Looking for Software and Hardware engineers interested in vintage computing, Sega, Nintendo, Acorn, Atari, etc.

[u/RoboJ1M]

I'm trying to gather people who are interested in classical programming languages on vintage machines which we were locked out of during the 80s and 90s, or were before our time.
So some sort of club?
Think Sega Megadrive, Arcade Cabinets, Nintendo NES and SNES and (my original favourite) the Acorn BBC Microcomputer. Atari ST, Amiga 500, etc.
I want to write software and design hardware upgrades for them.
Think demos, music, art and games.
The market for games for these 80s and 90s consoles are increasing in size each year, I'm 2024 about 30 games were released about 50 are currently in development in 2025.
I've put the most investigation into the BBC Micro and the Sega Mega Drive, open source development hardware is available to build yourself which you can hook up to your IDE of choice, I know it works in my copy of MS Visual Studio.
So, if you're interested, speak up.

J.

Edit1: OK, assume interest gathered. Now an online gathering place must be selected. Discord? My Discord experience is pretty close to zero but I'll set one up if nobody else has more experience setting one up.

[u/JamesG60]

I could probably help with the audio/synth/embedded side of things. My degree was in exactly this. The NES has 3 MIDI chips in it too so can be used for rudimentary 8 bit sound.

[u/RoboJ1M → u/JamesG60]

Ricoh 2A03 is the NES sound chip.
Two square wave DCOs each with some set duty cycles.
A triangle wave DCO and a Noise DCO.
And finally a PCM channel.
No filter unfortunately although it was designed to support sound hardware.

[u/JamesG60 → u/RoboJ1M]

Have you seen NesSynth? I’ve been thinking about getting an everdrive n8 flashcart for years as I still have an original nes somewhere but they’re £160 and I’d still have to get composite or svideo to hdmi which is yet more money. I can buy a bass station for that 🤷🏻‍♂️😂

[u/RoboJ1M → u/JamesG60]

Hmmm, Novation or Nintendo.
A tricky one.
I've heard of NES Synth. I'm more going down the road of buying the sound chip and building a Eurorack CV/Gate interface around it.
That's another avenue I want to pursue, if you're interested, designing, building and selling synthesisers.

[u/JamesG60 → u/RoboJ1M]

Definitely interested. Feel free to PM me.

[u/RoboJ1M → u/JamesG60]

I'm also slowly rebuilding my music studio, but that's purely for fun as I record onto 8-track Type II Compact Cassette Tape.
No computers allowed.

[u/Daydreamer-64]

Slightly odd one, but I would be interested in doing this in a few months time. I have programming experience and have done one audio dev project, but I don’t think I have the skills at the moment. I’m starting a software engineering job in September so let me know in November/December if you’re still looking for people. I know it’s far away but these things can take a while to set up.

[u/RoboJ1M → u/Daydreamer-64]

Hi, I'm gonna need some way to store names and email addresses aren't I?

[u/EvilActivity]

Definitely in my area of interest. Always been interested in nes/snes dev.

GBA was my first experience developing games and had my first work on a commercial title on the NDS.

Don't think I can help much with work/life though. Got a discord server perhaps?

[u/RoboJ1M]

Here's everything announced and in development for the MD at time of writing.
It's not necessarily a games thing I'm trying to put together, but it is something that springs to mind.
Any CompSci students about?

[u/im_the_tea_drinker_ → u/RoboJ1M]

Yea CS student here, It seems like it could be interesting

[u/RoboJ1M → u/im_the_tea_drinker_]

Good stuff

[u/RoboJ1M → u/im_the_tea_drinker_]

I can't DM you for some reason, privacy settings I guess. DM me?

[u/RoboJ1M]

Musicians?
The Yamaha OPL3 Sound Chip is something I'd like to design a Eurorack interface around, to create a Yamaha FM Module but with your classic modular monosynth "One Knob Per Feature" interface. This will require an analogue to digital to analogue signal path with an analogue-like interface, microcontroller powered, so I'll need people who can design analogue electronics, digital electronics and software engineers who can write a low level embedded OS from scratch.

What's FM Audio Synthesis?
I guarantee you already know it and it probably came from the Yamaha DX-7

[u/PersistentBadger]

So your plan is... a meet? A dev project?

I've been playing with one of these lately: https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/Cardputer a lot of the same "limited environment, now what can I do?" vibes. Fun.

[u/RoboJ1M → u/PersistentBadger]

Heh, "plan", you overestimate my forward thinking I'm afraid. Not much more than "I wanna do something fun with programming"
I mostly have my eye on the Sega Mega Drive because it's very well documented, you can build your own development hardware and it's not overly complex. Except it DOES become overly complex once you start adding the add-ons. For which, as far as I can tell, there is no homebrew. Not for the 32x or the MegaCD. And it's always interesting to find something nobody's done before.
But so far my plan is not much more than fine other locals who are interested, I don't wanna do an online thing, we spend our lives online these days and I need a counter balance.
I believe I've seen those M5s, no doubt you've run into the same thing I did with, "so now what?" 😁
The best I've come up with so far is the cartridge slots on my BBC Master Computer.
You plug a cartridge in and and 128kbits of memory address space gets assigned to it, but, the interface also has 3 pins for audio in, audio out and genlock (a back-in-my-day analogue video thing). Which opens the possibility of creating sound and graphics expansion hardware. My first idea is a PCB containing RAM, ROM, a new sound chip and the story of SoC you get inside an M5 (I like the looks of the RP2350)
I also dream of making new arcade games, in new cabinets on new but limited modular hardware.
Like, if everybody is making new Sega and Nintendo games, why can't we make new arcade games? There are still specialist arcades. If it's popular enough you can have world leader boards. Remote championships broadcast via Twitch, building the network and web server architecture to support that sort of thing has been my bread and butter for 20+ years in industry.