Hi!

Does anyone have the official NES DevKit, or know where I can get it? Or maybe other devkits made by official NES companies?

Anythings possible but I wouldn't count on a reply of yes myself. It is worth mentioning however that there are quite a few good tools available for nes development.

My personal recommendations would be
Assembler: WLA DX
Tile and Map Editor: GBTD/GBMB along with some code I wrote in QB for making the outputted binaries of the tile designer nes compatible. I'm just personally more used to gb development and working with vram. You could also write a converter to pad the files and make them usable as chrrom files though.
Music: There are some Nerdtracker/ MCK. I'm fairly certain from my experience with ripping nsfs that most companies used custom code for playing music.

I'm interested in the DevKit too. More like information about it though. What was it? a book with a compiler and some tools? Did it have a board to dev on? Something along the lines of nestech.doc? Did it include pie?

I'm not sure what the nintendo devkit was like but i'm sure i heard sometime that it was like a board connected to a pc, use assembly tools on the pc, then send the compiled form to the board for testing - displayed on pc monitor.

I could be wrong - maybe someone else knows for sure.

I'd like to know what the official devkit was like, too. All I've heard about it is that was incredibly expensive, so some licensed companies built their own.

I bet developers mostly used EPROM emulators, that would seem to be the best solution. That's where you have a RAM chip on the cartridge board that's hooked to a PC. You'd upload it to the EPROM emulator, then just hit the reset button to run it.

NES World used to (and probably still does, since Martin archives EVERYTHING) have interviews with some real programmers and graphic designers that worked at large and small companies doing NES titles.

Historically, Nintendo has never assisted in providing ANY tools for developers. They've given whoever signs up with them a developers manual, which goes over things like registers and memory maps, but is VERY badly translated from Japanese (more than likely translated by a Japanese native who has a semi-okay grasp of tech-savvy English). You received no hardware tools, no software tools, no nothing. This was most definitely the case with the SNES.

It's safe to say that the NES was more than likely the same way, especially when you look at how video games were developed in the late 80s -- and still are today. Gruelling hours, very little pay, non-regular paycheques, high stress, and very little debug time. A perfect example of the "SHIP IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" mentality that is still used in tens of thousands of companies in the United States and Asias today.

I personally have only run into one individual who has claimed to have the official Nintendo developers manual (register docs, memory map, diagram photos of how the PPU interacts with the electron gun (i.e. doesn't), yadda yadda), but he flat-out refused to send it to me or even take a couple photos of it, simply based on the motive that he wanted to gain something from it (recognition, or something like that) rather than just give it out -- because he knew if he gave it out, it'd be released all over the 'net and no one would give a fuck who he was and how he bent over backwards to get his hands on it. Pretty justified stance, if you ask me.

A footnote: I wouldn't recommending requesting things like this, especially on a public forum. Nintendo is now working NES games back into their profitable market value by coming up with the eReader thing for the GBA. Right now you can only play non-mapper games on it, but it's likely that they'll try to push this thing further, since it ensures that they have some legal standing in court over ROM piracy and what not. These games which are non-profitable to them are now becoming re-profitable; they're being dug up out of the back storage bins of Nintendo to be re-released, which means that in court they could indeed defend that illegal distribution of *anything* NES-oriented is affecting their income as a company. There's no proof of this, however; it's just an idea of mine.

-- jdc

I do know that some official companies used purely EPROM carts, and burned chips each time they needed to test the game (ugh, tedious!). I also see some official prototypes in hand hacked cases, so I think you're right about them having to fend for themselves.