I was wondering, does someone know how was the development of NES games back in the days?
Did they have a special testing NES, flashable cartridges, did they program it from a PC, or what?
Any info on that?
Well all the "prototypes" people found suggests they used carts with socketed eproms
its my understanding this differs per company. I don't know what Nintendo’s official development kit included, but its my understanding that some companies made special modified hardware that included hardware debuggers and I do not know what else. They could not effectively emulate the NES back in the 80s they used a PC to compile though.
I think most or all of the found prototype cartridges were built for testing or showing off. I'm sure most of the developers had something better, like an EPROM emulator at least. These companies were putting out big bucks to get carts made, it'd make no sense to use the cheapest tools. But of course it would vary widely.
But why would there be holes in front of the car then? I suppose the sample could be reused then......I suppose.
But ya I guess it makes sense they would use an eeprom emulator or a ram cart or something. (you're not gonna tell me none of the devs had a copynes like device
)
Yeah from what I've seen a lot of those carts have a "Return To:" on the label. Also, years ago a lot of TKEPROM boards were going around on ebay, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the prototype carts around are more recent.
To the OP: check out
www.nesworld.com -- the interviews and hardware discoveries (Martin often goes to Turkey and other foreign countries just to find crazy carts) should give you some idea how it was done back in the late 80s/early 90s.
OP == Original Poster?
Let's see...