The cost of a Sega Saturn development kit back in 1995

[mael]

It's funny because things had progressed to that since the 80's and 90's, at least in the west. Back in the 80's and 90's, bedroom coders was a large part of the porting force for western computers. Then you look at companies like Sega in the early 90's who were very interested in publishing small studios (like, famously, Toejam & Earl). Granted, this was all basically exploitation, not really a happy symbiotic relationship, but that period where breaking through to retail game publishing got hard was actually a historical anomaly.

Of course, on the PC side of things, indie games have always existed. I remember downloading and playing things like "Catch...if you can" from BBSes in the mid 90's. One of my favorite "indies" of all time was an impressive double-dragon style party fighting game called Little Fighter 2:

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It's pretty crazy how restrictive gaming became in the 00s when you think about it.
Granted things escalated in complexity at the time but stories like people porting "flagship games" to another platform was pretty rare then when you had a cottage industry making Megaman for DOS and way back when.
I lived in France back then and I feel like it was a real barrier to get anything done when I couldn't find the proper documentation to even learn stuffs.
It didn't help that the 00s weren't exactly awesome for the French gaming industry as a whole, a lot of closures and failures.
But you're right smaller dev studios were indeed very present even in the 00s, Ambrosia Software was known for publishing games made from very small teams.
I was all in on Escape Velocity Nova myself, the guy behind the game was really just doing that on his free time and Nova was the last one because he couldn't justify the workload and family had to come 1st.
And I just learned that Ambrosia closed 3 months ago and I'm unbelievably sad now :/
Seriously though for budding devs, there's no better time than now.
More platforms are documented than ever, tools can be found and it's not impossible to make something working on original hardware (in a reasonable timeframe) even without official support!

I didn't say before but congrats on the Saturn dev kit, that's quite the find!

e:also little fighter 2 looks great, I kinda wish I played that too lol

 

[Deleted member 12790]

It's pretty crazy how restrictive gaming became in the 00s when you think about it.
Granted things escalated in complexity at the time but stories like people porting "flagship games" to another platform was pretty rare then when you had a cottage industry making Megaman for DOS and way back when.
I lived in France back then and I feel like it was a real barrier to get anything done when I couldn't find the proper documentation to even learn stuffs.
It didn't help that the 00s weren't exactly awesome for the French gaming industry as a whole, a lot of closures and failures.
But you're right smaller dev studios were indeed very present even in the 00s, Ambrosia Software was known for publishing games made from very small teams.
I was all in on Escape Velocity Nova myself, the guy behind the game was really just doing that on his free time and Nova was the last one because he couldn't justify the workload and family had to come 1st.
And I just learned that Ambrosia closed 3 months ago and I'm unbelievably sad now :/
Seriously though for budding devs, there's no better time than now.
More platforms are documented than ever, tools can be found and it's not impossible to make something working on original hardware (in a reasonable timeframe) even without official support!

I didn't say before but congrats on the Saturn dev kit, that's quite the find!

e:also little fighter 2 looks great, I kinda wish I played that too lol

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I feel like the "thousand monkeys at typewriters" approach works well for art. The more people who can create, the lower the barrier to entry, the better IMO. I love what has happened in the post-indie revolution world, personally. Barriers to entry frustrate me, even if I can navigate past them.

 

[Man God]

Net Yaroze was the one with the authenticator memory card right? I found three of those in a Gamestop in 2002 or so in a bargain bin for five dollars each and sold them for a fortune later on.

 

[mael]

I feel like the "thousand monkeys at typewriters" approach works well for art. The more people who can create, the lower the barrier to entry, the better IMO. I love what has happened in the post-indie revolution world, personally. Barriers to entry frustrate me, even if I can navigate past them.

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I would have disagreed with you a decade ago but you're right when you're right.
It's impressive that we even have a youtube channel about a team dedicated to making a NES game, another one about a student navigating SNES architecture and even another one explaining all the shit he had to navigate on Sega's hardware!
I guess we can quote Ratatouille on that not everyone can be a master but the next one can come from anywhere and it's exciting that this can even happen.
Even purely as a customer it's much better when your next favorite product can come from a 3 people team on the other side of the earth.
For people delving into programming, it's heaven!
(sorry broken post)

Net Yaroze was the one with the authenticator memory card right? I found three of those in a Gamestop in 2002 or so in a bargain bin for five dollars each and sold them for a fortune later on.

