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