Sega Master System Demo

I'm making a mess learning stuff about coding for the Sega Master System. Being helped along by some much more clever people who actually know what they're doing.

Some basic settings exist for VSCode. I'm currently building on Windows, but as I do cross-platform I may aim to make it also as Mac-friendly as possible (some third-party tooling notwithstanding).

Goals

• Have C remote debugging with Emulicious
• Draw a picture to the screen
• Animate the picture with some scrolling
• Make the picture a bit fancier with V interrupt individual scrolls
• Add some sprites
• Animate the sprites
• Add a second example file
• Animate the palette in from black
• Have a scene manager to swap between effects
• Have more than one bank, to learn about bank switching
• Improve the responsiveness of button presses
• Figure out why the plasma effect is cursed
• Improve the build pipeline (makefile)
• Investigate making the build pipeline cross-platform (as much as is possible)
• Investigate whether the z88dk SDCC patch is viable with Emulicious debugging as an alternative
• Animate palettes between each other (not just from black)
• Figure out a nicer way to integrate inline z80 assembly with VScode...
• Improve the core structure with more single-purpose functions
• Add music?

Controls

Press the 1 button to cycle through the various scenes (some more computationally-heavy scenes might need a bit of an extra kick to move on...)

Dependencies

It uses devkitSMS as a basis for doing all its fancy stuff.

Code is compiled with SDCC 4.3.0 . The SDCC 4.2.0 release changed a lot of things. The C debugging is working again between Emulicious / VSCode! Although I've also learned that if a lot of local variables exist (eg. nested loops) then the outer counters are unreliable as they may reference Z80 registers that are being used for other things.

The bmp2tile project is included here for compiling assets, but I might move it to be an external dep later. For cross-platform support later, the png2tile looks like a great starting point.

I've added the STMcomp plugin by sverx to the bmp2tile utility here, needed for using STM compressed tilemaps. It's nifty.

Using VScode, make sure to install the Emulicious Debugger.

Building

I need to expand this bit, but the basics is that once the external deps are in place, you can use VScode Ctrl+Shift+P > Run Task to first run Compile Assets.

Then you can use the F5 key to automatically compile and attach the Emulicious Debugger to VScode and Emulicious, or use Run Task again to Build (Debug) and run it manually.

I plan to make this better at some stage. I'm just figuring things out for now, really.

Thanks

• The SMS Power Forums have many super helpful and smart people
• The Gotris project by kusfo has been invaluable for learning. I've shamelessly borrowed some techniques, and am indebted to the knowledge contained therein and its author
• The devkitSMS project by sverx made setting up easy, and it makes getting started with the Sega Master System fast and fun
• The bmp2tile project by Maxim makes getting assets into a format suitable for the SMS really easy
• The Emulicious emulator has fantastic support for SDCC's debug output being bridged across to VScode, making working with the SMS so much easier, and Calindro has been very helpful
• My friends bananaboy, sh0ck, null, and cTrix, with whom we made a little SMS demo for the Syntax Demoparty in 2021. The experience making the art for it, even though simple, inspired me to learn about coding for the SMS so we can push the art even further... next time?