Comment by corysama
11 hours ago
I’d bet the DS is the most advanced game console where it is still possible for a person to productively program it entirely via the bare metal memory map. As in: using an “SDK” that’s just a C header full of struct and array definitions at magic fixed addresses and no functions at all. Set values and the hardware does stuff.
I'd say the GBA is the sweet spot for this.
The DS has you dealing with two cores you need to write a firmware for that have to communicate to do anything useful, a cartridge protocol to fetch any extra code or assets that wouldn't all fit into RAM at runtime, instruction and data caches, an MMU, ... And that's without mentioning some of the more complex peripherals like the touch screen and wifi.
All official games used the same firmware for one of the cores, a copy of which is embedded into every single cartridge ROM. There's some homebrew firmwares included in the respective SDKs, but they aren't well documented for standalone use.
Granted, all of the above isn't completely impossible, but if you think of how much code you'd need to get a simple demo (button input, sprite moving across the screen), especially for a beginner, the DS requires a nontrivial amount of code and knowledge to get started without an SDK. Meanwhile, you can do something similar in less than 100 lines of ASM/C for GBA.
Agreed. I spent a lot of time programming the GBA in the early 2000s (back when the state of the art devkit was a flash cartridge writer with parallel cable...) and I consider it the last "grounded" console that Nintendo made, where you immediately and directly get to touch hardware right off the bat, without any gyrations. After having worked with the SNES in the 90s the GBA was a very familiar and pleasant platform to experience, in many ways similar to and built upon the SNES' foundation.
I've never coded for SNES, but the GBA having access to a mainline, modern C compiler is a massive buff. Also, emulators for it have always been available on practically any computer, console and mobile phone, and there's many so-called "emulation handhelds" that bring its (and similar) form-factor handheld devices to the market. If you really need an upgraded OG experience, many upgrade kits for the handheld exist as well.
None of this fixes the audio, but it sure gets damn close.
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The DS, more specifically the arm946e-s has an MPU, not a MMU (you're confusing it with the 3DS's Arm11). Not like it makes much of a difference anyway, you configure either once or twice then leave them be.
Honestly, I think why the GBA is more popular than the DS for that kind of thing is because it only has one screen (much less awkward to emulate), has high-quality emulators that are mostly free of bugs (mGBA most notably), and its aspect ratio is better than the DS anyway (3:2 upscales really well on 16:10 devices). That is to say, it's much easier to emulate GBA software on a phone or a Steam Deck than it is to emulate DS software.
gah, you're right, I was thinking of memory protection (as in, marking the relevant regions as read-write and read-execute) when I wrote MMU.
It's of course optional, and you can ignore it for trivial examples, but most games and SDKs will tweak it all the time when loading additional code modules from the cartridge.
It's just another way in which the DS is more complex to use properly without an SDK to do this for you - there's just more to think about. At least compared to how the GBA lacks all of this and the entire cartridge is mapped into memory at all times.
I agree, the GBA is a pleasure to work with. It's just a shame that the poor quality of the (stock) screens, low resolution, and lousy sound hardware make it feel like such a downgrade from the otherwise gnarlier and technically inferior SNES.
There's a pretty big renaissance of GBA clones out there right now that put better screens and speakers to the platform. And of course with emulators you can get all the modern hardware affordances for the platform.
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I think 3ds is also reasonably in the sweet spot.
Check out this project, fully written in bare metal C
https://github.com/profi200/open_agb_firm
Probably? Everything else onward relies on libraries...
Though there were some fits and starts there. The N64 for example is, from what I've heard, heavily library dependent and absolutely brutal to program bare metal (GPU "microcode" that was almost like programmable shaders v0.1); even the GameCube is a significant improvement for that kind of thing.