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Help with Sega Saturn VDP development & find sh2 assembler+linker sources to build with plain mingw

Discussion in 'Technical Discussion' started by vexatious, Jan 8, 2020.

  1. vexatious

    vexatious

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    Trying to develop mars content but can only target Saturn ATM. Living situation is difficult. I have more access to Sega Saturn hardware.

    What's the easiest way to target Saturn, and what VDP mode is most transparent to Mars supervdp (supposedly just plain flat 15-bit color bitmap with line scrolling and rle decompression)?

    Also vasm and vlink. Can I use Atari Jaguar RISC engine assembler to target superh2? I've heard the tom & jerry dsps are supposedly superh cpus.

    Where can I find an open source sh2 assembler and linker that builds with plain mingw-w64 without autotools?


    Thanks for the help!
     
  2. Aesculapius Piranha

    Aesculapius Piranha

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    https://antime.kapsi.fi/sega/docs.html
    https://www.retroreversing.com/saturn/
    As far as general Saturn knowledge, these are the places to go of that I know. I was going to comment sooner but decided to wait and see if someone who can actually give advice would speak up. Saturn is kind of an intimidating beast and I don't think there are a ton of people out there in the community who can talk offhand about a lot of these things, especially concerning the Jaguar stuff. The only part of all of that I can personally speak to is that I hate using mingw with a burning passion and would rather use a VM.
     
  3. InvisibleUp

    InvisibleUp

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    The Yabause wiki[1], SegaXtreme[2] and Sega Retro (which seems to be down right now) are all good resources as well. You could also look at what the Jo Engine[3] is doing. I'm also (very slowly) trying to curate my own collection at my own website.[4] Also, for disassembling, Ghidra's new SH2 support works fantastic so long as you plug the right values in for load offsets, etc.

    [1] https://wiki.yabause.org/index.php5?title=Main_Page
    [2] http://content.segaxtreme.net/satdev/Documentation.html
    [3] https://jo-engine.org/
    [4] http://ftp.invisibleup.com/notes/homebrew/saturn/
     
  4. vexatious

    vexatious

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    Thanks for the help. I should mention I'm tuning myself in with Microsoft's DIB and programming. Right now I'm reading C sharp books and hoping I can find a freely open superh assembler. So far it looks easier to mess with ms-dos stuff. Was hoping it'd be simple to virtualize Mars 15-bit framebuffer with Saturn and unfortunately the VDP stuff doesn't seem easy to truncate...