![arcade sega beat blast arcade sega beat blast](https://wiki.arcadeotaku.com/images/a/a7/Sega_Blast_City_JP.jpg)
![arcade sega beat blast arcade sega beat blast](http://www.heycomputer.com/bst01.jpg)
You can read more details about how Konami tailored each game for their respective support in the "Making of Contra III and Hard Corps" article from Retro Gamer #176 Graphical limitationsĪs processing power is not an issue, the main bottleneck of the Genesis / Mega Drive for homebrew developers are its graphical limitations. While both games are equally fun to play, they highlight the technical differences between the SNES and the Mega Drive / Genesis quite well. In comparison, Contra III on the SNES was limited by the power of the CPU, and instead of moving loads of sprites, Konami relied on unique graphical effects that only the SNES video chip can achieve, such as transparency. While the game was developed in Assembly and not in C (it was the 90’s), developers were able to use the huge processing power to move a lot of sprites on screen, creating memorable bosses with a lot of moving parts and huge explosions. If we look at vintage games, a good example of the Mega Drive / Genesis CPU power is Contra Hard Corps. So, when it comes to homebrew development in C language, "Blast Processing" is no longer a marketing myth but a reality!įor a personal example, here is an animated GIF of my game MeteoRain, with 45 meteorites sprites moving flawlessly at 60fps:Īnd here is another example of an explosion made with 40 particles moving at 60fps in Break An Egg: While being powerful in its own right, SNES’s CPU has a hard time running programs written in C at a reasonable speed. This is especially true when compared to other CPUs like the 65816 of the SNES. Luckily, the Mega Drive / Genesis use a Motorola 68000 processor, that is quite well suited to handle the particularities of the C language.
#ARCADE SEGA BEAT BLAST CODE#
It depends on the CPU they use, and also on the efficiency of modern compilers making code for such vintage processors. But the cost varies greatly from one retro console to another. Here comes Blast ProcessingĪs any vintage programmer will tell you, writing a program in C instead of Assembly will have a cost on your game performance. But how "easy" is it in reality? In this article, I'll give you my personal feedback on this point. Last but not the least, SGDK features a powerful "Sprite Engine" that will simplify most of the technical tasks to display moving images on screen. wav files, and for the music you can use several tracker tools. The same goes for sound: you can create your sound effects as. You can make your visuals with your favorite 2D graphics editor (from Photoshop to GIMP and Asesprite) and they’ll be converted automatically as long as you respect the hardware limitations (more on that later). SGDK also comes with several tools to facilitate the creation of graphics and sounds. It’s way easier and faster to learn than the Assembly language that was mandatory in the 90’s. It's a framework allowing you to code for this machine in the C language. But fear not, there is another tool that is as useful as those popular modern engines, while being tailored for Mega Drive / Genesis: SGDK. Well, I’m sorry to say that, sadly, those engines can not export games to the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis (yet?).
#ARCADE SEGA BEAT BLAST SERIES#
It comes with a beautiful plastic box like the actual vintages games, and a series of bonus postcards. These 3 games are now available in a cartridge published by Cote Gamers: Since then, I've also created two (small) arcade games for the console: In this game, you play as a SEGA evangelist who must convince players to leave their NES and SNES because the Genesis has better games! The game was released freely online on the 30th birthday of the console, and can be played here: Last year, to celebrate the 30th birthday of the Genesis / Mega Drive, I created a game titled "30 Years of Nintendon't." It's an obvious tribute to the best games of the console and to the aggressive marketing that SEGA used at the time (e.g.
![arcade sega beat blast arcade sega beat blast](https://images.launchbox-app.com/d1dc80cd-b6aa-4b4f-bb4a-dcfdd8704e40.jpg)
For example, I even managed to make a (very basic) game in 60 minutes, and it does run on the console! The games This is arguably the easiest machine to develop an homebrew game for, thanks to the powerful tools we have now. Today, I'll share my experience of making 3 games for the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis home console. Last year, I wrote an article about making a Game Boy game.