NESmaker is a no-coding IDE for creating games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, currently being kickstarted by The New 8-Bit Heroes‘ Joe Granato. When they say you can make a NES game with this toolkit, they mean real NES games, that you can play on actual hardware. This is pretty amazing.
The story behind it is that some NES homebrewers are turning the tools they’ve developed for their own use into a product for anybody to use.
Normally, if you want to program for the NES, you need to learn 6502 Assembler, and get really “close to the metal” — which is not for everyone. With NESmaker, supposedly you won’t need to code at all, although you’ll be limited to creating “adventure games” (think top-down zelda-likes). They are hoping to raise enough money to enable them to create additional modules to enable users to make games in various genres.
Although the developers have been using the tool internally on their own projects for a few years, it needs more polish before it’s ready for general use, so they are running a kickstarter right now to take pre-orders and to raise the necessary funds to complete their project. This includes not only the NESmaker software, but the hardware needed to flash a game pak so you can put your finished game on a cartridge and play it on real hardware.
How cool is that?