
References
- Genesis Software Manual – This is the official Sega guide for software developers and is one of the best resources to both learn the hardware and get started programming it.
- plutiedev.com – The website of Mega Drive programmer and all-around expert Sik. It contains a bunch of great details about programming all aspects of the Mega Drive.
- gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/ – The SpritesMind forum – the ultimate forum to discuss Mega Drive development.
- sega-16.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?28-Blast-Processing – The Sega-16 Blast Processing forum – also a good resource for development-related information.
- forums.sonicretro.org/index.php – The Sonic Retro forums – particularly the Engineering and Reverse Engineering forum and the Technical Discussion forum – have a lot of great information.
- www.cs.mcgill.ca/~cs573/fall2002/notes/lec273/ – A series of online lectures about the Motorola 68000. Start at Lecture 8. This is a great beginner-friendly resource for understanding most aspects of the 68000.
- github.com/BigEvilCorporation/megadrive_samples – Matt Phillips’ excellent set of basic Mega Drive programming samples with comments.
- blog.bigevilcorporation.co.uk/2012/02/28/sega-megadrive-1-getting-started/ – Matt Phillips’ earlier series of articles on Mega Drive programming.
- mrjester.hapisan.com/04_MC68/ – MarkeyJester’s 68000 programming tutorial.
Emulators with useful features:
- Gens KMod. This contains some excellent debugging features and is fairly straightforward to use.
- Exodus. This has perhaps the most debugging features. The Plane Viewer is really great for seeing how planes are scrolling, and there are a ton of other useful tools.
- BlastEm. This is a highly accurate emulator and displays some things such as CRAM dots or the column scrolling bug that Gens or Fusion don’t. The CRAM viewer is useful for identifying mid-frame palette swaps.
- Gens Re-Recording. A very useful tool for recording gameplay videos, and it lets you advance frame-by-frame to get a better look at effects.
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