Hello from the Frozen North
Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2023 12:25 am
Greetings,
I just learned about the Commander X16 in the past month or so. Put in a preorder for the second batch and I'm pretty excited about it. It's kind of a coincidence; it's been a life dream of mine to design my own retro-style game console to make games on, but I guess David Murray has beaten me to it.
I might still design my own machine someday if I ever get the resources, but in the meantime, trying to make a game on the X16 seems like a fun project.
I've developed indie games in the past, and I did a bit of work in MIPS assembly a long time ago, but my assembly is quite rusty and I've never developed on hardware with such limited specs, so this will be an interesting challenge. I know there's at least one C compiler that works on the 6502, so to be honest, I'm kind of hoping I can get away with using that and not have to hand-craft the assembly if I can avoid it. (；´∀｀) (Not really out of any "fear" of assembly, but just because writing working code in assembly is so excruciatingly slow compared to using higher-level languages.)
The main idea I have in mind is a turn-based, grid-based first-person dungeon crawler, so the performance requirements might be modest enough that perhaps what the compiler spits out will be performant enough.
Of course, before all that will be learning the basics of the basics, like writing a "Hello world" program, then drawing graphics, playing sound, and all those fundamentals that one needs to function before working on a proper game. Looking forward to it!
Dr.J
I just learned about the Commander X16 in the past month or so. Put in a preorder for the second batch and I'm pretty excited about it. It's kind of a coincidence; it's been a life dream of mine to design my own retro-style game console to make games on, but I guess David Murray has beaten me to it.
I might still design my own machine someday if I ever get the resources, but in the meantime, trying to make a game on the X16 seems like a fun project.I've developed indie games in the past, and I did a bit of work in MIPS assembly a long time ago, but my assembly is quite rusty and I've never developed on hardware with such limited specs, so this will be an interesting challenge. I know there's at least one C compiler that works on the 6502, so to be honest, I'm kind of hoping I can get away with using that and not have to hand-craft the assembly if I can avoid it. (；´∀｀) (Not really out of any "fear" of assembly, but just because writing working code in assembly is so excruciatingly slow compared to using higher-level languages.)
The main idea I have in mind is a turn-based, grid-based first-person dungeon crawler, so the performance requirements might be modest enough that perhaps what the compiler spits out will be performant enough.
Of course, before all that will be learning the basics of the basics, like writing a "Hello world" program, then drawing graphics, playing sound, and all those fundamentals that one needs to function before working on a proper game. Looking forward to it!
Dr.J
