[AP Dukefan94]

So my question is, can a video game company or anyone into build their own games make a game old for older game consoles (PS2 for example) that are no longer produced? I'm not sure if laws prohibit it or would it be up to the company that owns the hardware decision? Any guess.

[Kawa]

I can easily make GBA games, and so can you given a nice toolchain, some examples, and a means to get them on the system. DS is much the same but a tad more difficult, Gamecube and Wii... depends. SNES and NES are more difficult for lack of "nice" toolchains, unless you like writing in raw assembly. Same holds for Sega Megadrive/Genesis. That's all the systems I'll mention by name because those are the only consoles and handhelds I've programmed for, or attempted to, but the single nice toolchain that works for GBA, DS, GC and Wii, also supports PS Vita though I never cared to try.

The only prohibiting factor is getting your work to run on the actual hardware. Nintendo makes it notoriously more difficult with each new device, and they really don't like it when you do. Emulators, on the other hand... there's a big ol' can of worms regarding those that noone honestly wants to get into (teal deer: "emulators are illegal, unless it's our own"), but let's just say there's nothing intrinsically illegal about writing a NES/SNES/Gen game and easily running it only on an emulator for those systems. I do suggest, for the sake of those players who can get that stuff on the actual hardware, that you use the most accurate emulator you can find as to minimize stupid shit. For SNES, that means you do not test your work on ZSNES and consider it done -- depending on how sloppy your work is, chances are incredibly good it won't work properly or even at all on a real SNES.

[MusicallyInspired]

What Kickstarted game recently had a bonus stretch goal of supporting the Sega Dreamcast? I totally remember seeing that.

[Sledgehammer]

Too lazy to Google, but Dreamcast had plenty of games released after its official death. I think there was one in 2015 even.

[Shawneth]

Sledgehammer, on 13 December 2016 - 06:05 AM, said:

Too lazy to Google, but Dreamcast had plenty of games released after its official death. I think there was one in 2015 even.

The Dreamcast has quite possibly the most dedicated community around.

[oasiz]

You can code for older hardware but it can be a bit of a pain.
Devkits and whatnot exist from official HW & SW to unofficial tools and documentation.

Thing is, you're often wasting your time usually when doing serious stuff for older hardware.
While especially 80s and 90s systems have their own quirks that add to their charm, programming for them can be challenging.
Not only do you have to learn CPU specific assembly to program efficiently, you need to learn how that hardware works, how the chips communicate and what possible bottlenecks there are in the chipset.
Yes, details of this are more complicated but you're essentially stuck with often primitive development tools and loads of trial & error and learning.. More of a hobby for those who are really interested.

New games do happen, for example people in the demoscene still produce content (including games) for older home computers that are more accessible due to being designed with user-programming in mind and not locked walled gardens like consoles are.
It's a fun and impressive thing when something outstanding gets produced but often it's the result of years worth of research on the said hardware. Especially say.. Later generation NES games which are often what people remember fondly.. Even trying to think of how games like battletoads has been coded gives me shivers. It's just full of tricks that need quite a bit of knowledge.

When it comes to later 98 and up gaming, you're not as gaining much from coding for older hardware since the feature set is pretty much getting more generic at that point. Development documentation / scene for said devices and even emulation is barely approaching satisfying results in accuracy as the systems are more complex. However, in reality you're not really touching assembly, instead coding with say.. C, and relying on the APIs and development tools that the developer had to use their custom image/model/audio formats. But you're essentially displaying pretty much what was possible with earlier generation PC 3D hardware, except with longer load times and cumbersome / buggy tools. Anything after '03 is even more generalized, graphics chips are near identical to PC counterparts with their feature set, APIs are similar to what you can use on PC side already and you're essentially just cross compiling to a lower powered walled garden environment more and more as the years pass by.

Bottom line is that you're much better off making a more accessible title that has been coded with more modern hardware in mind, this doesn't automatically mean using Unity the laziest possible way to create a megadrive platformer-like game that shits all over what hardware could do at the time, instead you can code a similar engine much quicker from the ground up and even mimic quirks of the older systems without spending time optimizing things for a platform that people will likely end up emulating anyway. It's all about how well you can pull it off without compromising what it's trying to be.

As for the legality, Nintendo pioneered the lockout chip that was developed to weed out unlicensed games. You can't really license for any "end of life" systems like that as far as I know but a lot of them lack proper protection, which allows them to boot unlicensed cartridges / games with or without tricks.
DC has been blown open for years so it's an easy target, same with megadrive and other systems. These are still in the grey zone as far as legality goes but it's usually the hardware protections that prevent unlicensed code from booting that you should be worried about then distributing games.

[AP Dukefan94]

So aside from coding issues, I wonder if a company (Sony for example) would be open to the idea of acquiring the proper liscence to build new games for a discontinued console or PC?