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Funny story, the director of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle was the main coder for Code Age Commanders and was recruited by Square for what he was able to do with Net Yaroze.
He's still at Square Enix, last time I heard of him he was doing stuffs in an event related to FFXIV.
Coming from Europe, it's wild that a Gamestop could ever even be near a Net Yaroze!
Always seemed like the weird hardware that Japanese people had access but not for dirty Europeans >:(

 

[Deleted member 12790]

I would have disagreed with you a decade ago but you're right when you're right.
It's impressive that we even have a youtube channel about a team dedicated to making a NES game, another one about a student navigating SNES architecture and even another one explaining all the shit he had to navigate on Sega's hardware!
I guess we can quote Ratatouille on that not everyone can be a master but the next one can come from anywhere and it's exciting that this can even happen.
Even purely as a customer it's much better when your next favorite product can come from a 3 people team on the other side of the earth.
For people delving into

Click to shrink...

One of the very first contracts my company took on when I started it was doing some small work for a local doctor's office. They did some... doctor shit that was above my head... and needed a custom program made that could help them make evaluations and charts and stuff. Something bespoke, but totally simple to do. It was a super small one-time project, but I had to spend like half a week at the dude's office watching how he worked to understand his work load so I could design the application to fit his needs.

That highlights the problem, for me. My expertise is programming, his is medicine. The program is more about medicine than programming, the programming itself is rote. So you have laymen making essential tools for things like medicine, trying to take a crash course in whatever the daily workload of a doctor is. That's super inefficient. Making application development easier for laymen benefits society as a whole. That doctor knew what he wanted to accomplish better than he could possibly explain it to me, because he lives it every day. If the barrier to developing an application was so low that he could make one himself, he would have been way more qualified than I to make it.

That's not necessarily related to publishing games, just my overall thought on ease of access. Everyone has expertise in some field, programming should be a tool like being able to write. Let the experts write their own tools better than "programming experts" can.

 

[mael]

One of the very first contracts my company took on when I started it was doing some small work for a local doctor's office. They did some... doctor shit that was above my head... and needed a custom program made that could help them make evaluations and charts and stuff. Something bespoke, but totally simple to do. It was a super small one-time project, but I had to spend like half a week at the dude's office watching how he worked to understand his work load so I could design the application to fit his needs.

That highlights the problem, for me. My expertise is programming, his is medicine. The program is more about medicine than programming, the programming itself is rote. So you have laymen making essential tools for things like medicine, trying to take a crash course in whatever the daily workload of a doctor is. That's super inefficient. Making application development easier for laymen benefits society as a whole. That doctor knew what he wanted to accomplish better than he could possibly explain it to me, because he lives it every day. If the barrier to developing an application was so low that he could make one himself, he would have been way more qualified than I to make it.

That's not necessarily related to publishing games, just my overall thought on ease of access. Everyone has expertise in some field, programming should be a tool like being able to write. Let the experts write their own tools better than "programming experts" can.

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I tend to agree with you here.
It seems like in software we kinda like the broken window system of only letting "software experts" deal with software and they have to do everything including maintenance.
It's great if you're a software company because you have recurring revenue and it's easier to survive on these kinds of easy contracts than always be on the lookout for new customers that REALLY need your expertise.
I can't help but feel like it's wasting time and money for everyone.

So a way to deal with that is upping software literacy or making software as easy to make/maintain as possible.
I don't know why but I feel like there's kind of an image problem making people feel like software is hard to get into kinda like nerd math or something.
We're better at that now but even getting people to interact with the userfriendly version is hard these days.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

I tend to agree with you here.
It seems like in software we kinda like the broken window system of only letting "software experts" deal with software and they have to do everything including maintenance.
It's great if you're a software company because you have recurring revenue and it's easier to survive on these kinds of easy contracts than always be on the lookout for new customers that REALLY need your expertise.
I can't help but feel like it's wasting time and money for everyone.

