And now for something completely different
Friday, 17th November 2006
A long time ago I thought I'd try my hand at this emulation malarkey.
![cogwheel.gif](/images/cogwheel.gif)
The hardware is the Z80-based Sega Master System and Game Gear.
Due to the design, it was a huge, messy, poorly written series of hacks that could just about produce the above result if you didn't breathe too hard.
After finding this document, I had a bit of a blast at rearranging the Z80 core and timing the video hardware a bit more correctly. Here's that old Fire Track project:
![title.png](/images/cogwheel/bootable_fire_track/title.png)
All this does is run the emulation for 100 scanlines on a Timer's tick, hence the low reported clock speed.
![opening_effect.png](/images/cogwheel/bootable_fire_track/opening_effect.png)
The Game Gear's LCD cropped the output screen, so you wouldn't see the junk to the sides of the display here.
![level_screen_without_sprite.png](/images/cogwheel/bootable_fire_track/level_screen_without_sprite.png)
My implementation of the VDP doesn't support sprites yet.
Of course, these are the most exciting screenshots:
![cogwheel_sdsc.gif](/images/cogwheel/cogwheel_sdsc.gif)
![zexall.png](/images/cogwheel/zexall.png)
Two versions of ZEXALL, one that displays the results on the SMS screen, the other in an SDSC debug console.
One day I shall purge all of these CRC errors. One day! But not now, as I don't have the time to put any work on this (I stole a couple hours for the above), and in spare time (hah!) I should really focus on the Latenite software. Which, whilst it doesn't provide such pretty screenshots, is a great deal more useful.