Case Study: Nichimen Graphics achieves faster development and easier debugging for N-World with Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL

Nichimen Graphics - Customer Case Study

Nichimen Graphics, creator of the N-World game development system used to build Nintendo 64™ titles like Super Mario 64™, needed a development platform that could handle a very large, performance‑sensitive toolchain while enabling rapid development, easy debugging, extensibility and runtime introspection. To meet this challenge they chose Allegro CL from Franz Inc. (with Allegro Composer add-on) as their core Common Lisp/CLOS environment.

Franz Inc.’s Allegro CL delivered dynamic linking, incremental compilation, powerful macros, automatic memory management, runtime meta‑data, the meta‑object protocol and robust debugging/profiling tools, allowing Nichimen Graphics to extend the language with domain‑specific macros, inspect deployed state, fix bugs on‑the‑fly and optimize performance. The result was markedly faster development and easier maintenance of the large N-World system—capabilities Nichimen summarizes as, “We can develop code faster and debug and maintain it more easily,”—and a toolset that helped produce high‑profile games such as Super Mario 64.

Nichimen Graphics

Bob Coyne

Director of Software Development