Who here would be interested in this: Currently in a pre-alpha state, MegaDevelop is intended to be an IDE for for assembly development on the Megadrive. When complete, I will be making it available for around £5, with free updates etc (In serious need of cash, sorry). I would just like to get an idea of how many people would be interested in this before I continue development. Feature suggestions are also welcome.
I'm sorry, but why would anyone pay for this? Please tell me, I mean, this appears to be the beginning setup for a megadrive game, of which we've seen plenty of times from certain disassembles. Let alone the fact that the setup can be different in many ways depending on how the game is made. It's not to put your efforts down or anything, but it comes across as pointless. Plus iirc there already was a genesis/megadrive development assembly made by... drx? or stealth? (Cannot remember who) which was available somewhere (Also cannot remember where). Again I don't mean to offend or put you down at all, I'm just saying it seems a little pointless to try and sell something which is practically available already for free.
Esrael. Sorry, but Esrael Neto Assembler Editor already does what your program does and more for free. And Devster has his own for 32X. But thanks for trying!
I'm pretty sure the topic is about a MegaDrive IDE and not initialization code. (The code depicted in the editor is for demonstration purposes.) With regards to the program itself, I don't think I'd be willing to pay for what appears to be a syntax-highlighting text editor with shortcuts for running an assembler. That, and it looks like it's Windows only.
AFAIK, Esrael's editor is geared towards hacking sonic games, whereas I was hoping to make a generic IDE for Megadrive development. As stated, it is currently in pre alpha and looks and functionality are expected to change dramatically when it becomes more complete. I am also hoping to implement debugging functionality, as well in the future, this is just a very early prototype. Currently coded in C#.NET/Winforms as a concept test, but it will be later ported to either Mono with GTK, or to C++ with WxWidgets for cross platform as I do have another computer in the house running Ubuntu, so I have the environment to test on another OS. I was just posting to find out if any people on here would be interested in an all in one IDE.
While this is an interesting concept, I would say: a) It is too early to bring this thing up for comment. I made a similar mistake once (showing pre-alpha software that I planned to sell) and wound up finishing it at least a year or two later (loss of interest ensued). b) Selling a product like this may not go out well to the community; the last time a product was sold to this community (SonED), it was pirated so many times the developer gave up and released it as freeware. Also, a debugger suggests you also plan to integrate the functions of an emulator into this. Or do you have another idea as to how you would implement debugging — which is more work than it sounds?
For debugging functionality, I have considered using an emulator, and that is most likely the method I will choose despite the amount of work involved. Over time I intend to look into using that Sega CD Transfer cable for some communication between the Megadrive and PC as another debugging option, for use with flash carts, even if it's just basic printing to a console.
If I might offer up some constructive criticism, put in a few apps for VDP programming and stuff. Maybe a scene layout tool to manage layers and such. Some truly innovative stuff would really help to set this apart from just grabbing gedit with my syntax highlighter. Another suggestion, don't charge for this. I know you need money, but nobody who is good with programming would ever need this, and I doubt that beginners are gonna wanna shell out money for something to help them get off the ground. If you really must charge for it, do so, but I cannot see this getting anywhere in its current state.
I've been working on something similar for quite a while already. Actually, so far, I've been working mostly on an assembler, which will serve as a base for a cross-platform IDE (I'm currently using Qt for this). The motive for writing a new assembler is that the IDE will be able to access the assembly source through an object model, not just a stream of bytes. This will let me (and anyone who's up to it) write better editors that what we have available at the moment (e.g. SonED2 and SonMapEd, which are great but have some annoying limitations, and are not open source). And I was planning to release it for free. If you want to keep working on this, I'm not going to stop you. My project is currently far from ready for a release, maybe your program would interest some people here, but the price, as low as it might be, is likely to put them off.
I can tell you right now that nobody is going to buy this, so you may as well give that up right now. Outside of that, it seems like it has potential, but a text editor will work just fine for me, personally.
Do realize that all emulators are different; either you can build your tool with multiple debugging backends for different emulators or have one built into the IDE.
You never know, if this had huge programming libraries or extremely useful tools, it may be worth money. Thats if this gets complete...