So a way to deal with that is upping software literacy or making software as easy to make/maintain as possible.
I don't know why but I feel like there's kind of an image problem making people feel like software is hard to get into kinda like nerd math or something.
We're better at that now but even getting people to interact with the userfriendly version is hard these days.

Click to shrink...

Part of the problem is society grouping math in with "science" instead of "art":

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

Math has this stigma about being arcane and mysterious when it shouldn't be. Math is literally logical, we just teach it very, very poorly.

There's also the problem of women being kept away from STEM. Too much of computer programming is an old boys club. Some of the most brilliant people I know in gamedev are women.

Diversity, lots of conflicting ideas, and cooperation, all of which ties into eased barrier of entry, are what make for great software, IMO.

 

[mael]

Part of the problem is society grouping math in with "science" instead of "art":

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

Math has this stigma about being arcane and mysterious when it shouldn't be. Math is literally logical, we just teach it very, very poorly.

There's also the problem of women being kept away from STEM. Too much of computer programming is an old boys club. Some of the most brilliant people I know in gamedev are women.

Diversity, lots of conflicting ideas, and cooperation, all of which ties into eased barrier of entry, are what make for great software, IMO.

Click to shrink...

I don't get computers being a boys club, most of my teachers were women and a lot of team leads in my neck of the wood (not gaming) are women too.
It's a mystery to me when the most brilliant students were girls as well.
I spend a lot of time with artists as well and let's just say that in the workplace you absolutely need to know your ways around software as well.
It's my SO who deal with complicated computer shit and I'm the software programmer and she's the artist.
I get that as a society we're pushing women away from STEM but it's making the field so much poorer when it's only the same type of profiles that ends up anywhere.
For all the talk about how the system is supposed to be fair and all that (again France here), it's remarkable how unfair the system ends up when you decide to treat everything "logically".
We even had a famous French tech guy open a start up kind of school for computer, it was a gigantic sausage fest that dealt harassment to women.
Literally the biggest possible way to remove any kind of diversity on the field when it was said to be made to prevent this from moment go.
We seriously need to raise boys and girls better than the crap they're getting.

 

[Merc]

This is fascinating information. Thanks for sharing. I am blown away on how expensive it was for one dev kit especially at that time. Crazy. Not a lot people know

 

[Shaneus]

the larger white binder is the development book for the cart.dev

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Given there's a Sega Ozisoft manual, does that mean the kit came from an Australian developer?

Fake edit but posting anyway: I can see that's the Genesis development documentation that was leaked a little while ago. Love to know who that came from, given there have never been that many developers in Australia. Probably Beam/Melbourne House.

 

[Tokyo_Funk]

I am super impressed by what indie devs can do with the Saturn. One guy in particular has coded a 3D engine with some great features like half colour transparency for object fade in, coloured lighting, smooth gouraud shading and split screen modes all in a fairly optimised environment.

https://youtu.be/Oo2frV3NPFA

https://youtu.be/foMLX3Lz8fQ

 

[Shaneus]

I know a lot of people who worked on Atari Jaguar development, and the stories they've told me about the Jag SDK are honestly amazing, in all the bad ways.

Anywho, back to the Jaguar: It basically shipped with no documentation. The Devkit itself was full of bugs, the hardware itself actually did not work correctly. For example, the atari jaguar actually has a super advanced controller port, it works like a parallel port and can do all sort of two way communication. Known as the Atari Advanced Joystick port, it was honestly one of the most advanced communication protocols on any console for many, many years. EXCEPT, the early launch Jaguars had a hardware bug which made reading in two directions from the joystick near impossible. So the very feature of the joystick ports, wouldn't reliably work between revisions of the console, so no dev could ever use it. On top of this, different revisions of the console actually run at different speeds. Certain games will run faster on certain consoles.

