60 Day Gamecube Development Contest

An anonymous reader writes "The site Cubehacker.com, a GC development page, is hosting a 60 day development competition. The goal of this competition is to boost interest in developing homebrew applications and games for this powerful little console."

OK

[Apreche]

I'd love to, but where do I get development tools? It's the same problem with the Nintendo DS. I would love to make so many things for it to maximize its potential, but the tools are unavailable. Nintendo, its one thing to make hardware with capabilities for new amazing innovation in gaming, its another thing to restrict that potential by limiting access to development tools. If you let anyone who wants to make Nintendo DS games, the system will flourish even more.

Re:OK

[xanderwilson]

First rule shows the way: All entries submitted must be built / compiled with the unofficial SDK/Devkits made available by the development community!

Re:OK

[Anonymous Coward]

"First rule shows the way" That's the nice way of saying, "Read the Fucking Article."

Re:OK

[Paladine97]

Please visit my site [voidpointer.org] for Gamecube programming information. It includes information on gc-linux as well as general Gamecube programming. I also have links that describe how to build a cross-compiler. [voidpointer.org]

Substantial hardware investment required

[tepples]

Many GameCube owners can't afford to purchase either (BBA + PSO + subscription to PSO) or (Action Replay + SD Memory Adapter + SD writer for PC).

Re:Substantial hardware investment required

[Paladine97]

You don't need a subscription to PSO. I bought it used and have never be on their servers once. It is a rather rare game so expect to pay $40 for it used. The BBA can be found for as low as $20 new, probably a lot cheaper used on eBay.

SD Memory adapter can be constructed with the correct parts and a bit of hardware knowledge. Total parts shouldn't exceed $10. SD cards obviously range in price based on their size. Action Replay goes new for about $30 but again eBay could probably be used for a better deal.

So in the end you're looking at about $50 or so as an additional investment. The cube is $99 so it's not too bad in the long run. For XBox hacking you need the $149 XBox + $50 mod chip so the price for homebrew is comparable.

Re:Substantial hardware investment required

[tepples]

I bought [PSO] used and have never be on their servers once.

Do the PSO tools, the SD card tools, and the compiler tools work well under Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP? I don't want to have to spend money replacing my PC's video card, scanner, and the rest of the peripherals with ones that work well in some distribution of GNU/Linux for PC. Or by "GameCube Linux" did you mean running most of the tools on the GameCube itself and having it mount my PC's hard drive over Samba?

SD Memory ad

Re:Substantial hardware investment required

[OneHungLo]

Yes, PSOLoad and SDLoad are both Windows-friendly tools. Also, devkitPPC is available for Windows using MSYS. You can get the latest version of devkitPPC here [gcdev.com]. (I posted it there since we couldn't access the Sourceforge repo at the time of release.) If you need some documentation, there is a Wiki project going on here [aklabs.net] for libOGC. The wiki is small right now, but we're working hard to get all of the lib functions documented. Any help with documentation is appreciated.

Also, about the SD-Adapter, you don't ne

Re:Substantial hardware investment required

[mr_jrt]

Indeed. I was quite fortunate actually, I got my copy of PSO and BBA off of eBay for £11.50 and £30 respectively.

Did some playing around with the existing tools, but not looked at actually coding anything yet. I'm tempted by the action replay + SD card route though purely for the fact the software would be able to boot quicker....(though still not automomously as the disc lid needs still to be triggered IIRC).

The SD adaptor is a piece of piss to manufacture, really (though I haven't got aroun

Re:OK

[Boglin]

There are economic and historical reasons why Nintendo will never do this. As is well documented, Nintendo's main source of income isn't hardware sales, but licenses to use the platform. It's completely true that Nintendo would have more developers and probably sell a lot more units due to all the cheap games available. It's also completely true that AT&T could become the number one cellular provider by not charging for service; it's just economic suicide.

The other problem is a matter of history and personal bias, so it may not be as certain as the economic issues. The big video game crash that killed the Atari, Intellivision, et al. was partially brought about by the fact that anyone who wanted to make a game could do it - even if they had bad ideas. The market was flooded with thousands of crappy games and it was difficult to find the true gems amongst the garbage. When Nintendo released the NES, the wanted to avoid those same mistakes and put restriction on what could be released for their platform. While the most famous examples are the company's notorious censorship, they also had debugging requirements. They even put a limit that you couldn't release more than six games a year. The result was that Nintendo flourished where others had fallen. Now, you could argue that modern games require such vast resources that the shovelware of yore is no longer an issue. However, considering that licensing was one of the ideas that brought the company to the power it has today, they aren't going to abandon it until after the ship has already sunk.

WorkStation?

[tepples]

I've been thinking of turning the PS2 into a workstation.

It's a playstation, not a workstation. Did the plans in this 1999 story [eetimes.com] ever pan out?

Re:OK

[Jagasian]

Sounds like official Nintendo propaganda. The game industry tanked because of good ol' supply and demand. They simply supplied too much, while the demand couldn't match. Furthermore, as the computing power of the systems improve, so do video game sales. The NES could simply do far better graphics and sound than the 2600, which also helped sell more games and game systems.

If open development really was a problem, then why haven't we ever seen the same problem with PC games? There was never a PC game cr

"Crash"

[tepples]

There was never a PC game crash.

Bull. PC games crash, freeze, lock up, etc. much more often than console games do because unlike a console, which is a piece of fixed hardware, a "PC" is a collection of components that poses a much more nebulous target for quality assurance. The fact that a console and its Licensed titles will Just Work(tm) keeps the console makers in business.

Re:OK

[Boglin]

First off, I never intended to claim that that was the truth of the situation: I just said that that was how Nintendo saw the world and that it would be a cold day in Hell before they embrace an open platform.

Second, you mentioned that the industry tanked because of supply and demand. Well, when Nintendo put the restrictions on the platform, they choked off some of the supply. From Econ 101, when you decrease the supply and demand remains constant, the price goes up and the number of units sold goes down

Re:OK

[MilenCent]

Sounds like official Nintendo propaganda.

Oh for the love of....

Okay, sure, Nintendo spread this hugely pervasive meme, completely unsupported by fact, that console games were completely and totally dead before the NES came along, and no one happened to notice this while it was happening.

The fact that I could, and did, buy Atari 2600 games for less than a buck each at local drugstores during this time, and in fact built up a lot of my library at this time, a couple of years before the NES saw U.S. shores

Hope the contest finishes

[Craig Maloney]

I hope the contest finishes before the next "Gamecube is dead" story hits Slashdot... whoops, too late. :)

If you're not good enough for the Cube

[tepples]

The problem with a GameCube competition is that the standard of production quality on a system with 3D capability is often too high for a project produced by an individual. That's why there's the PDROMS competition [pdroms.de] designed for simpler systems such as the NES, Game Gear, Genesis, Game Boy Advance, etc., where an individual project could still compete.