Casey O’Donnell on DIY Gaming (Part 1)

Did you know you can
turn a Nintendo DS into a Voip phone, or
run classic DOS games on a PSP?

I talking with Casey O’Donnell about his research
into game development, both to get a better understanding of the tools available to the DIY gamer intent on
creating their own games and modifying the platforms they own

. We sat down with a list of topics from modding
all of the popular platforms out there and the attitudes those various companies have toward the modding and homebrew
community, as well as the various legal issues that crop up when you are taking apart the gaming platforms and
software you own. There’s a lot of material ahead, I’ve broken the discussion into two parts
so look for the second half of this interview very soon.

I was amazed at how much stuff you can do with the
Nintendo DS that isn’t supported by Nintendo, as well as
the ingenuity of the people who are attempting to crack the
Wii.

Casey O’Donnell:
Yes, I’ve gotten really interested in the Nintendo DS homebrew, in part
because for a really long time Nintendo sort of let it be, and there’s
quite a community that’s grown up around it. It has, by far, some of the
best tools available for it.

You’ve got this device that’s great. You’ve got two screens, it’s got some reasonable hardware to run
2d or 3d stuff, but you’ve got a touch sensitive screen, so basically you’ve got a mouse, you’ve got built in WiFi,
you’ve got a microphone, you’ve got 3d sound. Now, 3d sound is actually one of the things that people are still working
on supporting well. But yeah, what a great little device, plus you can buy one for a hundred and thirty bucks.

It’s cheaper than some cell phones.

Casey:
Exactly, and you can use it for Voice over IP, it’s a great little device. But recently Nintendo’s been cracking down on…
they’re not technically ‘mod-chips,’ they’re cartridges that they’ve figured out a way to bypass the boot system of the DS. And
originally these mod-chips for the DS used the GBA cartridge, because the Game Boy Advanced doesn’t use any encryption,
so it’s not illegal to ‘homebrew’ for that system. And so they were using the fact that the DS could run GBA games to
bootstrap their stuff. But now you’ve got these cartridges that you can develop game, write them on a mini SD card, put
the mini SD card in this thing, put it in your DS, and it will boot.

So there’s two effects: one, you can write code for the DS using that. But two, you can take, if
you’ve got a cartridge reader, you can read a game off a cartridge so you’ve got a ROM file, write a bunch of ROM files
to one mini SD card, pop it in and play lots of cartridges. Nintendo saw that as not just homebrew, but piracy. So they
started cracking down on that. They’ve busted a bunch of manufacturers and resellers in Hong Kong recently.

I’ve seen some of the products that’ve come out for that, and it is a cottage industry that’s sort of ‘grey market’ at this point.

Casey:
Yeah, I’ve been quite open about the fact that I imported from Hong Kong one of these cartridges because I think it’s
important having the ability… you know, it’s this interesting contradiction that’s been set up by the DMCA. I want
to have the right to speak or, you know, write software for the Nintendo DS, which has been locked out by Nintendo. But if
somebody else helps me speak on the DS, they’re breaking the law and I guess theoretically I’m breaking the law by
importing this device and using it. So it’s really interesting to me that it’s closed off more of a potential for piracy
rather than any actual piracy.

But at the same time, I was looking at Atari and
C64 emulators, pretty much anything that has gone before can be emulated on the Nintendo DS.

Casey:

And so emulation, a lot of effort gets put into porting emulators to different consoles you can homebrew on. So one of the
first things that a couple people ported into XNA Express was a Nintendo emulator. So they could play Mario on their Xbox 360.
But of course you’ll never see that anywhere because it dilutes Microsoft’s brand. Emulators are really interesting because
they’ll give the consumer a lot of options, but from a company standpoint they’re the worst enemy.

I have a friend who has an Xbox that’s modded so that he has all of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games on it, and it’s almost
like an archival system. It’s the same issue that comes up with p2p networks where people are collecting stuff and then
figuring out ‘I need these mp3s because now I have a cellphone that plays mp3s.’ It’s also like ‘I need all these Nintendo
games on my harddrive because now I can put it on my Xbox or my Playstation.’

Casey:

And that’s the other part of this, which is even if you own the games from which you ripped all the ROM files for, Nintendo
would rather sell you them again. The fact that you paid forty dollars for the game back in 1987, they still want you to pay
five dollars now to get it, rather than take something you already own and put it somewhere else.

Which then comes down to the question ‘did I buy the game or was I leasing it?’ Once the system stops being supported, does
that stuff that’s still under copyright, can I use it in other ways?