So when you got a Jaguar SDK, they dump a very bare bones system, with no documentation, that didn't work, and told developers to "make it work" and pump out games in like 6 months time. Insane that any jaguar games ever got made.

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Wat. Such a clusterfuck, that is insane to me. Should make witnessing the MISTer core interesting, if it's able to take into account these hardware bugs, the varying speeds etc.


Edit: Oh man, this thread is joyous. Love reading about developers creating with limited tools and hardware back in the "good old days". It's why I kind of enjoy seeing the modern demoscene and development scene for old platforms like the MD, it's a great example of what people can do with outside-the-box thinking and using modern hardware as a devkit for a (relatively) ancient platform.
Thinking specifically of the XenoCrisis devs as well as the TiTAN demoscene group here, but I'm sure there are others.

People need to keep posting in this thread, I could eat all this information up and still be craving more. Any recommendations for documentaries or rare/old/bizarre YT videos are welcomed, too.

 

[Tokyo_Funk]

I don't get computers being a boys club, most of my teachers were women and a lot of team leads in my neck of the wood (not gaming) are women too.

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One of the best engine programmers in the world is a lady by the name of Corrine Yu, she has made some pretty incredible stuff and tries to stay out of the spotlight too much.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Here's a question. Is there a YouTube video documentary on how games are made in dev kits as thorough as possible? I'd also love to see how those old SGI units were used for games. I feel like a lot of dev kits are just never truly shown off other than the bare minimum it feels like. Could be for legal reasons.

Click to shrink...

this video popped up on my youtube suggestions:

 

[Deleted member 12790]

You guys wanna talk how hard the Saturn is to develop for? Just starting to go through the documentation right now. There is an entire 300 page manual on how to make the two SH2 processors stay in sync. That's just syncing the CPU programming. The saturn has dual video display processors, the "GPUs" of the saturn so to speak. Each one is a completely different kind of chip. They each have their own entirely separate manuals. VDP1 has a 178 page manual, and VDP2, the more complex of the two, has a 440 page manual.

Hooray texture bending:

 

[Akela]

Those are some insane prices, but honestly don't seam out of place for 90's computer graphics hardware. As you say, they recommend people buy SGI computers to develop on, which themselves used to cost somewhere between a car and a large house. Which I guess was really the downfall of SGI - as soon as consumer hardware became "good enough" to do decent CG work they were done for, even if they didn't know it yet. 3DS Max became so popular because unlike Maya, it ran on consumer DOS machines, basically opening up the world of CG to the masses. In fact my local collage was able to offer a course in CG animation around 1994-5 pretty much because 3DS Max was available on hardware they could actually afford. And when Maya made the jump over to Windows that was basically it for dedicated workstation machines like the ones SGI offered. And thank god for that, honestly.

I couldn't imagine what it must have been like doing a CG animation/games course where I would forced to use one of a dozen or so priceless workstations the collage offered and it wasn't possible to work from home when I wanted to, as I've heard was the case for the few collages that actually used to use SGI hardware back in the day. I'm sure using a computer that was outragously more powerful then anything on the consumer market would have been cool - but maybe not so much when a deadline was approaching and the computer lab was full. The fact that today pro-level software can run on home PCs almost as well as expensive workstations did wonders for making the industry more inclusive.

 

[flyinj]

Oh neat, I also have a cost breakdown of an N64 dev kit as well:

SGI O2 - $25000
Softimage/Alias Power Animator - $20000
System Development PartnerN64-PC - $3600
Partner-N64PC PCI Interface board - $350
IS-Viewer NUS - $1600
Control Deck Assembly1 - $200
Control Deck Assembly2 - $200
4 Meg Memory - $20
PC Sound Tools - $1500
Flash Rom Gang Writer - $2425
256M Flash Cartridge - $461
16k Eeprom - $2
IC 7101 CIC - $1
N64 Disk Drive + 5 disks - $ 650
Additional Disk for N64 Disk Drive - $20

Total Cost: $56,029

Like the Saturn, they also recommend an Indigo 2 for 3D modeling.

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I wonder if you could use 3DS v4 or MAX to do modeling on. Did they have a proprietary import tool that only accepted file formats generated specifically for the dev kit that only high end workstation software exported?

