I’ll be running a workshop teaching the basics of 68000 assembly language and the SEGA Mega Drive at this year’s GameCity festival! It’s on Thursday 27th October, 11am – 2pm, at the National Videogame Arcade, Nottingham, and will last for around 3 hours.
Who is the workshop for?
- Those who have never written a line of assembly before
- Those with little or no understanding of how a CPU works
- Some higher level programming experience is required – functions, variables, logic and flow, signed and unsigned numbers
- Some higher level debugging experience is required – breakpoints, stepping, watch windows, swearing
- A basic understanding of binary and hexadecimal numbering is recommended (I’ll provide a quick refresher, though)
What will be covered?
- The basics of the 68000 CPU
- The basics of 68000 assembly language
- Writing your first line of assembly
- Building your first ROM
- Debugging assembly
- Basic arithmetic, branching, looping, and logic
- Initialising the SEGA Mega Drive
- The Mega Drive Video Display Processor
- Programming the VDP
- Palettes, tiles, maps and sprites
- Turning the screen pink!
- Creating a font
- Displaying “Hello, World!”
- Porting Crysis 3
What will you need?
- A computer
- A text editor
- DOSBox
- SNASM68K.EXE (ignore the warning about 64-bit systems)
- An emulator with built-in debugger (Regen D on Windows/Linux, DGen on Mac)
- The workshop support files: https://www.mediafire.com/?akxee28ius4gdox
That is so cool! I’d totally attend if I lived in the same country…
I also would have loved to be able to attend this. Will there be an online version of this session someday?
Will a recording of this session get posted here?
Regardless thanks for doing something like this! It’s excellent.
I’d love a recording too and also posting of the final code achieved in the session so a lamer like me can look it over
He posted the final code and powerpoint slides on a forum, see http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2591
He posted the final code and powerpoint slides on a forum, see http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2591