While the Genny was/is/will be my favorite system, I was always interested by the white beauty : the PCEngine Duo R.
Thanks to a friend, I bought one years ago, before eBay…so yes, at a fair price 😉
Let be honest, it was “somewhere” on my house since then, I only plugged it 1 or 2 times to check its status.
Now that I develop on Genny, and spend half of my time fighting with the only 4 avalaible pals, my interest for the PCEngine increased over time, but not for the same reason.
Last year, I wanted to stop Genny dev, because of some personal concern with the community….but I HAD to code, it’s a real dope.
I looked at the SMS, the Lynx, the Neogeo Pocket, the GameBoy…and the PCEngine.
I moved to SMS, because sverx’s devkitSMS was looking for some love and because I found it interesting to work on the origin of Genny.
A that time, I though only HuC was available for the PCEngine and, no, sorry, coding with SmallC is not something I could do. NO.WAY!
Earlier this year, I learnt about CC65, a C compiler for 6502 processors, used for NES, Lynx, Atari, Apple2 and some others.
HuC6280, the PCEngine’s CPU, is a customized 65SC02 so yes, CC65 could be used to code game on PCEngine using the C language or ASM.
In fact, the PCengine is one of CC65’s target so…great !!!!
Well….yes, but no so great. PCEngine support was made to be able to build contiki on PCEngine and, while the works done is awesome, it’s not usable as-is for game development.
I made a quick hello world and, while a lot of work is required, CC65 is actually the only valid C compiler to use for PCEngine development.
3 months later, I’m back on it !
