A blog of my experience learning 68k Megadrive programming

[BigEvilCorporation]

Hi!

For the past year or so I've been learning 68k assembler on the SEGA Megadrive, and I've been blogging the whole learning process in the hope that someone else would find my ramblings, shoddy source code and eureka moments useful when trying it for themselves.

It covers initialisation, some basics on 68k assembler, the VDP planes, tiles and palettes, fonts and text drawing, a "Hello world" sample, gamepad input, horizontal scrolling, sprites, sprite animation and some basics on the PSG sound chip.

I had hoped to have a lot more content up before publicising it, but my real job commitments have taken away all my spare time as of late, and the next article in the series is taking me quite a while. I'm still working on it, so expect more on the PSG and some findings on the FM chip, as well as a fully playable game in the future!

Note that it's not a tutorial as such, it's just a log of my learning experience, so expect it to be riddled with errors and inconsistencies. Please let me know what you think! Especially if any of it proves useful to you, or you spot any errors.

Here is it: http://www.bigevilcorporation.co.uk

BigEvilCorp.

[Charles MacDonald]

Wow, this is really great stuff! I hope you can continue it in the future -- once I got to part 10 I was wishing there was more. It's nice seeing development broken down into these little pieces.

Can't wait to see how you handle the PSG/FM sound. Not being a musician that kind of thing seems confusing and mysterious, but the PSG article made it very simple to follow.

[Stef]

I'm following your blog since the first day, very very interesting indeed
Very low level and very complete explanation about the megadrive hardware and development. I already recommended your blog to people interested with megadrive development. Keep up the great work !