Fading Images onto the Screen

Cast your mind back to the opening title of Sonic the Hedgehog. As the game loaded, the title screen went from an entirely black screen to our spiky blue friend and his impressive logo. This is a technique which can be performed fairly simply and using the knowledge that we have previously learned regarding the […]

Creating Tiles from Images

It’s impossible to make a game by creating tiles by hand. What we really want to do is use our knowledge of the Video Display Unit to bring in some pixel art and display it on the screen. This is the art of creating tiles from images. First thing we need to do is grab […]

Tiles and Planes: How Graphics Work

The Megadrive / Genesis uses three planes to display graphics. Planes A and B are used for the 2 scrolling playfields and 1 Sprite plane. Each plane is made up of tiles. Each tile is made of an 8×8 sprite. These tiles are the basic units when it comes to loading and displaying graphics on […]

Megadrive Programming : Adding Controller

In this section I will be teaching you how to detect the console’s controller input. The function which we need to call to initialise controller support is JOY_init(). We place this at the beginning of the main function. This function resets the controls and begins to check what buttons on the controller are being pressed. […]

Megadrive Programming : Hello World

In this series I am going to start looking at the Sega Megadrive / Genesis and how to begin programming for it. These tutorials will mostly be focused on the C programming language and will be using the Sega Genesis Development Kit. In this post I will show how to setup your development environment and […]