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Some questions about the mega drive

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by LERPish, Apr 2, 2019.

  1. OK, so basically I've been wanting to make some games for the sega genese a.k.a. the mega drive! But it't really hard to program in assembly 68k. It's not that the language itself is hard to learn, it is being quite easy to learn what it does and how it works, the problem is the console itself, for example i don't know how to initialize the mega drive properly, how to initialize the ROM, how to send information to the VDP and all that stuff. So basically im here to ask for help and to see if anyone here has some tutorials or tips to help me out.

    Thanks for reading this,
    LERPish
     
  2. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

    NotEqual Tech, Inc - VR & Game Dev Oldbie
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    Matt from Big Evil Corp has a pretty good series of guides to getting started: https://blog.bigevilcorporation.co.uk/2012/02/28/sega-megadrive-1-getting-started/

    The Megadrive Development wiki has some good pages with all the relevant port addresses and register formats, you can basically start here and dink around from article to article: http://md.railgun.works/index.php/VDP
     
  3. qwertysonic

    qwertysonic

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    There has been work on a C compiler for the Genesis if C is easier than assembly a language you already know.
     
  4. Spanner

    Spanner

    The Tool Member
  5. Hey thanks to all the replies, just started studying and everything's is makeing way more sense.
    Also i don't really wanna use the C compiler for a number of reasons, first is that i heard that it might not be the most effective, and second is that i really want to learn more about retro programming, so hey that kills 2 birds with 1 stone, but thanks anyways for the sugestion
     
  6. Lostgame

    Lostgame

    producer/turnablist. homebrew dev. cosplayer. Oldbie
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    The O.I.C.
    I'd highly advise sticking with assembly over a C-based solution. It seems like there were some solid links earlier in this thread.

    There's also this awesome tutorial.
     
  7. Shoemanbundy

    Shoemanbundy

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    I'm surprised SGDK hadn't been mentioned over that older C compiler. If you're going to do C, it's far more than capable and has had some neat stuff made with it already.