Because using an SGI workstation for the extremely low poly modeling work that these consoles used is massive overkill.

 

[Outrun]

You can't do this with Nintendo....!

 

[Deleted member 12790]

I wonder if you could use 3DS v4 or MAX to do modeling on. Did they have a proprietary import tool that only accepted file formats generated specifically for the dev kit that only high end workstation software exported?

Because using an SGI workstation for the extremely low poly modeling work that these consoles used is massive overkill.

Click to shrink...

The kit comes with a bunch of SoftImage 3.0 Irix export tools, so it's seemingly made with SGI in mind. That said, the tool CD also has some macOS photoshop export plugins, and some windows CLI tools. The actual tool used to interface with the devkits is written for windows 9x, you need to use windows 95 (or windows 98) to debug your kit. These tools don't seem to overlap much, though, so I think it really was expected that you'd have a windows PC, an SGI workstation, a mac as some sort of sound/imgage editing machine, etc.

There's actually a pretty sweet collection of tools for macOS here with a neat UI, I'm going through and installing it piece by piece, I'll take a pic of it running on my PPC G4 here in a bit.

The ideal setup seems to be a windows PC for debugging and coding, an SGI workstation for 3D modeling, and a mac for texture and music editing. I guess you could use photoshop on the SGI workstation, but there appears to be an entire set of tools for various image conversions and such built on the Mac. Things that do things like generate assembler code representing binary image data that you can embed in the program.

 

[eyeball_kid]

Developing for these older platforms was\is a REAL challenge.
A really obtuse kind of puzzle.
I'm gonna get there one of these days *shakes fist*

I want to sit on time travelling santa's lap and ask for one of these kit's.

Those SGI machines look kinda cool.

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Ahh, those blue debug PlayStations. Brings back memories. I worked on marketing for a lot of PS1 titles so we were always being given in-progress builds of games on CD-Rs, since the marketing campaigns were already in progress 2-4 months before game release.

 

[Dreamwriter]

Net Yaroze was the one with the authenticator memory card right? I found three of those in a Gamestop in 2002 or so in a bargain bin for five dollars each and sold them for a fortune later on.

Click to shrink...

I had a Net Yaroze back in the day, loved it, even just for playing Japanese games (it was region free). Didn't make much more complicated than an asteroids game where you shoot rotating/scaling smiley faces though :)

Fun fact: when I eventually had to sell it, I put it up on Craigslist. I'm pretty sure I sold it to Kevin Bachus, one of the first people on the Xbox team (I didn't know he was from Microsoft at the time). This was a few years before the Xbox release.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Found another brochure, this one is a price listing from Cross Products for their assembler and compiler software packages. This isn't the price of hardware, this is the price of software to use the hardware. The brochure includes prices for lots of non-sega stuff:

SNASM2 - Saturn CS: $4000
SNASM2 - 32X/Genesis: $4800
SNASM2 - Atari Jaguar: $5000
SNASM2 - CD-i: $4000
SNASM2 - SNES: $4000
SNASM2 - Sega CD: $10000
SNASM2 - Sega Genesis: $4000
SNASM2 - Amiga 600/1200: $3000
Sierra 68000 C Compiler: $1750
Multi-edit (text editor): $300

These development kits needed retail consoles to be modified, the way these kits work is that they take advantage of some unused error trapping vector in the hardware (things the hardware uses to handle, for example, divide by zero errors) and maps them to routines related to debugging. As such, in your source, you need to first set the int vector for that trap, then purposefully induce it. This is how stuff like breakpoints work for these devkits. The process of modifying a console usually involved attaching to a test point on the console, like the Saturn's controller board has a port for an NMI controller where you can send, from external hardware, non-maskable interrupts to trip those trap vectors.

