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I can't speak for modern gamedev, but as far as the classic console homebrew scene goes, most popular systems have extremely accurate emulators with step-thru debuggers that make writing and testing code exponentially easier. Testing on real hardware is easier too, aided by flash-carts with micro-SD cards. I'd imagine devs back then would have killed for such luxuries.

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From what I've seen they at least had hardware which allowed for memory dumps and step debugging. But yes, modern tools for emulation and development targeting older consoles are really impressive.

A lot of games have built-in memory dump views that's been disabled in the release (but you can enable them by flipping a bit), so at least that implies to me that memory dumps from the hardware wasn't universal.

If you look at the information available regarding the SNES dev kits[0] you'll see the one intended for programmers included memory inspection and breakpoints. However, from what I've heard, a lot of SNES developers didn't actually have access to these tools.

I should probably ask some colleagues who I knew developed for the SNES back then, I'm sure they can shed some light on what it was like.

[0] https://www.retroreversing.com/super-famicom-snes-developmen...

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