So, in the very early days of home Computers/Consoles there was a ton of new things released, almost every month. We all know about the more famous systems, the Atari 2600, Nes, Apple 2 etc. But there were also tons of other system released all with their own little quirks.
but what about the
Oric atmos?
Jupiter ace?
Gamemate?
So the idea is that we set out a rough guideline for the specs of our own systems, then make a game that would be released for that system.
So first we would have to choose a time for our system to be released. So we can recognize roughly what other systems we would have been competing with at the time.
Nothing silly like something as powerful as a Playstation 4 but released in 1978.
You could also write a little about your system and maybe a picture of what it looks like. Year of release, what it was competing with and how well it did. Oh, and a name
List what your system specs would be,
.Maximum resolution
.An overall palette
.An on screen at once palette (sprites and backgrounds + background colour)
.How many sprites at once and how big they can be (or software sprites which can be any size but are slower)
.How many background objects there can be and how big
.How many scrolling layers
.Sound (Don't worry too much about it, this isnt that important)
.Maximum game size
.Buttons on the controller (or just, keyboard if it's a computer)
You can make it more interesting by adding a flaw
Examples:
.Built in controller with no fire buttons
.No sound chip
.A low amount of sprites
.An ugly fixed palette
.Prone to slowdown
.No scrolling
.Tiny rom sizes
Then make a game!
It could be a totally original game, a conversion of another game on a competing system, an exclusive game in a popular franchise or whatever!
I have an idea for my console too, based on combining the Gameboy and Virtual Boy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy ). Basically, it would have low resolution, 4-color (black/white/red/cyan), vector-based graphics, but be designed to show wireframe 3D games in stereoscopic 3D when viewed through a pair of those cheap red/cyan glasses you can get. The actual game could be something along the lines of the original "Battlezone" or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyjU4MtonZM
This is a great idea but it takes a bit of planning and I'm wondering if you need help getting it off the ground. I suggest just making two or three console specs, set a deadline of a couple of months and letting people decide which to make a game for. I'll try to find time to support your competition even if I only have time to make a crappy single screen game
It's neat because the dev environment is contained in the console itself, so you can build an entire game without leaving the application.
The only issue is that it's not fusion, so it uses lua as the coding language. Still kinda fun though.
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Edited by LordHannu
