Interest in High Level Scripting Language for Sega CD Dev?

Mask of Destiny · Post by **Mask of Destiny** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 4:05 am

I've been working on a high level language as my main hobby project for a while now. About a week ago I did a partial port to the Sega CD for kicks. The current port isn't terribly useful as it all runs on the slower main 68K (which also has access to less RAM), can't currently access files off the CD, doesn't have any graphics capabilities and can't access the controller; however, those things could be fixed.

My thought was to have the interpretter (I haven't written a compiler yet) run on the Sub 68K and then have most of the graphics API implemented in 68K assembly on the main 68K. Performance wouldn't be great, but it would probably be good enough for some reasonable games.

I'm not sure if I'll continue working on the Sega CD port, but if there was interest in it I'm sure it would encourage me at least a little bit.

Mask of Destiny · Post by **Mask of Destiny** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:41 pm

So I take there is no interest then? Oh well.

Stef · Post by **Stef** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:17 pm

Oh sad... no a single response. I've to admit i'm not very interested by SegaCD dev nor by high level language (which mean less hardware control then less performance). However that's only my voice

ob1 · Post by **ob1** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 5:44 pm

I'm keen on MegaCD, but I'm on 32X for now.
And I prefer ASM access to high level language.

Fonzie · Post by **Fonzie** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 6:53 pm

took me almost two years to own the segacd in C language... I wont switch to any other thing.

But wouldn't your goal just experimenting your stuff on a standalone hardware to mesure performace?
If so, then enjoy

Mask of Destiny · Post by **Mask of Destiny** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 2:12 am

To be honest, I'm not entirely surprised that no one here is really interested. It would seem just about everyone here is already comfortable with lower level languages and the Sega CD obviously isn't very popular (a pure Genesis version would probably be theoretically possible, but producing a version that could reasonably handle the relatively large ROM space, but tiny RAM space would be a lot of effort).

But wouldn't your goal just experimenting your stuff on a standalone hardware to mesure performace?

Well performance isn't the main motivator. I can compare performance to other languages on fast machines just as easily as slow ones. Part of my motivation was just to see if I could make it work. Part of it, was this silly desire to write an OS mostly in my language (inspired by MS research project, Singularity). To do that, I'd need to get the base language working on bare hardware and the Sega CD is the piece of hardware I know the best. Part of it was also to provide a new tool that would hopefully be useful to the dev community and/or interest some new developers in the platform.

So I might still go ahead with the Sega CD port, but I might not. Only time will tell.

commodorejohn · Post by **commodorejohn** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 6:44 pm

Hmm, I like the idea. I've actually been considering the possibility of a SCUMM-style system for Sega CD - would this be something similar, or would it be more low-level?

Mask of Destiny · Post by **Mask of Destiny** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:51 pm

commodorejohn wrote:Hmm, I like the idea. I've actually been considering the possibility of a SCUMM-style system for Sega CD - would this be something similar, or would it be more low-level?

I'm not familiar enough with SCUMM to say and for that matter I'm not even sure what the final product will look like at this point as I haven't really put any energy into designing the "Game API" of the language.

My current thinking is that for each sprite-ish object on the screen (player, enemies etc.) would be represented by a user defined object (in the programming language sense of the word). Methods of those objects would be called for certain events (new frame, collision, user input, etc.). The framework would read from properties of these objects for things like x and y position, current image frame, etc. and handle pushing the changes to the graphics hardware. I have some vague ideas how I want to handle background planes, but nothing terribly concrete.

So overall, the hardware would be pretty much completely abstracted away and some of the basics common to 2D game engines would be handled by the framework, but things specific to certain types of games or game engines would be up to the user of the framework. So theoretically anyway, the framework would be equally suited to a sidescrolling platformer as it would be a top-down perspective RPG.

commodorejohn · Post by **commodorejohn** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:38 pm

Hmm, sounds a little closer to GameMaker than SCUMM, but pretty close to what I was considering. I'd like to see something along these lines.

myfishbone · Post by **myfishbone** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 10:17 pm

hell yeah there is interest! if you can pull this of i would be the happiest person in the world , id love to develop for the sega cd and having a dev api makes it soooo much easier

tomaitheous · Post by **tomaitheous** » Wed Apr 30, 2008 2:38 am

commodorejohn wrote:Hmm, I like the idea. I've actually been considering the possibility of a SCUMM-style system for Sega CD - would this be something similar, or would it be more low-level?

There is already a SCUMM interpreter for the SegaCD - it's running Monkey Island

I did some little work on the TGCD Loom which also uses SCUMM.

Mask of Destiny · Post by **Mask of Destiny** » Wed May 07, 2008 2:52 pm

myfishbone wrote:hell yeah there is interest! if you can pull this of i would be the happiest person in the world , id love to develop for the sega cd and having a dev api makes it soooo much easier

Well I did release my language a couple of months ago. I did a DS port recently and given my experience with that I think I'll probably wait until I have a compiler for the language before I mess around with a Sega CD port again.