I've been playing with some Sega mastersystem coding. So far I've got a toolchain up and running that takes a level-sized bitmap, chunks it up, RLE compresses the columns of of tiledata and lets it run on the mastersystem.



The levelmap and graphics are from 'Edge Grinder' - an 8-bit collaborative project hosted at Format war led by Jason 'TMR' Kelk, and were designed for the C64, which is why all of the coloured pixels are double-width. They could be improved for the mastersystem and it's more liberal palette and 1x1 16 colour graphics mode, but at the moment I'm more concerned with getting the code up and running.

Looking at the Sega Megadrive/genesis it looks like it's pretty much the same technique to get things going there, albeit with nicer graphics and a faster 68000 CPU so when I have enough to be going on with I'm going to port it all across.

The sprites look like hassle though - I'm working with 8 sprites per line of 8 pixels width, as opposed to the 24 pixel wide ones on the C64 so it looks like things might get a little difficult.

Maybe a bit of flicker or creative use of background characters might be in order...