Which CD-based console was the easiest to program for?

[kenneth9265_3]

Which "old school" CD-based console was the easiest to program for?

 

[Deepak]

Easiest or least difficult?

 

[Clashman]

Well, there's also the CDI, Playstation, Saturn, Commodore CD32, NeoGeoCD, TurboGrafx CD, PC-FX, etc. Why limit it to just those three, (especially when Sega CD and Jaguar CD were add-ons)?

 

[Qroach]

How about none of them.

 

[Sonic]

I'll go with Sega-CD. It didn't have any exotic architecture and was just another Genesis on top of the current one. This is all from memory, I could of course be extremely wrong with my thinking and if I am I apologize.

 

[ERP]

Sega CD was largely painless. But the extra hardware was close to unuseable since it was in a seperate address space.

I nenver did any work on the original 3DO, but it's my understanding that they had their act together, solid OS good techsupport, the only major issue was the few defective units that shipped early with only one of the two blitter things working (I can't remember what they called them). A lot of 3DO games only used 1 for that reason, the good ones detected the condition.

 

[Qroach]

Noo, I worked on 3DO and with people that worked on 3DO. It was horrible. They had to use Mac comptuers for the development environment, and they weren't the nice macs of today either. :?

 

[ERP]

Yeah M2 was like that, and as much as I hated the Mac dev platform, working on a PC at the time of the original 3DO wasn't like working on the "nice" PC's of today either. What with all the tools being DOS based, the 64K limits and XMS still hangling around.

At least you could write a MAC tool that had an array bigger than 64K without having to jump through hoops to use it.