Currently employed as an honest-to-goodness videogame programmer, working directly in 6502 assembly for a bonkers project that runs on a real NES. This is delightful fun, but also a short term contract, so I'm keeping my ears open for other opportunities. I absolutely love low-level engineering challenges, and am perfectly comfortable working directly with machine code. I've recently had the pleasure of designing a "hardware" audio synthesis chip, realizing that design on an FPGA, then programming it to play music and SFX under realtime performance constraints on a 1.7 MHz CPU. If you've got more of this sort of thing that needs doing, I'm all ears!
Curious, how did you get this contract?! I'd love a retro game dev gig like this. I have projects on RHDN on several different retro consoles and processors (6502 / Z80 / 65C816) and can work my way around WLA and the Mesen debugger with the best of 'em!
Also did you come up with a famicom audio expansion chip yourself? That's amazing!
I met my current employer while working within the NESDev community, and we quickly realized we lived in the same state. One thing led to another after that. This feels like one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. That said, there's a surprisingly healthy market for "new retro software", or whatever we're calling new games made for 40+ year old consoles.
The expansion audio thing does indeed work on Famicom natively! For NES we plan to ship a small adapter to plug into the otherwise unused EXP port on the bottom of the frontloading console. A single resistor can bridge one of the cartridge pins to Audio Out, unlocking expansion audio for folks in the US. Works great!
Remote: Preferred
Willing to Relocate: ...Maybe! (I'd need to sell my house.)
Technologies: Rust, C/C++, TypeScript, Python, 6502 Assembly, some Verilog
Github: https://github.com/zeta0134
Email: zeta0134 at reploid dot cafe
Currently employed as an honest-to-goodness videogame programmer, working directly in 6502 assembly for a bonkers project that runs on a real NES. This is delightful fun, but also a short term contract, so I'm keeping my ears open for other opportunities. I absolutely love low-level engineering challenges, and am perfectly comfortable working directly with machine code. I've recently had the pleasure of designing a "hardware" audio synthesis chip, realizing that design on an FPGA, then programming it to play music and SFX under realtime performance constraints on a 1.7 MHz CPU. If you've got more of this sort of thing that needs doing, I'm all ears!