Sega Genesis Chiptunes Player Uses Original Chips

February 17, 2017 by Jenny List 16 Comments

If you were a child of the late 1980s or early 1990s, the chances are you’ll be in either the Super Nintendo or the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive camp. Other 16-bit games consoles existed, but these were the ones that mattered! The extra power of the Nintendo’s souped-up 16-bit 6502 derivative or the Sega’s 68000 delivered a gaming experience that, while it might not have been quite what you’d have found in arcades of the day, was at least close enough that you could pretend it was.

The distinctive sound of consoles from that era has gained a significant following in the chiptunes community, with an active scene composing fresh pieces, and creating projects working with them. One such project is [jarek319]’s Sega Genesis native hardware chiptune synthesiser, in which music stored as VGM files on a MicroSD card are parsed by an ATSAMD21G18 processor and sent to a YM2612 and an SN76489 as you’d have found in the original console. The audio output matches the original circuit to replicate the classic sound as closely as possible, and there is even some talk about adding MIDI functionality for this hardware.

The software is provided, though he admits there is still a little way to go on some functions. The MIDI support is not yet present, though he’s prepared to work on it if there was enough interest. You really should hare this in action, there is a video which we’ve placed below the break. Continue reading “Sega Genesis Chiptunes Player Uses Original Chips” →

The Sega Mega Drive Dev Kit

June 18, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

sega While most homebrew video game development has focused on the original NES, Atari consoles, and has produced a few SNES games, there is another console out there that hasn’t seen much love. Sega’s classic console, the Genesis or Mega Drive, depending on where you’re from, was an extremely capable machine with amazing capabilities for its time. [Chris] figured the Mega Drive would make a good target for an all-in-one development kit, and with a lot of work he managed to put one together.

The standard cartridge for the Genesis or Mega Drive is just a simple ROM chip wired directly into the console’s address space. [Chris] took a cheap FPGA and some dual port ram to create a seamless interface between the modern world and the inside of this ancient console, allowing him to load every Mega Drive game off an SD card, as well as use modern tools to modify old games, or even create new ones.

To demonstrate his dev kit, [Chris] took a copy of Sonic 1, and using the debugger and GDB, gave himself infinite lives. It’s a very cool demonstration, searching through all the commands executed by the Megadrive CPU with the standard Linux debugging tools.Going through the trace, [Chris] found the instruction that decremented that value representing Sonics lives, replaced it with NOPs, in effect giving himself infinite lives. This is a lot like how the Game Genie works, only using much, much better tools.

Of course a USB dev kit wouldn’t be much use if it could only modify existing games. The real power of [Chris]’ work comes from being able to develop your own demos, games, and homebrew apps.

[Chris] needed to write a small homebrew Mega Drive app for the ROM loader portion of his dev kit using SGDK. Disassembling his own code with the dev kit, he was able to take a look at the instructions, and potentially even modify his loader.

It’s a really impressive technical accomplishment, and something that could be a boon to the extremely small homebrew scene for the Mega Drive. All the boards, code, and everything else are available over on [Chris]’ github, with the entire project written up on hackaday.io. Videos below.

Continue reading “The Sega Mega Drive Dev Kit” →

Four Tear-downs For Your Friday Afternoon

November 27, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 9 Comments

We know that feeling, you’ve been up all morning working hard, and now you just want to relax. What better way than to sit back and watch as helpless electronic devices are stripped, forced to show their goods, then put back together only hap hazardly – not that we’re into that or anything. Today, we had one thing on our mind, game systems.

With the release of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver shoppers were also given a device called the PokéWalker. A pedometer that helps your pocket monster gain experience and affection towards you. Here is a tear-down of the device next to Nintendo’s other try at getting children active, the Activity Meter pedometer. [Thanks Arty2]

Sega, while in todays day all we see is more and more rip offs of everyone’s favorite Hedgehog, we do remember a time when you brought more to the game field, especially with your advanced consoles. It does bring a tear to our eyes seeing this beast being torn apart, but its all for the best.

Those keeping up with Nintendo’s DS series will notice one thing, the console keeps getting smaller and smaller. That trend continued until the (Japan) release of the DSi LL. Some think its size can be attributed to an easier to see screen, others feel its jam-packed with more features. Make your own decision after seeing its tear-down. [via engadget]

Finally, we couldn’t decide what a fourth tear down should be, and couldn’t just leave with only three. So how about 10 separate Sony gadgets torn apart!