Here are the all important links for today's episode: To support what I do you can check out www.patreon.com/RMCretro To subscribe to Jason you van visit www.youtube.com/@The_Dev_Den To shop at my gift shop check out rmcretro.store Thanks to PCBWay.com for supporting the museum Thanks everyone! Neil
for a moment I thought you were launching a retro publishing / dev company and I was all ready to jack in my career and come crawling on all fours for a job
By the sound of it at the end I think they plan to do that with a game he's working on? At any rate, I think the most productive "general" thing they can do on that front is a mixture of store-front for various things (including just reliable access to some specialty supplies), how-to guides on various things, and maybe acting as a specialty crowdfunding portal. There's likely to be too much variety in volumes to reliably be a constant publisher.
The doors could have some kind of white-board/flip-over scrabbling area for ideas and brainstorming? You'd be sure to get in some of that in a cramped space, not letting such valuable space go to waste...
So glad to see you grow. Knowing that there are people out there intentionally archiving this particular part of our shared electronics, computers, and video games history. Love all of the work that you guys do.
Loving this sooo much! Great banter, great systems. Oh and the PDS. I cant wait to finally see it in action after all the years of just reading about it and few pictures.
Hi Jason, I had an absolute blast at your opening ceremony and the interview with Richard! Every moment was fantastic. Can’t wait for more interviews and updates. Best wishes!
After hearing about the idea of the Dev Den on one of your Patreon days, it's amazing to see it happening. Can't wait to see those dev kits running and even more excited about the music side of things ; that could be an entire den of its own right there! I have to say, I am in awe of all the hard work you guys put in to build that. All the flooring and painting and carpentry, it looks exhausting and then you go and start making an inventory as well!
Yeah, would love to see Chris Huelsbeck (my favourite games music composer) visit the Cave for a talk, although I believe he's living in the US currently so could be tricky to arrange.
This is so exciting. I love the idea of taking the museum and channel to support a actual dev environment as a musrum piece that's operational! I love how he favors a trackball and actusl magnetic disk!!!!!!!!!!!
I know it's not just bedroom coding, but I spent my childhood on my friends bed while we coded games from magazines. You need posters, and a bed to sit on, preferably pine with retro bed covers
Very interesting… nice idea too. The original ‘cave’ started me on my own ‘man cave’ at home stacked full of old retro consoles, 8 bit systems and retro Apple kit ❤
Wow Die Alien Slime is a blast from the past. It was one of those games I had vague recollections of playing and enjoying a lot on my c64 when I was a lad, but never could recall what the name was these days. Thanks for the nostalgia hit and great to see the creator :) . Also, cool initiative with the Dev Den. Thanks for a great video, as always!
You building a development office as part of your museum reminded me of some of the stories I read and heard about arcade game development in the late '80s. With both a memoir from one person and interview from another (who both worked at the same publisher's video game department), and without much visual reference to go by, I pictured a typical late '80s office but looking a little different with PCs, arcade hardware, and physical documentation on some of the desks and such. I think you nailed it with the wall paint, flooring, and desk!
when I worked in game dev from the late 90s to early 2000s, our PS2 Tool was inside a cage that was bolted to the floor as part of our security agreement with Sony. So for authenticity somebody better get out the angle grinder, welder, and buy the biggest padlock 😂
Great video, I came to the cave with my son about year ago and had great time, I hope we get to come back again see all changes when we are back down your way
What a wonderful idea. I'm looking forward to seeing what magic Jason could do with that dev system all those years ago. I set myself the challenge of learning machine language to write a simple game for the Tandy Colour computer, the Coco (and by extension the Dragon 32) a while back. I really wanted to try doing it old school, so cassettes for storage and the old 8 bit Coco 2 for editing, compiling and debug. I tried for a good week or two and when I got to 100 or so lines of code I moved development to my modern PC. If anything trying coding like those guys in their bedrooms back in the 80s gave me a whole new appreciation for the patience and forward thinking needed to pull off such a task. On a modern PC you can bring up your code, edit a few lines, compile and test on an emulator in a matter of seconds. On the original hardware the same task takes somewhere in the region of 10-12 minutes. But, I'm happy to say that with huge perseverance I finally finished my game and now have a huge lingering thirst for all things 8bit code and development. So Jason is more than welcome to show up in my youtube feed anytime, I'm off to check out his channel right this instant. Thanks Neil ;)
Grat vid as usual thank. PDS! Back then that was the dream. And it was only a dream due to cost. But in an interesting turn of events I ended up working with Andy Glaister (main creator of PDS) after he stopped doing the PDS and moved to America.
I made a few games using PDS and PDS2 back in the day. :) It was a pretty great environment after working with native solutions. Cross development was the term we used for coding on PC and targeting other systems. Great addition to the cave.
