01: The Project

The idea behind this project was to create a Platform game that will be able to be run on the original console hardware and by creating the game understand the tricks need to develop on the earlier console generation.

This idea came about from a litreature review that I undertook comparing the mainstream platofrm games over many console genertaions and noting that as the console generation went on and 3D techniques became more compicated the number of AAA platformers actually declined.

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How did the hardware evolve what limits are there

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Beofre the Mega Drive there was the Sega Master System and the influence of the Master System can be seen on the Mega Drive.

The master system was designed to be able to use 64 possible colours with the user being able to select one lot of 16 of the colours for use on the backgrounds and another lot for the sprites. All backgorund images on sprites where made up of 8 pixel by 8 pixel tiles and the system could hold 14Kb worth of tiles (around 448 tiles in it's memory)

By the time the Mega Drive came around the newer console could display 512 possible colours (without speacil tricks) use 4x 16 Palettes for the background and sprites as well as hold around 2048 tiles in it's memory. The Mega Drive could also display up to 80 sprites on the screen at once up to 32 pixels x 32 pixels in size (with 20 on any scanline) compared to the Master systems 64 8x8 pixel sprites with 8 on any given scanline

It was in part these tighter limits on resources and seeing what experienced decelopers could do with the technologu that peaked my interest in creating a game for the Mega Drive

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2D Platformers Beofre and After the Mega Drive

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In the days of the master system in a lot of the games the repeated use of the same tiles is obbious and having only one background layer means that there is a lack of depth to the screens.

By the time we get to the Mega Drives era, The additional background layer as well as more space for tiles mean that the games and level within them have greater depth and richness over the previous levels

With the additional computing power and space the PC and future consoles had the freedom to be even more artistic and have smoother animation and more layers

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The Project Goals

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The goals for the project are pretty simple

1: The game must be able to be run on the orginal hardware (as well as variety of emulators)

2: It must respect the size limit of traditional carts (ie up to 4Mb)

3: When using tools to help the process basic understanding of the how the hardware works and how this would have been done traditionally should be had

4: Should be playable and where possible use diffrent techniques and tricks have learned about

5: I should write up what i have found as i do things

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Tools being used for this project

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Visual Studio with the Sega Genesis Development Kit for Programming

Gens with Kmod for testing and debugging

Aesprite for creating indexed graphics

Deflemask for creating music (hopefully we will see how it goes)

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Getting started with the SGDK library

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The following video is a short tutorial on how to install the SGDK and get it working with visual studio