I have being using Trial[1] for the past few weeks to test out game development in Common Lisp, and have been having a great time. Being able to alter (almost) all aspects of your game while it's running is a blessing.

I hope this port succeeds.

[1]: https://github.com/Shirakumo/trial

This is super neat - SBCL is an awesome language implementation, and I've always wanted to do CL development for a "real" game console.

I'm also surprised (in a good way) that Shinmera is working on this - I've seen him a few times before on #lispgames and in the Lisp Discord, and I didn't know that he was into this kind of low-level development. I've looked at the guts of SBCL briefly and was frightened away, so kudos to him.

I wonder if SBCL (+ threading/SDL2) works on the Raspberry Pi now...

Thanks to the author for the fascinating and detailed write up. It feels like a lot of the time this level of detail around the specifics of 'blessed' (not homebrew) console porting are only revealed years after the end of the consoles lifetime.

As an aside, reading about this kind of deeply interesting work always makes me envious when I think about the rote software I spend all day writing :)

> The answer to that is that while I would desperately like to share it all publicly, the NDA prevents us from doing so.

I'm curious what the rationale here was for using the official SDK, rather than the unencumbered "homebrew" ones[0].

As a complete guess, maybe Nintendo doesn't let you officially publish games built using 3rd party SDKs?

[0] https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Setting_up_Development_Environme...

Related: https://opengoal.dev.

Context: Naughty Dog used a custom Lisp-alike (GOAL) to build the Jak & Daxter series on PS2. They left enough debugging information in that it was possible to reverse engineer. The OpenGOAL project has done so, and these games can now be run on all platforms that their GOAL compiler gets ported to (x86 for now AFAIK). Would be cool to port this to the Switch.

I've just bought Kandria. I'm not much of a game player so I probably won't get much play out of it, but Shinmera is clearly pushing the bounds of the Lisp world, and that's something to support.

Her work is just amazing. And makes me incredibly happy, as I like to write some CL here and there.

I wish the likes of Nintendo and Sony themselves finance such efforts. I mean it's one another way to create games (IP) for your console, what possibly could be the downside of starting something similar to Github Accelerator for your platform?

This is what I come to HN for. Kudos to OP and their colleague. I know it's impossible but what a blessing it would be if Nintendo could be a little more open about their system.

b/c it isn't described anywhere...

SBCL - "Steel Bank Common Lisp"

> Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a high performance Common Lisp compiler. It is open source / free software, with a permissive license. In addition to the compiler and runtime system for ANSI Common Lisp, it provides an interactive environment including a debugger, a statistical profiler, a code coverage tool, and many other extensions.

https://www.sbcl.org/

How's CL's GC performance for games nowadays? I've been slightly eyeing the upcoming Autumn Lisp Game Jam myself, but last I checked all the major libre CL impls, including SBCL, still used a full stop-the-world collector, which feels like a recipe for latency spikes. I saw flashes of stuff on sbcl-devel about someone working on a lower-latency one, but I don't know whether it got anywhere.

Somewhat offtopic, just flashed through my mind: you know what would be amazing and absolutely useless at the same time?

Porting Yuzu to Nintendo Switch

Great article. One question I had, not to diminish this hard work, is why not use a different implementation like ECL which is pretty portable already and can compile to static C code which can just be compiled traditionally for the target? I've been doing that for a Wasm + SDL2 game in Lisp and it's been (relatively) straightforward. I suppose performance might be a issue.

Awe-inspiring work Shinmera and Charles.

How is this thing useful? Does it mean you can use the Trial to develop games completely free hassle on NS after its done, and you don't need a popular engine like Unity, Godot, Unreal?

Does anybody know what is the status of Trial on Mac OS? Specifically Apple Silicon

OT but is there an easy way to build a game with Godot or Unity and deploy it to the Switch? I'd love this for my son.

Absolutely kudos to that effort. I love hacking around with CL and some Schemes, and an effort like this is just amazing.

I probably missed it, but since the switch doesn’t have a keyboard how do you handle text input ?