Ok, so I’ve been moving recently (going back to university, so I’m now a student again for the first time in a looong while), and while carrying boxes and furniture, my mind wandered, and I got an idea that can probably be described as just plain weird. Or really nice. I’ll let you judge, bear with me 
Basically, I was thinking of how things used to be back in the 80′s & early 90′s, when I was making games and demos for the Commodore 64 and the Atari ST. Development environments wasn’t all that evolved back then, and you had to make do with whatever tools you could find… but, and here’s the thing, in some ways things was a lot simpler, and it was in many ways easier to get started making stuff for those machines.
So, I got to thinking that it would be fun to make a virtual retro computer. Not an emulator, there’s plenty of those, but a brand new home computer which runs in a window on your PC. It would have quite strict technical limitations, its own flavour of assembler language, and some sort of high-level (and preferably a bit more modern) language built on top, and a couple of sprite/image/sound/music editors thrown in, to enable people to make their own stuff for it straight out the box.
So, it’s a crazy idea, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m in the initial planning phase now, which I really enjoy: cup of coffe, couple of books, a notepad and some imagination I’m defining the technical specification of my made-up machine, and also designing the instruction set for its made-up CPU
I’m calling the thing RetroBox for now. More on this later…
Man, I wish I could help you with something like that, unfortunately my knowledge on things like Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX spectrum and Atari ST are deleted from my memory somewhat like my saved games from Dune II, Battle for Arrakis.I must say that you might be on to something great here though… I would love to try make a game for you that I’m sure you’d appreciate (have tons of ideas just working on the means to make them materialize) Good luck with RetroBox!!!
I know what you mean, I’ve really had to brush up on the old stuff for this project… but that’s part of the fun
It would be great to see other people make games for the RetroBox, but I suspect that there will be some time before it is in a state where that will be easy…
The first version will probably be assembler only (and a custom RetroBox assembler language at that), but I’m planning on adding a high-level language later on…