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The Sega Mega Drive Dev Kit | Hackaday

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February 2, 2016

THE SEGA MEGA DRIVE

DEV KIT
by: Brian Benchoff

13 Comments
June 18, 2014

While most homebrew video game

development has focused on the original
NES, Atari consoles, and has produced a
few SNES games, there is another
console out there that hasnt seen much
love. Segas classic console, the Genesis
or Mega Drive, depending on where
youre from, was an extremely capable
machine with amazing capabilities for its
time. [Chris] figured the Mega Drive would
make a good target for an all-in-one
development kit, and with a lot of work he
managed to put one together.
The standard cartridge for the Genesis or Mega Drive is just a simple ROM
chip wired directly into the consoles address space. [Chris] took a cheap
FPGA and some dual port ram to create a seamless interface between the
modern world and the inside of this ancient console, allowing him to load
every Mega Drive game off an SD card, as well as use modern tools to
modify old games, or even create new ones.
To demonstrate his dev kit, [Chris] took a copy of Sonic 1, and using the
debugger and GDB, gave himself infinite lives. Its a very cool demonstration,
searching through all the commands executed by the Megadrive CPU with
the standard Linux debugging tools.Going through the trace, [Chris] found the
instruction that decremented that value representing Sonics lives, replaced it
with NOPs, in effect giving himself infinite lives. This is a lot like how the
Game Genie works, only using much, much better tools.
Of course a USB dev kit wouldnt be much use if it could only modify existing
games. The real power of [Chris] work comes from being able to develop
your own demos, games, and homebrew apps.

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[Chris] needed to write a small homebrew Mega Drive app for the ROM
loader portion of his dev kit using SGDK. Disassembling his own code with
the dev kit, he was able to take a look at the instructions, and potentially even
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modify his loader.

Its a really impressive technical accomplishment, and something that could
be a boon to the extremely small homebrew scene for the Mega Drive. All
the boards, code, and everything else are available over on [Chris] github,
with the entire project written up on hackaday.io.Videos below.

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Posted in classic hacks, Software

Development
Tagged mega drive, sega, sega genesis, sega mega drive

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13 THOUGHTS ON THE SEGA MEGA

DRIVE DEV KIT
ChopSueyAR says:
June 18, 2014 at 5:30 am

Any DIY projects like this for NES or SNES (project files, schematics,
code, BoM)?
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KayserSoze says:
June 18, 2014 at 10:15 am

Finally, something a question I can contribute an answer to! For

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SNES the best project I know of is SD2SNES

http://sd2snes.de/blog/
Project files are available on GitHub
https://github.com/mrehkopf/sd2snes
I own the Deluxe Edition that was put together via Stone Age
Gamer.
Ill take a look through my links and see if I can find anything for
the NES. I know theres several universal carts (I own one), and a
dev board (have to find the link) though I dont think the pcbs are
available.
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Chris McClelland says:

June 18, 2014 at 11:10 am

I believe sd2snes is just the SD-card interface; it doesnt do

any of the remote-debugging or bus-cycle tracing of the
UMDK.
Actually, it would probably be straightforward to make a
NES/SNES bridge for the UMDK FPGA board and port the
machine-code monitor. Unfortunately theres no GDB support
for the 6502 and the last GDB release with 65816 support is
13 years old.
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Chris Kirby says:

June 26, 2014 at 12:16 pm

Funnily enough I actually wrote / found the infinite life cheat for
sonic 1 for game genie.. It was my first job after I left school at 16. I
was hired by a little games company called Optimus software in
Stockton uk to hack all the genesis and snes games and create the
cheats for it.. I did this on the genesis using a special cartridge that
let my plug the carts into an amiga where I could look though the
rom. Then I had a special genesis where I could alter 2 bytes of
rom , using an address and replacement bytes.
For snes I used a logic analyser. And another special cart.. The
cheats I found were then loaded I to a special program which
would spit out the special game genie codes..
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JIm B says:
June 18, 2014 at 10:11 am