As such, SN offered services to mod consoles for you to use with their dev hardware. The prices to mod a retail console:

Amiga 600: $3000
Amiga 500: $2000
Genesis: $500
SNES: $500
Sega Saturn: $800
Atari Jaguar: $350

SN also offered CD emulators for many consoles:
Sega CD drive emulator: $3500
Sega Saturn JVC CD emulator: $8000
Sega Saturn MIRAGE CD Emulator v100: $3000
Sega Saturn MIRAGE CD Emulator v200: $3750
Additional emulation modules: $500

 

[Deleted member 12790]

So part of the fun now is hunting down ancient and nearly impossible to find software now. I want an of-the-time devkit, using hardware from that age. Luckily, I have several windows 95 boxes and a couple of old macs. Got the Sega sound and graphics tools installed in OS9 on my Mac, I'm about to start setting up Windows 95 for development. Reading through the Sega docs, these tools are super old. This is from back when Linux used COFF instead of ELF for the executable format, so I'm stuck going back to GCC 3.1. For the record, the current GCC is 8.x lol.

Seems the IDE they used back in the day was called CodeScape. I'm having a hard time trying to track down a copy of that unfortunately. I've got someone sending me a copy of SoftImage 3D 3.0, I'm curious to see if the key will work with it. I don't know how I'm going to source a copy of Irix photoshop, though, although I still have a very old student copy of Photoshop for MacOS from back when I was in college. I wonder if it'll be compatible with the photoshop plugins...

One other funny thing - long time scenester Nemesis managed to provide a backed up copy of the Sega Developers Technical Support site from around 1997, so I can browse the old support files. These are great because they become a snapshot of 1996-1997 Sega internet:

 

[Shy]

I'm not able to contribute at all to this thread. (because i'm a thicko)

But i just wanted to say. I always love seeing your posts and threads Krejlooc. You incredibly knowledgable about tech, and game development. ❤️❤️❤️


The only thing i can contribute is this vid.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

So finding CodeScape for the Saturn might be literally impossible these days. Talking to a guy who sold a copy a while back and it's super rare. On top of that, it requires a dongle to work, and those dongles expire after a while. More than that, check this out:

The manual is in Japanese! This is for the western kit!! Talk about terrible documentation.

The guy has some really awesome pics of the entire software set tho:

LOL an entire five-thousand-dollar SDK coming on 15 floppies and fitting under 50 MB.

 

[Friskykillface]

Make Die Hard Arcade 2
That's pretty awesome OP, have fun with it but ouch at the original cost

 

[freshVeggie]

Fascinating stuff. Wonder what those who lived through the early days think about current development. Especially from the technical standpoint.

here's a neat one from one of my friends:

Click to shrink...

Mad lad. His passion, enthusiasm and dedication is infectious.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Mad lad. His passion, enthusiasm and dedication is infectious.

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Ya Matt is a great guy, very helpful and friendly.

It's funny, when you run in retro demoscene circles, you run into the same folks over and over again at multiple websites. There's a whole crew of sega demosceners who bounce between Dreamcast, Sega Genesis, Saturn, etc. who are all incredible people. None of us have ever met in person, we're from all over the world (USA, Australia, Estonia, etc) but man I'd love to buy these people a beer and dinner sometime.

When I was first given my saturn devkit, I went looking for more information about software for it, and one of the first things I found was a link on another board from Matt, pointing to a video by another guy I see in sega circles all the time, who was documenting a Saturn devkit in a youtube video that began with a shoutout to the very person who got me my devkit, haha. Small world.

 

[BlackFyre]

Just want to say: love this thread.

Love seeing these old machines.

 

[sibarraz]

I'm proud to announce Garfield's Fucked Up Adventure coming to Xbox One once I start a studio.

Click to shrink...

Can I back this project?

 

[Megasoum]

That's just the cost of the main unit.

Regarding "every blah is a dev unit" -- that's true of almost every console ever. For example, you still need a retail Sega Saturn for the above dev kit. There is an unpopulated breakout board on the retail saturn for an NMI connector. To use this devkit, you need to solder a connector onto a retail saturn to connect to the unit. Those costs you quoted are just for part of the kit. For comparison, those parts would have been about $700 for the saturn as indicated above.

Click to shrink...

Yeah... No....

