John Carmack, the man behind Doom, is a fan of homebrew, and wishes that the DS's platform holders would embrace it rather than hinder it. Carmack believes that homebrew on the DS is perfect for budding programmers, helping them get to grips with game design:
"It is a shame that homebrew development can't be officially sanctioned and supported, because it would be a wonderful platform for a modern generation of programmers to be able to get a real feel for low level design work, to be contrasted with the high level web and application work that so many entry level people start with."
Carmack might be right, and homebrew may have all sorts of wonderful, legal, harmless applications, but he's being somewhat naive. We all know what the main reasons for opening up one's DS is, and that's not something Nintendo likes to encourage, strangely.
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Contest:
9:49 AM on 11.09.2007
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Does Nintendo not want that because I imported it??
Home brewers always find away around the system anyway and if you have enough know how to make a game in the first place well you probably won't find getting to know hacked documentation and what not from the web too hard to get to grips with.
Allowing anyone to develop a game does not mean that they would be allowed to sell it.
/That pirate is definitely just thinking about baseball.
It's a nice little toss-out to homebrew developers. Basically, you pay something like a hundred bucks a year, and in return you can play indie games written by you (or others, possibly ms-approved) for the xbox 360.
I'm not sure that it's easy or even possible to abuse this to allow pirated games. I think this is the kind of thing that Mr. Carmack is referring to -- he'd like to see a similar facility for the DS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze
I'm in the development game and I fully support Carmack, with a caveat....
Why not just manufacture a USB-Enabled Cartridge (we all know it's been done), create a simple SDK based off a solid, easy language like python or a juiced up basic and turn the fucker loose for $99 USD (So its cheaper for us Canucks :P)
Lock the cart with an encryption key so it can only play games compiled by the SDK and boom...you have a generation of DS developers in the wings...
As for piracy, umm, duh it's here. *Cough* Natrium42 *cough*.
Take the Adobe approach...they know everyone pirates Photoshop. But does anyone use ANYTHING else? They have every pixel pushing geek on lock.
If the big N had a tight little SDK and a 256MB Flash chip they'd have a legion of programmers skilled enough to take on real, licensed games right out of school. Instead we get flash games and shit for XBLA.
I guess if they did make an official kit it would help speed things along in that it would stream line the development tools, rather than waiting 2 or 3 years for hacked or reversed engineered oness to become available.
But then like Microsoft, Nintendo are gonna put these things through tests and filter out the stuff they don't want and won't allow for us to decide if a certain game/application is crap or not.
I think its only a matter of time before Nintendo grapple with the fact that those creative gamers outside of japan, not in schools supported by them and their software/hardware muscle, need and deserve some kind of help in this area, on DS or Wii. They'd be wise to act, as it will eventually bring new blood to the industry. To ignore the homebrewer and mistakenly mix them with pirates trickily would be silly.
If a couple of people who spend a few hours a day hacking in their basement can beat out professional developers, then the "pros" deserve to lose some sales.
As for homebrew in general, I don't see the point other than novelty value. If you want to make games for fun and education, not financial profit, then the PC is the best place to start. The hard part is not getting into the habit of being lazy, since PC development is just so easy.