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32-bit, megabyte-order-of-magnitude is a much more interesting place to be than C64-equivalent hardware. You can actually make things that look and feel good, b

32-bit, megabyte-order-of-magnitude is a much more interesting place to be than C64-equivalent hardware. You can actually make things that look and feel good, but you still need to be clever about it. Nintendo GBA and DS are very much in this space, and are great fun to work with.

codeflo 5y ago
I’ve actually tinkered with GBA programming, and you’re exactly right. It’s surprisingly accessible. Of course, it’s built as a console, not a computer, so you can’t actually program on it. But give it more RAM instead of ROM, a keyboard, and you’re almost there.
jhbadger 5y ago
Maybe it is a feature of how old you are? To me at 50, GBA/DS just doesn't seem very retro. It's just a slightly worse version of modern gaming with no real charm of its own. But I suppose if you are 30, it has nostalgia value because it was what you grew up with.
- codeflo 5y ago
  Well I'm 37. We might split hairs here about what is and isn't retro. The GBA came out in 2001, which admittedly isn't that long ago, but in many ways, it was simply a modernized, mobile variant of the SNES. Indeed, many of its most successful titles were simply ports of SNES games from the 90s, like Super Mario World. So in my mind, it's a mobile 16-bit console in spirit (I know it actually has a 32-bit ARM CPU). That's less true for the DS. And I don't think many people would argue that 16-bit gaming had "no real charm", I consider it to be the peak of the 2D era. In fact, Super Mario World is often held as one of the best platformers of all the time. With all its fan mods, it's still widely played to this day. It's the early 3D era that followed that's mostly forgotten.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    The DS is really just a GBA where you added a bit more every single thing there was in the GBA, and a really weird 3D chip. A bit more RAM, a bit more memory, a bit faster ARM, a few more graphics plane modes, and so on.
- feffe 5y ago
  I think so. Although I had a C64, I cut my teeth on programming the Atari ST in assembler. The 68k is so much nicer to program than the 6502. The graphics and sound capabilities of the x16 is more in line with a turbo charged Atari ST or Amiga 500. That would be my dream retro station. Still I'll buy a x16 if it ever materializes, could be fun to play with some raster effects and sprites again.

codeflo 5y ago

I’ve actually tinkered with GBA programming, and you’re exactly right. It’s surprisingly accessible. Of course, it’s built as a console, not a computer, so you can’t actually program on it. But give it more RAM instead of ROM, a keyboard, and you’re almost there.

jhbadger 5y ago

Maybe it is a feature of how old you are? To me at 50, GBA/DS just doesn't seem very retro. It's just a slightly worse version of modern gaming with no real charm of its own. But I suppose if you are 30, it has nostalgia value because it was what you grew up with.

codeflo 5y ago
Well I'm 37. We might split hairs here about what is and isn't retro. The GBA came out in 2001, which admittedly isn't that long ago, but in many ways, it was simply a modernized, mobile variant of the SNES. Indeed, many of its most successful titles were simply ports of SNES games from the 90s, like Super Mario World. So in my mind, it's a mobile 16-bit console in spirit (I know it actually has a 32-bit ARM CPU). That's less true for the DS. And I don't think many people would argue that 16-bit gaming had "no real charm", I consider it to be the peak of the 2D era. In fact, Super Mario World is often held as one of the best platformers of all the time. With all its fan mods, it's still widely played to this day. It's the early 3D era that followed that's mostly forgotten.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  The DS is really just a GBA where you added a bit more every single thing there was in the GBA, and a really weird 3D chip. A bit more RAM, a bit more memory, a bit faster ARM, a few more graphics plane modes, and so on.
feffe 5y ago
I think so. Although I had a C64, I cut my teeth on programming the Atari ST in assembler. The 68k is so much nicer to program than the 6502. The graphics and sound capabilities of the x16 is more in line with a turbo charged Atari ST or Amiga 500. That would be my dream retro station. Still I'll buy a x16 if it ever materializes, could be fun to play with some raster effects and sprites again.