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Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

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Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#11

Post by jsheard »

ducktective wrote: post #8

I wish the likes of Nintendo and Sony themselves finance such efforts. I mean it's one another way to create games (IP) for your console, what possibly could be the downside of starting something similar to Github Accelerator for your platform?

Because it's well established that game developers can and will jump through whatever hoops the platform holder demands at their own expense, they don't have the leverage to be picky about the technical details when deciding which platforms to ship on. Nintendo doesn't need to create new incentives to release on the Switch when they already have the biggest incentive of all: 140+ million units sold, and a high attach rate.

At least there isn't as much hoop jumping as there used to be, since the systems have all converged on using commodity CPU and GPU architectures with at most minor embellishments.

Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#12

Post by Shinmera »

fouric wrote: post #6

This is super neat - SBCL is an awesome language implementation, and I've always wanted to do CL development for a "real" game console. I'm also surprised (in a good way) that Shinmera is working on this - I've seen him a few times before on #lispgames and in the Lisp Discord, and I didn't know that he was into this kind of low-level development. I've looked at the guts of SBCL briefly and was frightened away, so kud…

I'm not doing the SBCL parts, that's all Charles' work that I hired him for. My work is the portability bits that Trial relies on to do whatever and the general build architecture for this, along with the initial runtime stubbing.

And, as mentioned, *her :)

Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#13

Post by Shinmera »

Retr0id wrote: post #9

> The answer to that is that while I would desperately like to share it all publicly, the NDA prevents us from doing so. I'm curious what the rationale here was for using the official SDK, rather than the unencumbered "homebrew" ones[0]. As a complete guess, maybe Nintendo doesn't let you officially publish games built using 3rd party SDKs? [0] https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Setting_up_Development_Environme...

You cannot publish games with homebrew, it has to use the official SDK. Besides that, almost nobody has a jailbroken Switch, so it would make it extremely hard to play any games on anything but an emulator.

Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#15

Post by cellularmitosis »

Shinmera wrote: post #12
fouric wrote: post #6

This is super neat - SBCL is an awesome language implementation, and I've always wanted to do CL development for a "real" game console. I'm also surprised (in a good way) that Shinmera is working on this - I've seen him a few times before on #lispgames and in the Lisp Discord, and I didn't know that he was into this kind of low-level development. I've looked at the guts of SBCL briefly and was frightened away, so kud…

I'm not doing the SBCL parts, that's all Charles' work that I hired him for. My work is the portability bits that Trial relies on to do whatever and the general build architecture for this, along with the initial runtime stubbing. And, as mentioned, *her :)

Holy cow, Kandria looks amazing. Is it also developed using Trial? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usc0Znm-gbA

Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#16

Post by Retr0id »

Shinmera wrote: post #13
Retr0id wrote: post #9

> The answer to that is that while I would desperately like to share it all publicly, the NDA prevents us from doing so. I'm curious what the rationale here was for using the official SDK, rather than the unencumbered "homebrew" ones[0]. As a complete guess, maybe Nintendo doesn't let you officially publish games built using 3rd party SDKs? [0] https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Setting_up_Development_Environme...

You cannot publish games with homebrew, it has to use the official SDK. Besides that, almost nobody has a jailbroken Switch, so it would make it extremely hard to play any games on anything but an emulator.

> You cannot publish games with homebrew, it has to use the official SDK

This doesn't surprise me much, but does Nintendo state this explicitly anywhere public?

If Nintendo chose to sign an application developed using a 3rd party toolchain, there's no technical reason why it couldn't run on retail consoles.

Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#17

Post by sinker »

colingw wrote: post #2

I have being using Trial[1] for the past few weeks to test out game development in Common Lisp, and have been having a great time. Being able to alter (almost) all aspects of your game while it's running is a blessing. I hope this port succeeds. [1]: https://github.com/Shirakumo/trial

Lisp languages seem well-suited for building games. The ability to evaluate code interactively without recompilation is a huge deal for feature building, incremental development, and bug-fixing. Retaining application state between code changes seems like it would be incredibly useful. Common Lisp also appears to be a much faster language than I would have blindly assumed.

The main downside for me (in general, not just for game programming) is the clunkiness in using data structures - maps especially. But the tradeoff seems worth it.

Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#19

Post by jsheard »

whitten wrote: post #18

I probably missed it, but since the switch doesn’t have a keyboard how do you handle text input ?

The Switch can support a USB keyboard, which would be the nice way to do it. There's already a fair number of officially published games with keyboard and/or mouse support, including a couple of programming ones. It has an on-screen keyboard too of course but you wouldn't want to rely on that more than absolutely necessary.

Re: Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch

#20

Post by anisoco »

f1shy wrote: post #7
fouric wrote: post #6

This is super neat - SBCL is an awesome language implementation, and I've always wanted to do CL development for a "real" game console. I'm also surprised (in a good way) that Shinmera is working on this - I've seen him a few times before on #lispgames and in the Lisp Discord, and I didn't know that he was into this kind of low-level development. I've looked at the guts of SBCL briefly and was frightened away, so kud…

- Is it not her?

It is

https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/436

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