Which system is the easiest (and hardest) to dev for?

on MD, when doing 3D, the best way is using a RAM buffer and when you're done, just DMAing it into VRAM... direct VRAM manipulations will be quite a bit slower...

 

That is how it was done, all into the 64K RAM, and DMA'ed into VRAM. I guess I didn't make it clear that the hardware specific structure was to get the writes to RAM efficient.
--Selgus

 

Just out of curiosiy, what MD game(s) did you work on ? And do you know anything about sound stuff that was used ? Sound stuff fascinates me as I have made a really powerful sound system for MD, though 15 years too late :/ (and I was in kinderkarten 15 years ago anyway...)

 

Nothing that was published on the Genesis, before working on XBAND Modem networked games. All my Genesis development was for my own pleasure. I did a 3D cavern demo, a Centipede game, and a bunch of other little projects.

For sound, I used the GEMS system, so just used their Z-80 driver.
--Selgus

 

I could fully agree with you. On another website I made a thread about programmers not optimizing their code, and everybody answered, "because they didn't have time to fine tune their code for optimal speed." I kept on explaining them that nitpicking little pieces of code after you programmed the whole thing wouldn't help very much, enable to make a large difference you need to program it already fast to begin with. Those guys just couldn't get what I was saying to them, no matter how many times I explained to them.

The only reason developers thought the Snes was so hard to run fast is because the programmers kept waiting till the end to optimize their code and this is the only reason they struggled with it.

 

Well I agree with you that a certain amount of it was the developer's fault but at the same time the SNES CPU was indeed slow. Atleast slower than the Genesis. Mainly I just find it annoying that the SNES CPU was certainly capable of running faster than the pathetic 2.68mhz yet they let it be that.

 

I guess there isn't any of your MD stuff left ? It would be fun if there were and you'd be willing to give anything out

GEMS sucks As much as I could run the soft that came with it, things were rather user-hostile, at least compared to my sound system
The Z80 code is a mess aswell

 

I'm sure I could dig up some of my old stuff, and maybe post bits and pieces of it here. It's all 68K assembly, but it well commented (I personally believe in spending the time when writing code to comment it well so anyone reading it doesn't have to guess the intent).

I've already posted some N64 MIPS assembly I have done on this site.

GEMS did the job for me, so I treated it like a black-box. At that time, I wasn't an expert in Z-80 so it probably did save me a lot of time. As I used to tell my audio director, they are called "video" games, not "audio" games. ;-)
--Selgus

 

GEMS sucks from a listeners point of view too. Bloody awful screechy sound from it. TmEE, what do you think of Technosoft's sound engine, especiallyt hat used in Thunder Force 4?

Yakumo

 

Techosoft's sound engine is doing wonders with FM, but it fails miserably at PCM When the tools would ever surface, I doubt nothing much can be done until someone translates them from JP to EN...
I can dream of TF4 Stage8 with PCM drums :drool:

Sounds fun I really should start commenting my code... when you write ASM and have no comments its fine, but after some time has passed and you think of further optimizations, you'll go crazy trying to figure out what your old code does, especially when its already very optimized

Hehe some current games could be called audio games though

Mr. Steve Snake once told me that GEMS was the only tool that "regular musicians" could use as it required no programming knowledge... that explains the fact it was used by some 200 games.... which of few sound good :/