The beauty of retro computers, especially in the 8-bit era, is that you develop for the computer on the computer, with it’s default prompt being a BASIC interpreter from which you can load any of the original native tools. But who wants to develop like it’s 1979?

Cross-compiling for one architecture, while sat in the comfort of another, is nothing new. But these modern tools are specialised, and not always general enough to be packaged with every distribution. Or if they are available today, will they tomorrow? Or do they require extensive dependencies, specific versions, or changes to the host OS and libraries that are incompatible with your day-to-day?

Docker, first introduced in 2013 (which almost makes it retro itself!), lets us run these tools in a safe containerised environment that act like a virtual time capsule, providing fully reproducible builds and super-fast turn-around so you can stay in the creative flow.

In this talk we see two similar projects, ZXDocker and Dragon Docker, to see how simply retro development tools like cross-compilers, assemblers, BASIC→binary converters, and emulators can be combined into a Docker image that results in a one-click workflow.

Perhaps this will future-proof the retro development process for another 40 years!