Forums

I'm looking to develop a SMS game. Looking for someone to pair with me remotely to help me get set up. I've been a software dev by trade for ~15 years so I should be okay once I get started. Regarding your experience, I would insist that you've done this before and have released something in the Homebrew section of this site.

I'm based in Australia but I can adjust my hours to work with anyone anywhere. Thinking hourly rate will work best for both of us.

in case nobody shows up I'm pretty sure you can get set up quite easily by yourself in almost no time - we've got plenty of documents here

Agreed with sverx; I've no Master System releases to my name so am not a candidate, but it's actually a fairly easy platform to get up and running on.

There's a prescribed header with a checksum to get right if you want your game to be able to boot on US or European machines, but beyond that the cartridge file format used by emulators is a plain binary dump and most emulators don't even require it to be a power of two so the direct output of an assembler will do (subject to post hoc fixing of the checksum).

There are only two significant kinds of paging hardware, and only one official one, so there's also not a lot to learn a lot about that. Just use the official Sega scheme.

I guess that for titles that don't want to pull off any screen trickery the VDP's access window schedule strongly implies a structure of (i) wait for interrupt; (ii) apply all screen changes; (iii) perform gameplay updates preparatory for the next instance of the loop; (iv) HALT(/go back to (i)).

So then it's just the actual hard stuff: assets and making it fun.

Its pretty easy to get set up on your own. Just 6 months ago I had no knowledge of the architecture and now I'm finishing up my project. Though tbh I probably only actually spent 2~3 months time total on the project. Either way Its super easy there are lots of documents here as well as lots of great community members who can offer some advice if you ever get stuck.

[shameless promotion]
also, if you prefer C, you can use devkitSMS - it gives you quite a good abstraction from the hardware and relieves you from the VRAM timing burden...
[/shameless promotion]

just to help sverx in his shameless promotion, devkitSMS is really cool.
Even i, without much knowledge of programming and zero knowledge of C (and even less of asm) could make a demo with it.

There's a tutorial also, that really helps it. But overall, it's pretty easy to get started, and the forum here is really helpful if you have any questions.

sverx wrote

[shameless promotion]
also, if you prefer C, you can use devkitSMS - it gives you quite a good abstraction from the hardware and relieves you from the VRAM timing burden...
[/shameless promotion]

Do you have any setup tutorials and preferred programs for devkitSMS. I originally wanted to use it for my project but felt like since I was mostly done with it id just finish it in asm. But future projects would go a lot better with it since C and C++ are my mains when programming.

IllusionOfMana wrote

Do you have any setup tutorials [...] for devkitSMS

Setup - in the github readme
Basic usage - in the github wiki
A short tutorial - coding a simple sort-of pong clone

Interesting, I might give the devkitSMS a try.
Not sure what I'll do though.

Author	Message
ponny Guest	Paid gig - looking for someone to pair remotely to help me get started Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2018 10:50 pm
ponny Guest	I'm looking to develop a SMS game. Looking for someone to pair with me remotely to help me get set up. I've been a software dev by trade for ~15 years so I should be okay once I get started. Regarding your experience, I would insist that you've done this before and have released something in the Homebrew section of this site. I'm based in Australia but I can adjust my hours to work with anyone anywhere. Thinking hourly rate will work best for both of us.

sverx Joined: 05 Sep 2013 Posts: 3805 Location: Stockholm, Sweden	Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2018 8:20 am
	in case nobody shows up I'm pretty sure you can get set up quite easily by yourself in almost no time - we've got plenty of documents here

TomHarte Joined: 24 Sep 2018 Posts: 66	Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2018 3:12 pm
TomHarte Joined: 24 Sep 2018 Posts: 66	Agreed with sverx; I've no Master System releases to my name so am not a candidate, but it's actually a fairly easy platform to get up and running on. There's a prescribed header with a checksum to get right if you want your game to be able to boot on US or European machines, but beyond that the cartridge file format used by emulators is a plain binary dump and most emulators don't even require it to be a power of two so the direct output of an assembler will do (subject to post hoc fixing of the checksum). There are only two significant kinds of paging hardware, and only one official one, so there's also not a lot to learn a lot about that. Just use the official Sega scheme. I guess that for titles that don't want to pull off any screen trickery the VDP's access window schedule strongly implies a structure of (i) wait for interrupt; (ii) apply all screen changes; (iii) perform gameplay updates preparatory for the next instance of the loop; (iv) HALT(/go back to (i)). So then it's just the actual hard stuff: assets and making it fun.

IllusionOfMana Joined: 08 Sep 2018 Posts: 270	Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2018 9:05 pm
IllusionOfMana Joined: 08 Sep 2018 Posts: 270	Its pretty easy to get set up on your own. Just 6 months ago I had no knowledge of the architecture and now I'm finishing up my project. Though tbh I probably only actually spent 2~3 months time total on the project. Either way Its super easy there are lots of documents here as well as lots of great community members who can offer some advice if you ever get stuck.

sverx Joined: 05 Sep 2013 Posts: 3805 Location: Stockholm, Sweden	Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 8:28 am
	[shameless promotion] also, if you prefer C, you can use devkitSMS - it gives you quite a good abstraction from the hardware and relieves you from the VRAM timing burden... [/shameless promotion]

tibone Joined: 30 Mar 2009 Posts: 291	Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 12:22 pm
tibone Joined: 30 Mar 2009 Posts: 291	just to help sverx in his shameless promotion, devkitSMS is really cool. Even i, without much knowledge of programming and zero knowledge of C (and even less of asm) could make a demo with it. There's a tutorial also, that really helps it. But overall, it's pretty easy to get started, and the forum here is really helpful if you have any questions.

IllusionOfMana Joined: 08 Sep 2018 Posts: 270	Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:57 pm
IllusionOfMana Joined: 08 Sep 2018 Posts: 270	sverx wrote [shameless promotion] also, if you prefer C, you can use devkitSMS - it gives you quite a good abstraction from the hardware and relieves you from the VRAM timing burden... [/shameless promotion] Do you have any setup tutorials and preferred programs for devkitSMS. I originally wanted to use it for my project but felt like since I was mostly done with it id just finish it in asm. But future projects would go a lot better with it since C and C++ are my mains when programming.

sverx Joined: 05 Sep 2013 Posts: 3805 Location: Stockholm, Sweden	Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 8:21 am
	IllusionOfMana wrote Do you have any setup tutorials [...] for devkitSMS Setup - in the github readme Basic usage - in the github wiki A short tutorial - coding a simple sort-of pong clone

pyroesp Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 62 Location: Belgium	Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:11 pm
pyroesp Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 62 Location: Belgium	Interesting, I might give the devkitSMS a try. Not sure what I'll do though.

Forums

View topic - Paid gig - looking for someone to pair remotely to help me get started