in an evening and a tutorial. The goal here is to learn some interesting things, challenge yourself, and see what you can come up with.

The much harder/more advance stuff will come later when I get a feel for where everyone wants to go. I really want to dive back into 6502 ASM and I'd like to pick up Z80 ASM, but those are pretty advanced compared to C/C++. People here also might want to just stick with more modern systems like the Nintendo DS and Wii where you have a full compiler suite along with IDE and debugging. If thats the case, we can dive super hardcore into those systems. I can talk about a few things on the DS wintermute and dovoto have not covered before like OAM A+B and proper tile scrolling.

[skaldicpoet9]

Right on, that sounds awesome. I would love to learn how to do some homebrew on the DS as well. I say why not, I'll go ahead and try it out and see how it goes, I have always wanted to try my hand at some type of homebrew/mods.

[Cthulhu32]

Awesome, yeah it sounds like a lot of people really like the Nintendo DS dev. So I think we'll do some DS dev in March after we finish the Gameboy. Everyone will get all spoiled with having all that OAM space and fancy function calls. Then we'll drop into something less traditional to keep it spicey, unless people want to continue with more modern systems.

[skaldicpoet9]

Yeah, I have been wanting to do some DS homebrew ever since I got my R$ and started toying around with different homebrew apps on the DS. I can't wait

[knight]

Im in. I've always wanted to make a game for NES.

[team_q]

For some reason, I thought this had do to with making beer!

Regardless, I'm down.

[Average Software]

I'm not really interested in anything but the Atari 5200, and possibly the Sega Master System.

I haven't started my 5200 project quite yet, I'm still researching the 6502 and all the other hardware bits in the system.  Once I get it started though, I'm going to add the code to my public Subversion repository for anyone to look at.

I'm pretty sure the 6502 was used in a ton of old game systems, so the assembly in my project might be  applicable to a bunch of different stuff.

[salade]

I hope I have enough time to do this!

[Guillaume]

Totally in!

It'll be awesome if the participating devs could get some articles/doc written on the month's platform as they code, to contribute to the HB community 

[Cthulhu32]

I'm not really interested in anything but the Atari 5200, and possibly the Sega Master System.

I haven't started my 5200 project quite yet, I'm still researching the 6502 and all the other hardware bits in the system.  Once I get it started though, I'm going to add the code to my public Subversion repository for anyone to look at.

I'm pretty sure the 6502 was used in a ton of old game systems, so the assembly in my project might be  applicable to a bunch of different stuff.

Heck yeah, a lot of old systems used to use the 6502 chip, the Atari 5200, the Commodore 64, the NES. There's a ton of knowledge to gain from learning that chip, and also the Z80 which was used in many of the old systems as well. I will consider doing a secondary mission for people wanting to do ASM vs. higher level C/C++

[skaldicpoet9]

Right on, when I was talking to Hideous about this thread in the first place I mentioned that what I was really interested in was NES (and DS of course) homebrew. I am definitely down with some of that action should you ever touch upon it 

I thought this had do to with making beer!

We could do that too! 

[moi]

Maybe it's better not to limit the platform? Maybe a theme could be more interesting?

[Guillaume]

I like the idea of platform-themed months better. I just find it cooler and more prone to sharing and discussing the actual development.

[Absurdist]

This is awesome, I'll try to participate.

[Cthulhu32]

Maybe it's better not to limit the platform? Maybe a theme could be more interesting?

Yeah it'd be awesome to just have a free for all, share your knowledge, but I think for this exercise/experiment we will have a focused platform. Part of that is for my own sanity, so I'm not going through like 4 different platform sources with different questions for each, and partly because it's good to focus on one topic when we get to extremely complicated systems. That way I can write python tools and quick tutorials for each individual platform.

But that is an interesting idea, maybe for a month we will have a "Free-for-all" where you use your favorite platform to create a demo or game with a specific theme. That would be pretty cool further down the line when we've all completed a few challenges, and we have a large list of platforms to choose from.