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Guy in UK making a new Sega Genesis with original Dev kit


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Have you guys seen this?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/63454976/tanglewood-an-original-game-for-the-sega-genesis-m?ref=profile_starred

I have been following Matt Phillips on Social Media and he has a video on YouTube showing how he is using a Mega Drive Dev Kit to make this game!! Crazy amount of work!! Check this youtube video.

In the comments, he says he has the NHL '94 Holy Grail an EA S-Probe Dev Kit.... You know what that means eh lol!

This guy is the real deal! Amazing.

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So if he plugged any cartridge into this, he could create sheets of original code?

That could be a game-changer... literally.

I'm not even close to being an expert but the S-Probe is one piece of the puzzle. With Skills and the right development program one can start reverse engineering the code. Every tool/asset/program that made NHL '94 is out there it just has to be found.

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Yeah, I once read about disassembly software out there, there's a few for Genesis / 68000. I even tried to use it one time, but it got too technical. I think you'd have to really spend some time educating yourself on the programming language before messing with disassembly/reassembly. The technology is definitely out there...just need one of these guys to get excited about '94!

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I found this quote interesting from the kickstarter page:

The Windows/Mac/Linux versions are delivered in the form of a downloadable app, providing a close-to-authentic Mega Drive experience on your desktop without the hassle of setting up an emulator!

I wonder what he's using for this, and whether it may be something that could be programmed for netplay.

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Yeah I read about the part of the game basically having its own program sans an emulator & got excited.

Then I saw the donation options & read what they offered if you put up $250, $5000, $1000 or $5000 & realized he's probably not doing any extra code for the small peanuts we would offer.

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Maybe he's a huge NHL94 fan?

Nobody will be asking him to do it for free - but perhaps (seeing as it's already coded)..and IF..IF..IF it can be programmed for netplay. Coaches would have to buy the program from his site and he could make his money back that way.

..or maybe we start a kickstarter of our own to fund the work. Approach all of ex-NHLers and offer kickstarter rewards of stat boosts in the game - that way JR has to match every dollar.

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Guys... I have to dash everyone's dreams... That device doesn't really do anything special when it comes to reverse engineering the game. If you want a printout of the code, I can do that. I show portions of the code often in my hack descriptions. It just isn't particularly useful without the original source code, because all the names of things get stripped out when making the BIN/ROM file. With old console games programmed in assembly language (the 68000 language he keeps talking about), the ROM is the code, it's just not the source code.

Hacking the game comes down to finding what parts of the code do what (because the code is all just "get 2 bytes from address 532523 and store it register 3. multiply register 3 by 5. store register 3 in address 894378" and then you need to figure out that address 532523 contains the player's speed rating, and 894378 is where it stores his in-game speed rating, etcetc... There is no way to recover those names ("PlayerSpeedAttribute" "PlayerSpeedInGame" etcetc, whatever the original programmer may have called them)

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Guys... I have to dash everyone's dreams... That device doesn't really do anything special when it comes to reverse engineering the game. If you want a printout of the code, I can do that. I show portions of the code often in my hack descriptions. It just isn't particularly useful without the original source code, because all the names of things get stripped out when making the BIN/ROM file. With old console games programmed in assembly language (the 68000 language he keeps talking about), the ROM is the code, it's just not the source code.

Hacking the game comes down to finding what parts of the code do what (because the code is all just "get 2 bytes from address 532523 and store it register 3. multiply register 3 by 5. store register 3 in address 894378" and then you need to figure out that address 532523 contains the player's speed rating, and 894378 is where it stores his in-game speed rating, etcetc... There is no way to recover those names ("PlayerSpeedAttribute" "PlayerSpeedInGame" etcetc, whatever the original programmer may have called them)

Hey Smoz,

What benefit would the S-probe have over software emulation? Once the source code is "found"?

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Hey Smoz,

What benefit would the S-probe have over software emulation? Once the source code is "found"?

We don't really need the device he's showing, or the s-probe. As far as I know, anyway...

If you watch in the video, there is a point at around 8 minutes where he has written some simple source code, then he opens up a command prompt, and he says he has a batch file (small program) for running "the SNASM.exe assembler", which is a program that converts the source code into the BIN file. Then he uploads the BIN file to the device and he can run his code and debug on there, which is cool, surely helpful for writing new code, but not totally necessary.

The added bonus of the Dev Kit is that you can view your actual source code while debugging, whereas with the emulators, the best they can do is show you the raw disassembly from the BIN.

Here is SNASM: http://segaretro.org/SNASM68K

And here is another similar assembler/compiler called ASM68k: http://info.sonicretro.org/File:ASM68k.7zhttps://www.google.ca/search?q=ASM68K

So if we have the source, we can also convert it to a BIN. The BIN may need some "massaging" to work on the Genesis, but that's alright, we can cram our changed parts into a working ROM that we currently use.

Long story short, what we need/want is the source code :) :)

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I think the contents of those disks are probably included in the "SDK" (Software Development Kit) on this page: http://www.emuparadise.me/sdk/(Sega Mega Family SD [size: 126M], sounds like it must be the MegaDrive/Genesis kit..)

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Hey Smoz, When I'm less busy Let's talk. Lesser in his interview explains the benefit of using the S-Probe over Software Emulation. He explains why Hardware emulation is better. Of course this stuff is way over my head. He hints at the fact that having the full source code may not be necessary needed.

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Sure, sounds good! I'm curious to hear what he said about it. It's probably better for interactive debugging. When he says the source isn't necessary, I suspect he means that we can do, well, what we are already doing, changing the assembly code in-place in the ROM.

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