I’ve kinda orbited around the video games industry since video games were a thing, and accordingly I have quite a few interesting tidbits of hardware laying around – and stories to go with them.
For example, here is the complete lifecycle of the early XBOX game:
The clear machine is a DVT-4 development kit, the green one is a debug kit, and the black one is a retail machine. At work we have probably 30 of the green debug kits from back when we did console certification, but there was only one dev kit – and I used it to help clients work out kernel level issues.
Using that dev kit I’ve written a few things that run on the Xbox, but they are just personal project things for the entertainment value.
Ages ago I got into programming, computer graphics, music production and sound design, and other such hobbies with the intent of being a one stop shop for game development… It was nice to put all of those skills to use and see the end result run on a console. 🙂
Here’s another setup from back in the day:
That’s the old Nintendo development setup. There’s an NDEV and debug (RVT Reader) Wii for Wii games, and an IS Nitro writer and emulator for DS titles. The red PC was the Wii dev box that ran the two RVT burners and the black one was for DS development.
All in all it was a lot of fun working on early consoles – mostly because anyone could. But as the amount of money in the segment increased so did exclusivity – and eventually you had to be a “name” or owned by Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony to get the tools to write things. I got out of the business after Playstation 3, because Sony started wanting six digits for dev/debug hardware – if they deigned to even talk to me.
And Microsoft had gotten just as bad…
So I kinda moved on to other things, but I keep the hardware around to remember how it used to be. 🙂
Listening to "Deacon Blues" by Steely Dan