Part of my job is to buy devkits directly from the three console makers for a big AAA studio and while I obviously can't go into details about the actual prices, I can guarantee you that the total cost of setting someone up to be ready to develop for a modern console is CONSIDERABLY lower than your breakdown in the op.

Not only are the kits themselves a lot cheaper nowadays, you just need a normal workstation with a good CPU and 64gb of ram and it will do the job just fine. That's nothing crazy PC wise. Most of gamers nowadays have a PC more than capable of handling development

You still have extra costs in the periphery like Visual Studio licenses and Windows Licenses but you would need all that stuff no matter what anyway.

Also QA departments don't always use devkits. We have access to testkit hardware that is even cheaper and consists of basically a normal retail version of the console hardware but that has the added ability to run unsigned code. Games will often require testers to use a devkit earlier in development before they start doing optimization since you have more ram in devkits vs testkits but by very definition, the game has to be able to run on a testkit before it is released.

 

[sibarraz]

Back in the day, within a studio how many devkits do you have to buy? Considering that back then studios were small teams, did they has to buy a fev kit for each guy with a computer or you just need 1 unit for the whole team?

 

[julian]

I've got a Wii U kit which is considerably cheaper. Lol. I don't think there're gonna be too many collectors of those in the future. Pretty great that you can get something up and running just using JavaScript, but my dream was to be able to code well enough to someday make some shitty things for the Saturn - my favorite.
You better make something cool! ....no pressure

 

[Huey]

I love these threads, Krejlooc. Please never stop making them.

insane given the revenues for Saturn games in particular would have been so, so much lower than current systems.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Yeah... No....

Part of my job is to buy devkits directly from the three console makers for a big AAA studio and while I obviously can't go into details about the actual prices, I can guarantee you that the total cost of setting someone up to be ready to develop for a modern console is CONSIDERABLY lower than your breakdown in the op.

Not only are the kits themselves a lot cheaper nowadays, you just need a normal workstation with a good CPU and 64gb of ram and it will do the job just fine. That's nothing crazy PC wise. Most of gamers nowadays have a PC more than capable of handling development

You still have extra costs in the periphery like Visual Studio licenses and Windows Licenses but you would need all that stuff no matter what anyway.

Also QA departments don't always use devkits. We have access to testkit hardware that is even cheaper and consists of basically a normal retail version of the console hardware but that has the added ability to run unsigned code. Games will often require testers to use a devkit earlier in development before they start doing optimization since you have more ram in devkits vs testkits but by very definition, the game has to be able to run on a testkit before it is released.

Click to shrink...

Funnily enough some good came out of this entire topic as I've now got the ball rolling towards an XDK thanks to a MS rep earlier ITT.

Back in the day, within a studio how many devkits do you have to buy? Considering that back then studios were small teams, did they has to buy a fev kit for each guy with a computer or you just need 1 unit for the whole team?

Click to shrink...

This is actually a good point, earlier games were made by much smaller teams.

 

[Shy]

I wonder what PS1 dev kits cost in comparison, have any idea?

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They cost £12,000 according to this.

https://www.retroreversing.com/official-playStation-devkit

But those SGI workstations were really supplanted by the fast evolution of PC video cards and CPU's.

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Do you know when they start to get overtaken for dev work. ?

 

[Deleted member 1627]

They cost £12,000 according to this.

https://www.retroreversing.com/official-playStation-devkit

Do you know when they start to get overtaken for dev work. ?

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If I am remembering correctly, the move was quite deep into the PS1 life cycle. There was a game I worked on that transitioned from PS1 to PS2 and all the dev work on that was on PC's.

 

[XboxCowdry]

I read somewhere that to get good samples on the SNES you needed hardware that cost over £20,000 from Nintendo is that true?

 

[Shy]

If I am remembering correctly, the move was quite deep into the PS1 life cycle. There was a game I worked on that transitioned from PS1 to PS2 and all the dev work on that was on PC's.

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Ahh. Thanks.

If you don't mind me asking. What was the game.

I read somewhere that to get good samples on the SNES you needed hardware that cost over £20,000 from Nintendo is that true?

