Jet64

"If I could only use one piece of software for the rest of my life, what would it be?" That’s the driving philosophy behind the Jet64 project.

Jet64 is my "trapped on a desert island with no internet" app.

It is a retro game development environment containing everything you need to write a great retro game, reminiscent of the C64 and Amiga eras.

It might be helpful to think of Jet64 as a virtual Amiga 5000.

Jet64 Workstation

The Jet64 fantasy console was designed to help you make wonderful retro games and share them easily across multiple platforms.

The carts you make with Jet64 are yours. Sell them anywhere, no royalties, ever.

My intention from the outset was to create an app that lets you create every aspect of a retro game:

• Sprite design
• Level map layout
• SFX generation
• Music composition
• Palette creation
• Font creation
• Code editing
• and even 1 click itch.io uploads!

Who is Jet64 for?

Jet64 is for people who:

• Are nostalgic for the golden era of 80s and early 90s gaming.
• Prefer clean, pure code to scenes, graphs, and nodes.
• Love fast code that does not fragment memory.
• Get a weird thrill inversely proportional to the size of their delivered executable.
• Love old-school graphics and retro demo effects.
• Are excited by stateful hot reloads.
• Love the speed of compiled languages but hate long compilation times.
• Have a thing for the simple purity of plain C.
• Love having all your projects easily accessible in one space.
• Get an inner zing seeing fast inter-project switching.
• Love the Amiga MOD tracker scene.
• Believe that 256 indexed colours and 1-bit masking is the pinnacle of computing aesthetic.
• Understand that if they don't use their coding skills, they're going to lose their coding skills.

The Virtual Hardware

• Blazingly fast C carts with a tiny disk footprint.
• Variable resolutions (1280x720 default).
• 64MB of WRAM available to each cartridge.
• 120 FPS fixed frame rate lock.
• 256-colour palette with strong custom palette support.
• 24-bit Amiga-style Copper emulation.
• 8-bit and 16-bit synthesised sounds and Paula-style PCM support.

The Workstation

• Built-in Gfx Editors: Sprite, animation, map, and palette editors.
• Audio Studio: MOD music authoring, tracker, and playback.
• Code Editor: Native C editor with auto-complete, and stateful hot-reloading.
• One-Click Export: Deploy to Web (HTML5), Windows, Mac, and Linux from the same source.
• Interactive Fiction: A dedicated IF engine to create your own Infocom-style adventures.
• Theme editor: Allowing fine-tuned customisation of your workspace.
• Profiler: Built-in profiler for performance tuning.
• Cartridge Exchange: Discover, download, and share open-source carts with fellow creators via a BBS-style community commons.
• CRT Overlays: Optional shader overlays and custom shader.

Blazingly fast?

By the standards of an Amiga 3000, absolutely! Please understand however, that Jet64 employs a CPU-based software renderer. Your graphics card will love Jet64 because it only has to stage the pixels and apply an optional post-processing CRT effect.

This pipeline is indeed extremely fast for traditional retro sprite-based games, particularly if you employ "dirty-rect" based presentation. Where you *will* see slow downs will be in sprite rotation and scaling, as these are all done on the CPU. You can mitigate this completely by pre-rotating and scaling your sprites via the built-in sprite banks. If you'd like a speed baseline for pure pixel fill rate, run JetAmp here on my itch.io page and press F for frame rate.

I've also prioritised compilation speed in Jet64. By leveraging the TinyCC compiler, even large project carts compile extremely quickly. As an example, the JetAmp and Jet64 Breadbox carts both compile on my baseline M4 mac mini via TCC in under 2 seconds.

About the download.

The Jet64 Workstation is under furious development. It will be made available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Any downloads on this page are very much an early access version so early adopters should bear that in mind.

You will encounter bugs. Potentially many bugs. Please report them on the Jet64 Discord

Jet64 was created with Claude AI as my co-lead. Claude is a better coder than I am. I design. Claude codes. We both test.