alt Hacker NewsI’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.
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gjsman-1000 • today at 3:24 PM
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.
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.