It is very well done! I have to wonder, though, if I was developing a

game from scratch or doing deep reverse engineering, Id probably first
try using a software emulation of the machine. A good emulator
provides a lot more productive environment (eg, easy snapshotting and
restoration of state, complete and simple visibility into machine state).
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Still, no doubt, such a hardware debugger would be invaluable for

tracking down issues where the emulator isnt faithful enough to reality.
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Pedram Azimaie says:

June 18, 2014 at 11:39 am

http://krikzz.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=55
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notdave says:
June 18, 2014 at 2:27 pm

and? $143 each without cart.

http://shop.retrogate.com/Mega-EverDrive-MEGA-ED.htm
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Gdogg says:
June 18, 2014 at 1:44 pm

Awesome. Not sure I understand how the debugger can read the
registers, but I guess for breakpoints and such it just overwrites its
vector table which is interesting: That means the vectors are reimplemented on each cartridge (if the cartridge is in their address
space).
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prophet3636 says:
June 18, 2014 at 2:14 pm

The debugger can read and write the 68000 registers because the
first thing the monitor[1] does when it starts is to save the registers
to a well-defined region of SDRAM, where they can be read or
written by the host[2]. When the monitor exits, it loads the 68000
state from the same region of SDRAM, thereby picking up any
changes the host made.
Breakpoints are implemented by writing the monitor address to the
illegal instruction vector, then temporarily writing the illegal
instruction opcode to the breakpoint address. When the breakpoint
is hit, the 68000 throws an illegal instruction exception and returns
control to the monitor.
Single-stepping is implemented in the same way, but it uses the
68000s built-in trace mechanism, where a trace exception is
thrown (you guessed it, back to the monitor) after just one
instruction has been executed.
TBH all the debug stuff was made *much* easier by the fact that
my SDRAM controller interleaves MD reads & writes with the
hosts reads & writes, so the only orchestration that is necessary is
the polling (on both sides) of a semaphore at a certain address in
SDRAM.
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[1]https://github.com/makestuff/umdkv2/blob/20140524/gdbbridge/monitor/monitor.s#L97
[2]https://github.com/makestuff/umdkv2/blob/20140524/gdbbridge/mem.c#L547
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Gdogg says:
June 18, 2014 at 4:10 pm

Thats awesome. I was going to read into the source after

work, but youve saved me a lot of time. This is something Id
like to recreate for something like an NES, but the hardware
stuff is beyond what I know as a lowly software engineer :)
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Fernie says:
June 18, 2014 at 3:05 pm

and using the debugger and GDB GDB is the debugger.

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stefanpirvu says:
June 19, 2014 at 1:09 am

Wow, it looks great! Is there a possibility to use this approach to debug

on running Arduino? I use the AvrStudio to test the code (offboard) but
after some time running, the board just freezes; it would be great if I
could then just activate a debugger, feeding the .elf file and step
through the code (cpp code :) ). I am a beginner in this kind of low level
programming, this seems like a solution but I cant elaborate limited
knowledge :(
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prophet3636 says:
June 19, 2014 at 4:34 am

This approach is possible with the MegaDrive because it uses

separate components for the CPU and memory, so you can alter
the memory its executing from under its feet in order to observe
what it does, and even control what it does.
Conversely, an Arduino contains an AVR microcontroller, where
the CPU and memory[1] are both in the same chip. So no, this
approach will not work.
However, I do believe theres a JTAG-accessible debugger built
into some of the AVRs, offering hardware breakpoints and singlestepping. To get that working you can either buy a JTAGICE
dongle from Atmel or if you prefer DIY there are some options[2]
[3].
[1]Two separate memories, actually the AVR has a Harvard
architecture so its code lives in flash and its data lives in a separate
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SRAM address-space
[2]http://amtek.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/make-your-own-avr-jtagdebugger/
[3]http://aquaticus.info/jtag
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