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Yep. Sound chip was made by Sony (By big Ken himself) So if you wanted to get the best out of it. Cough up.

 

[Deleted member 1627]

Ahh. Thanks.

If you don't mind me asking. What was the game.

Yep. Sound chip was made by Sony (By big Ken himself) So if you wanted to get the best out of it. Cough up.

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The Getaway. It wasn't the Getaway on PlayStation 1 though, but it's basic DNA was pretty much the same.

 

[Shy]

The Getaway. It wasn't the Getaway on PlayStation 1 though, but it's basic DNA was pretty much the same.

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Ahh.

I never played one of them.

But i always liked how it was set in London and a big chunk of it explorable

That is the Getaway. Right ?

I'm not thinking of something else, am i ?

 

[Deleted member 1627]

Ahh.

I never played one of them.

But i always liked how it was set in London and a big chunk of it explorable

That is the Getaway. Right ?

I'm not thinking of something else, am i ?

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Yeah that's the Getaway alright XD

 

[Shy]

Yeah that's the Getaway alright XD

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Good good. 😄

My memory isn't the best. And it's gotten even worse now that i'm an old. 🤣

back in the day, i always wondered if i could drive to my yard.

 

[Deleted member 1627]

Good good. 😄

My memory isn't the best. And it's gotten even worse now that i'm an old. 🤣

back in the day, i always wondered if i could drive to my yard.

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Hmm, depends where you lived at the time. We took some creative liberties with the map, mostly due to technical limitations, but it's fairly accurate.

 

[Shy]

Hmm, depends where you lived at the time. We took some creative liberties with the map, mostly due to technical limitations, but it's fairly accurate.

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Ahh neato. That's good to know.

Not many games take place here, Unfortunately.

I want to say... but ya know. The internet is horrible.

 

[Deleted member 1627]

Ahh neato. That's good to know.

Not many games take place here, Unfortunately.

I want to say... but ya know. The internet is horrible.

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I totally understand.

 

[Vipershark]

Krejlooc, where do these developer/SGI enthusiasts generally hang out?
I've been looking at AssemblerGames for a while but it's apparently in some sort of Schrodinger's closed forum state where it no longer exists, but is still there.

Is ObscureGamers the place to go for Sega Development nowadays?
Is there a good Discord that I should be on?

 

[Kazooie]

They are similar in costs, typically between $50k-$100k.

These are JUST the debugging costs for the machines, btw. This isn't the PC you need to develop on. All devkits are just modified machines that let you connect them to a PC to do things like halt execution and examine RAM as the program runs. This is the cost for the custom Saturn (and N64) debugging hardware, that you still have to pair with a development PC (both recommend an Indigo 2 for your development PC - ~$100k).

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Sorry, no, that is completely wrong. I only know the cost for Nintendo, but it's at least one order of magnitude lower. Xbox One dev kits are actually free. The every-Xbox-One-is-a-dev-kit feature also is not the same as what you describe here. You can run the dev kit software on a retail Xbox One to test Xbox Creator's Club games. Every Xbox One is capable of that. But then you cannot have achievements, are limited in resource access and only end up on the Creator's Collection no one knows about. If you want to develop for ID@Xbox you need a proper dev kit, but MS gives that out for free if they approve your concept.

 

[Shy]

Krejlooc, where do these developer/SGI enthusiasts generally hang out?
I've been looking at AssemblerGames for a while but it's apparently in some sort of Schrodinger's closed forum state where it no longer exists, but is still there.

Is ObscureGamers the place to go for Sega Development nowadays?
Is there a good Discord that I should be on?

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I know this isn't answering your question. But have you seen these vids.

 

[Vipershark]

I know this isn't answering your question. But have you seen these vids.

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I have!
I even joined an SGI discord server for a while to see what kinds of things were going on, but it seemed like a lot of discussion and not a lot going on, activity-wise.

I'm a lot more interested in seeing development being performed on these machines.
Is anyone (other than Krejlooc?) creating modern-day Saturn/PS1/N64 homebrew on an SGI workstation?