This is awesome! Tooling is often an underappreciated aspect of development. Better tooling allows for higher quality output at lower effort, and the tooling today for developing against older platforms would cause developers past to drool.
If you're curious about making NES games, there's literally never been a better time to start than today. Unless you count tomorrow...
My favourite example of this effect is the large expansion to Morrowind that is Tamriel Rebuilt. Their quality standards in the last few releases have been so high, the base game wouldn't pass them anymore. Yet their release tempo is increasing. Much of this is due to big effort by its loving developers, but some of it also comes down to improved tooling that just didn't exist a couple of decades ago.
There's a similar story around the old PDP computers. People with modern computers as tooling have managed to coax old PDP computers into doing things they always could, but which it was insurmountable to get them to do without the modern tooling.
I guess what I want to say by this diversion is this: if you don't know what project to take on in your spare time, develop tooling for an old platform you like. You'll enable others to make things we couldn't even dream of before.
If you're curious about making NES games, there's literally never been a better time to start than today. Unless you count tomorrow...
My favourite example of this effect is the large expansion to Morrowind that is Tamriel Rebuilt. Their quality standards in the last few releases have been so high, the base game wouldn't pass them anymore. Yet their release tempo is increasing. Much of this is due to big effort by its loving developers, but some of it also comes down to improved tooling that just didn't exist a couple of decades ago.
There's a similar story around the old PDP computers. People with modern computers as tooling have managed to coax old PDP computers into doing things they always could, but which it was insurmountable to get them to do without the modern tooling.
I guess what I want to say by this diversion is this: if you don't know what project to take on in your spare time, develop tooling for an old platform you like. You'll enable others to make things we couldn't even dream of before.