Casey:
Well that’s one of the interesting things about Nintendo. That’s why you can go into the mall now and you see these little
devices that have twelve Nintendo games on them, because the patents have expired for those devices, the patents that cover
the hardware that locks things out. And you start seeing what happens over time, and once copyright runs out, sure we
can distribute these games because they’re not covered by copyright any more. Which is why you see companies trying to
expand copyright backwards in time.

What interests me is that people are not just making games for these things but that they’re taking it in ways that had never
been imagined by the platform makers.

Casey:

There are several add-on devices that fit in to the DS’ GBA slot that provide additional functions. So like force-feedback
vibration pack or the gyroscopic one. I’ve heard of a couple of different ones. Most of these homebrew libraries support
these devices before Nintendo games support them. So it is quite a vibrant community, and people are making some very
interesting stuff.

And the fact that the DS is a limited hardware platform is one of the things that I really like about it. The more
limitations you have, the more imaginative you tend to be within those limitations as you ask ‘What can I do within
these boundaries?’ Recently
John Carmack said that the Nintendo DS was
one of the best platforms for homebrew, for learning game development, precisely because of its limitations. This was
after he’d spent some time working on the DS and came to see it as a great learning opportunity for people to
understand why you’d need to do X or Y efficiently, how do you work within rigid limitations. The reason that
Super Mario 3 looked so much different and better than Super Mario 1 is because people got better about being imaginative within
Super Nintendo’s limitations. And that takes time, but it’s a really important aspect of game development.

Even the people who are making the slot cards are figuring out different ways to go about using these devices, as it seems
there’s a great deal of variation between slot-1 and slot-2 devices even within the last two years.

Casey:
Some of them have gone the route of doing it legally, you know how can they bypass it legally, versus screw the legality
we’re going to use slot-1 rather than slot-2.

What I’ve noticed is that it’s kind of a moot point.
If you were to go the legal route at some point they’d figure out a way to make that illegal if
they don’t want you to do it.

Casey:

One of the unfortunate things about being an individual is you can’t stand up to the legal power of a corporation,
they’ve got way more lawyers and money than you do. Even if you’re in the right, time in court costs money.

Okay, I was looking at the open source or open license hand-held gaming platform, the
GP2X which is fascinating to me.

Casey:

Most open source platforms fail because the first people port emulators to them, but then they won’t make any original
game content for them. And in part it’s because you’ve got a bunch of really talented hacker types, but they may not
have artist friends, or know that you need a pipeline, or these other things that game developers have figured out already.

So it just becomes another way to play a pirated game.

Casey:

Exactly, and so if you had some investment in these, and they’re a bit more expensive because the company has to actually be
able to make a profit off these devices because they’re not going to make any money off licensing. They’re not going to be
a distributor or a publisher, so they have no other opportunity to make money other than the sale of the device. Sure, it’s
a bit more expensive than a Nintendo DS, but you can do whatever you want with the device.

So I think the GP2X is particularly interesting (and I’m asking for one for Christmas). But again it’s very similar
to the DS, except for that there’s no encryption, there’s no legal issues that come up. It’s an open device that runs
a version of Linux. I’m pretty sure that SDL (Simple Directmedia
Layer), it’s an API for sort of a basic setup in 2d graphics and things like that.

There’s a good deal more coming in the second half of this interview. Look for the rest of this discussion
next week, and until then there’s a wealth of information available at the links below.

Related Links:

Lapis

moboid.com/lapis/

Game Development Related:

gpwiki.org/index.php/Game_Programming_Wiki

flipcode.com/articles/articles_summary.shtml

nehe.gamedev.net/

gamedev.net/

mathworld.wolfram.com/

wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.G.E.N

enterbrain.co.jp/tkool/RPG_XP/eng/

clickteam.com/eng/index.php

Emulator Forum:

emuboards.com/invision/

General Pages on Homebrew:

wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_homebrew

wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_homebrew

wikipedia.org/wiki/Psp_homebrew

wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Linux

wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA

Microsoft XNA Pages:

msdn.microsoft.com/xna/

creators.xna.com/

XNA pro-con discussion:

forums.xna.com/thread/32590.aspx

XNA Related:

ziggyware.com/news.php

xnaresources.com/

DS Homebrew:

tobw.net/dswiki/index.php?title=How_to_start_coding

dev-scene.com/NDS/Tutorials_Day_1

palib.info/wiki/doku.php?id=day1

PS3 Homebrew:

gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=24363

gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9290

Open Consoles:

xgamestation.com/view_product.php?id=33

gp2x.com/