Sega Genesis Dev Kit (SGDK)

[Stef]

Heya

SGDK (aka Sega Genesis Dev Kit) is a small development kit for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis.

It's divided in 2 parts :
- GCC compiler & tools binaries for Windows platform only (sorry for osx and linux users).
- the development library sources which provide facilities to develop on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis System.

You'll see that only required part of GCC are provided to keep the whole archive to a reasonable size (< 20 MB).

Updated version 1.30, download it here : http://stephane-d.github.io/SGDK/

You can find some tutorials about how use it in the Wiki section of project's page.

As you see SGDK is now hosted under Github (as Google code is closing).
Free feel to post issue or request, also if you want to contribute in some way you can contact me on the project page

Don't hesitate to post bugs or feature request in the issues tracker :
https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/issues

[plee]

Hello everyone

Here's the link of my blog... actually it's just dealing about genesis deving. You can find my small dev kit and a test rom using it
It's all french but seems we only have french people here except Mask of Destiny for now :p

http://stefda.spaces.live.com/blog/

Here're links for direct download :
http://gens.consolemul.com/download/tem ... sDev01.zip
http://gens.consolemul.com/download/temp/gencube3D.zip

let's have fun and nice deving !

Nice...are you doing your own pixel draw routines?

Not everybody here is french

[Stef]

Yep, i did my own draw routines. You can see them by downloading the mini devkit, libraries sources are included.
I'm using a 2 horizontal pixels based drawing methos because it's faster to manipulate byte than "half byte"
All code is in pure C, we can obtain better performance with ASM but imo that's not that bad for C code
Genesis isn't designed for bitmap drawing, I've to use an internal bitmap buffer in main memory then blit it to video memory in software because i need to convert the bitmap in tiles.

I did a brief translation in english about the contect of my blog, i can post it here but believe me, it's not really interesting People just need the download links

[cdoty]

Not everybody here is french

Nope, at least two of us are from Texas (Houston area even)!

[Stef]

Not everybody here is french

Nope, at least two of us are from Texas (Houston area even)!

hehe
Don't worry, it was a joke, i'm not from one of these chauvinistic french

[cdoty]

Genesis isn't designed for bitmap drawing, I've to use an internal bitmap buffer in main memory then blit it to video memory in software because i need to convert the bitmap in tiles.

Are you double buffering the screen?

Do you DMA transfer the screen over multiple frames?

[cdoty]

Don't worry, it was a joke, i'm not from one of these chauvinistic french

I found it funny that two of us are from the Houston area.

Houston is now officially the center of the Genesis dev world!

I mean, look at sega.s included with SGCC and GenesisDev01, we're both credited in that file.

[plee]

Don't worry, it was a joke, i'm not from one of these chauvinistic french

I found it funny that two of us are from the Houston area.

Houston is now officially the center of the Genesis dev world!

I mean, look at sega.s included with SGCC and GenesisDev01, we're both credited in that file.

[plee]

Yep, i did my own draw routines. You can see them by downloading the mini devkit, libraries sources are included.
I'm using a 2 horizontal pixels based drawing methos because it's faster to manipulate byte than "half byte"
All code is in pure C, we can obtain better performance with ASM but imo that's not that bad for C code
Genesis isn't designed for bitmap drawing, I've to use an internal bitmap buffer in main memory then blit it to video memory in software because i need to convert the bitmap in tiles.

I did a brief translation in english about the contect of my blog, i can post it here but believe me, it's not really interesting People just need the download links

Before I lost the code, I did a line/pixel draw by manipulating the tile data memory directly. So I'm wondering would that be faster or not

[Stef]

Genesis isn't designed for bitmap drawing, I've to use an internal bitmap buffer in main memory then blit it to video memory in software because i need to convert the bitmap in tiles.

Are you double buffering the screen?

Do you DMA transfer the screen over multiple frames?

That's not a real "double buffer", you can see it as a main memory buffer which is blitted to video memory each time. I can add a double buffer with a sort of "asynchrone blit" but that will use almost all the main memory :-/
I can't use DMA as i need to rearrange the bitmap buffer in tile. To be more exact, i can use DMA by using some tricks but i need to do a lot of DMA transfert and the total amount of data transfered is 2 time the size transfered in software. Finally, that's not faster than doing a good software transfert.

[Stef]

Yep, i did my own draw routines. You can see them by downloading the mini devkit, libraries sources are included.
I'm using a 2 horizontal pixels based drawing methos because it's faster to manipulate byte than "half byte"
All code is in pure C, we can obtain better performance with ASM but imo that's not that bad for C code
Genesis isn't designed for bitmap drawing, I've to use an internal bitmap buffer in main memory then blit it to video memory in software because i need to convert the bitmap in tiles.

I did a brief translation in english about the contect of my blog, i can post it here but believe me, it's not really interesting People just need the download links

Before I lost the code, I did a line/pixel draw by manipulating the tile data memory directly. So I'm wondering would that be faster or not

That all depend of the number of line or pixel you're drawing.
For a small number your method is faster, but if you want a real bitmap buffer you want to manipulate freely and a lot, i think it's better to use my method. As i'm doing some basic 3D rendering (with triangle fill), i just can't use your method.
Your method offers another important advantage : the VDP fill capability ! you can use it to clear your display buffer without any speed penality. On my side i need to :
- clear buffer
- do my draws
- blit the buffer

[plee]

Yep, i did my own draw routines. You can see them by downloading the mini devkit, libraries sources are included.
I'm using a 2 horizontal pixels based drawing methos because it's faster to manipulate byte than "half byte"
All code is in pure C, we can obtain better performance with ASM but imo that's not that bad for C code
Genesis isn't designed for bitmap drawing, I've to use an internal bitmap buffer in main memory then blit it to video memory in software because i need to convert the bitmap in tiles.

I did a brief translation in english about the contect of my blog, i can post it here but believe me, it's not really interesting People just need the download links

Before I lost the code, I did a line/pixel draw by manipulating the tile data memory directly. So I'm wondering would that be faster or not

That all depend of the number of line or pixel you're drawing.
For a small number your method is faster, but if you want a real bitmap buffer you want to manipulate freely and a lot, i think it's better to use my method. As i'm doing some basic 3D rendering (with triangle fill), i just can't use your method.
Your method offers another important advantage : the VDP fill capability ! you can use it to clear your display buffer without any speed penality. On my side i need to :
- clear buffer
- do my draws
- blit the buffer

Just curious... I like what you did with the lib!

[Stef]

[Stef]

New version of the mini devkit available.
Actually just some improvements in the library (new functions and bugfixes). Download the partic demo with sources included to have a basic example

Genesis Mini DevKit v0.2
Genesis Particules (sources & bin)

Have fun

[TmEE co.(TM)]

Can there be ASM stuff in your lib ?