I made dozens of games back in the 80s using BASIC with machine code routines cobbled together from magazines. But living far from anywhere where professional games were being made, I only became a published games author in the early 2000s when the internet came along and people started to notice me. I'm still in the games business today, and these days I write 8 bit games for fun on the weekends (some examples are on my RU-vid channel). It is SO MUCH easier now that you can access emulators and all the information you need online. And it's a lot of fun! The retrodev scene is thriving; lots of great new games have been made for 8 bit systems in recent years.
That Dev Den is brilliant. I’ve only been in Software Development since 2006, so still a youngster in your eyes. Sadly I’m from mainland Europe, but if I ever get the chance I would definitely love to come and visit. Would really love to see how it all was done back in the day and learn a thing or two. Great work! Cannot wait for part 2.
I really appreciate this addition to the cave. As someone who has been doing programming, graphics, sound and music since his Amiga days (even though I do not thrive in all of that 😂), I feel that home computers are too often reduced to just gaming machines on RU-vid.
So gratifying to see both this channel and the cave [edit: finally!] take off in the way they have and get the recognition they deserve. Neil is the ultimate slow burn.
I'm looking forward to seeing some videos from this space once it's up and running. Gamedev, retro and modern, is one of those things that seems baffling when looking in from the outside. You always manage to break complex things down in a way that reglar' Joes like myself can understand them.
You've got to have a dualtone Trimphone and a cork pin board in there! Also don't forget a Star LC10 9pin dot matrix printer, complete with fanfold paper...
This is mighty interesting. Looking forward to seeing videos appear on the Dev-channel. :) I think I must tag along with Erwin/Mr Custard someday soon to check out the Cave.
Hey, that's heckin' rad! I recently started building a retro dev workstation myself. Taking an old computer and setting it up with what I need for NES, SNES, GB, and N64 development... Including the ability to interface with my """development hardware""" (By which I mean ""magicoms,"" by which I mean "backup devices" by which I mean _game copiers._ 😏)
Wouldn't it be cool to develop a game in the Dev Den? Something that visitors to the cave could then play on a C64 for example? I think that would be really fun.
I remember someone from Elite recommending that I get Rodney Zacks Programming the 6502. I did, and with a stock C64, I was still baffled. Managed a game with Mirrorsoft's The Game Creator or some text stuff with C64's terrible BASIC. Will be fascinating to see how it should/could have been done in an alternate universe (if I'd had a bigger brain).
I used OCP's Full Screen Editor/Assembler back in the day. My experience with it influenced some of my choices with the Odin assembler I've written on the ZX Spectrum Next.
I love my Atari STE, keyboard has unresponsive keys the last time I tried it “sad face”. I will sort it at some point I’m sure. 4Mb RAM and TOS 2.06 because I wanted to be able to change window colours 😁
i wish i kept my 8-bit abilities in check with real stuff.. may have ended up doing better stuff than i am doing today.. asides that.. great video, and dang i'd love to see a LLama in there 🙂
Nice to see more stuff coming to the cave. One thing surprised me though. If I understood correctly, you only open for three hours. This seems a very small amount of time to play with all the different systems that you have up and running.
Very cool stuff guys, thanks! Excited for part 2. A little before my time as i was born in 1990 but i still remember playing dos games on my first PC a windows 95 machine.
Hi my name is Tony. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. My dad told me about a computer with a mouse and windows-esque OS. He saw this machine running in the mid 70s. I was obviously shocked because of windows 95 not being invented twenty years later. I was amazed to discover the Xerox Alto!. If you could get hold of one a trash to treasure would be awesome. Tony Ps if you have an Amiga 500 to sell, I would be very interested. I am on benefits and will happily donate the machine back to you probably with a PiStorm installed) I'm 45 an never got the chance to use one except round friends of my parents; so it would be awesome to experience one for myself.
The Cave is becoming more and more like Kong Studios! -- actually, now that I think about it, would it be possible to do a virtual tour of the place to have online for those of us who will likely never make it to that part of the world?
Ah coding in the 80's... Sinclair basic on the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, a bit of Z80 assembly on the Spectrum (helped by Machine Code Monitor) and the CPC464, (compiled by hand!!) with a dash of text adventure games using the Quill and the Graphic Adventure Creator. Followed up with some dabbling on an Amiga 500 and A1200 with 68000 assembly and a touch of C. (Oh the joys of the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual!!)
Nice, so you may need to catchup with Colin Furze and make a real cave next as u expand again. I also think maybe your getting near the point of investing in a lift kickstarterto gain new heights of lower floors.
Great video. I very interested to hear more about your in-house developed inventory software package. Is there any chance that this could be made available to the Retro community? I could surely use the help of such a system to keep track of my personal retro collection!
