Hardware-craft game development · 1975 → 2005
Make a real game,
on a real old machine.
Pick a system. Work through complete games — not toy exercises — in the languages people used at the time. Direct hardware, no engines, no apologies.
Not sure where you fit? Find your way in → · Want the shape first? Open the map →
What's ready · what's next
/systems/Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Britain's gateway to gaming
Commodore 64
The best-selling computer of all time
Commodore Amiga
The multimedia powerhouse
Nintendo Entertainment System
The console that revived an industry
Atari ST
The musician's computer
Preview →BBC Micro
The educational powerhouse
Preview →MSX
The international standard
Preview →Amstrad CPC
The all-in-one challenger
Preview →VIC-20
The friendly computer
Preview →Master System
Sega's first worldwide console
Preview →What's new
/updates/ →Dash — a finishable NES game
The NES track's on-ramp: steer a runner, time a jump over the sweep, collect three coins to turn the level. Seventeen units from a blank screen to a cartridge, all driven off the NMI loop.
Read →All four launch machines have a game you can finish
Spectrum, C64, Amiga and NES each now open with a complete game, built one technique at a time — a title screen, a win and a loss, the lot. Not a demo: a small game you can play to the end.
Read →The shipped games learned to be lost
A pass over every finished game to make sure each has real stakes — a win you earn and a loss you can genuinely hit. Flock now shows both its endings, and a couple of latent bugs that quietly made games un-losable are closed.
Read →Four decades · pick a year
/timeline/Genesis
The home-computer boom
Where the curriculum grows
16-bit · the bridge
Edge of our range
The hardest cases
Learn in layers
curriculum and referenceCurriculum Map
How the learning layers fit together
The Craft
Cross-machine game-making techniques
Foundations
The ideas every machine shares
The Vault
People · games · hardware · culture
Pattern Library
Production-ready code, per system
Sources & Standards
What counts as checked, cited, and real
The Timeline
Hardware alongside the world that shaped it
The Fleet
Every machine we mean to teach
Built in the open
github.com/emu198xOur own emulator.
Emu198x — cycle-accurate cores for the machines we teach, modelled down to the pins and the timing. Headless and scriptable today; used for automated runs, screenshots, and accuracy work while learners use the native emulators.
An honest ask
≈153 machines catalogued. Dozens of games each. One of me.
This is free, open source, and forever — every page, every binary, every line of prose. The catch: I can't reach the full ambition alone. Author a game on a machine you love. Port the methodology to one I don't own. Fill a vault entry.
Ways to help →