With the widespread adoption of emulators, nearly any individual can start playing video games from bygone eras. Some systems are even capable of supporting homebrew games, with several having active communities that are still creating new games even decades later. This simplicity of programming for non-PC platforms wasn’t always so easy, though. If you wanted to establish games on a now-antique console when it was still relatively new, you had to jump through a lot of hoops. [Tore] shows us how it would have been made with his Sega Mega Drive advancement kit that he built from scratch.
While [Tore] had an Atari ST, he wanted to do something a little a lot more cutting edge as well as at the time there was nothing much better than the Mega Drive (or the Genesis as it was known in North America). It had a number of features that lent the platform to development, namely the Motorola 68000 chip that was very typical for the time as well as as a result had plenty of documentation available. He still needed to do quite a bit of reverse engineering of the system to get a proper dev board running, though, starting with figuring out how the cartridge system worked. He was able to develop a memory bank that functioned as a re-writable game cartridge.
With the hard parts out of the way [Tore] set about building the glue logic, the startup firmware which interfaced with his Atari ST, as well as then of program wiring it all together. He was ultimately able to get far sufficient along to send programs to the Mega Drive that would enable him to control sprites on a screen with the controller, however regrettably he was interrupted before he might establish any type of total games. The amount of research as well as work to get this far is incredible, though, as well as there may be some helpful nuggets for any individual in the homebrew Mega Drive neighborhood today. If you don’t want to get this deep into the Mega Drive hardware, though, you can develop a cartridge that allows for advancement on native Sega hardware instead.