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.

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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