Nice Carl Segan reference

"the Mega Drive of Hello World".. the pun doesn't translate well in Europe.

its called Mega Drive all around the world except for the US. so its as relevant as the imperial system.. meaning nonrelevant. I still dont understand why they chose different names for Trump country.

@@bepowerification maybe it was easier for them to rebrand consoles for the NTSC system.

@@bepowerification The reason is not entireley known, but clues point to SEGA changing the name to avoid a trademark dispute.

@@bepowerification hey.... It wasn't trump country then... Don't insult the 90s...Clinton was president then.

More like bringing gun to a cannon fight

More like bringing a blaster to lightsaber fight

More like bringing a lemon to a knife fight.

Like pissing on embers next to a firetruck.

Dude python is harder imho

Even more hours go into newer games. The development man-hours for games have steadily been increasing as the years go by, since consumers demand more and more content at higher and higher fidelities. I've seen estimates that a game like the Witcher 3 might have taken close to one million man-hours to complete, which is just crazy to think about.

@@shmunkyman33 What's most interesting is that the process has changed so much in these few years. These days most games are built from pre-existing engines like Unreal and Unity - where all of the tools not only exist but are available to literally anyone in the world with internet access. I have seen creation of some truly amazing games by individuals who couldn't write a single line of code as a result. This wasn't really the case back then, as Matt demonstrates perfectly. There were only a handful of dev kits in the entire world and even if you got a hold of one, just look at how "easy" it was to use lol

@@davistalhone9482 If someone writes a game in unity they know how to program. Just because you use a game engine doesn't mean you can't write a single line of code. It's the same thing as saying "If you use C you cant write a single line of code." Because if you want to get really low level, write it all in binary, and physically wire the connections yourself. You can ALWAYS go one level lower.

@@rosslewerenz9360 You aren't wrong there - but I was able to make a platformer in GDevelop and my coding skills are all but nill. We really have tools today that cater to we simpletons.

Check out the 'Coding Secrets' youtube channel. He was a programmer making Mega Drive games in the early 90s and has all types of videos about how technical feats were achieved in games during that time all while coding in 68k assembly.

GamerX84 C as high level...

Casper S� It has no direct relation to the machine instructions - that kind of abstraction is what I always understood by "high level language". I'm a C programmer and would hardly know where to start writing assembly language.

@@dingo137 If you know C, you can easily learn assembly easily. The same can not be said for languages like python and JavaScript.

@@dingo137 even at first year of computer science Assembly is used to learn the basics of memory management and so on, even to people who never programmed before. I think that in your case shouldn't be a particular issue to dive into it.

I was gonna ask if all Megadrive games were written in assembly That's mental/awesome Sonic's still rubbish though

As a retro console ASM hobbyist i can't imagine doing it without the infinite resources of the internet and modern emulator debugging tools. I am also truly amazed it ever happened at all.

The complexity is all still there... It's just abstracted away for your convenience.

@@Mmouse_ yep. Intel assembly is still around and can be used if you want to. You just generally don't need to

it looks like it's the National Videogame Museum which Conor Clarke introduced last week on this channel.

Sounds just like a swimming complex

Honestly mic quality (or plain lack of dedicated mics) is an ongoing issue with this channel.. I really do hope to see some improvements in this department

dw, modern consoles are even more of a nightmare if you want to do it yourself like this guy is. :v

Nah it wasnt so much work otherwise it would have been imposible for small teams. It just had its quirks. Assembler mighh look difficult but its not, its like driving without a seat belt. While you drive correctly nothing happens, but when assembler programs fail, they do so catastrophically. (Go watch some sonic 3 or mortal kombat 3 glitchfest video)

@@laharl2k I guess the thing is, when you're driving without a seatbelt on your life is in the hands of others (assuming you're a perfect driver xD). I'm pretty new to programming so assembly does seem pretty intimidating, however I do really like languages like C so far. I guess the difficulty in programming games now comes from the fact that they're so much larger and more complex than ever before, but I think it's also far easier now for anyone to learn the basics and quickly start coding. Back then it required a lot more in-depth knowledge and expertise, and many of the things that we take for granted now (such as libraries) didn't exist.

@@aggserp4340 You don't have to make games as hard as a AAA studio though? You can make noughts and crosses if you wanted to

@@cal2904 Well that's certainly easier now than it was in the 80s

Retro console dev isn't so bad. There are tile graphics editors, YM-chip sound editors, emulators with step-thru debuggers, and even when writing raw ASM you can define macro routines to do the dirty work like loading up the VDP with tiles to cut down on redundancy.

Which ironically has a never-used DMA capability deep in it's ancestry.

You mean where they now use external files which can be updated without changing the main code.

There is a playlist linked on screen at the end of the video.

@@juggernaut93 oh. I stopped watching when the content ended.

Have to get the core libraries & such built first.

Think of an original comment FFS

@@techtipsuk Post your own original comments instead of impotently flailing your arms about, demanding originality from people posting shibboleths, you absolute cretin.

@@cl0udbear NPC more.

Martin Håhjem Årdal absolute mad lad

It looks like he’s real the Mega Drive whisperer. Quite impressive stuff!

@Mr Heck Well, rather a MegaCD. It's more multimedia fun! It's an underrated add-on that was actually a lot better then the AVGN makes it out to be.

Uh, it's the same today. You, as the end user never see it.

To be fair this is some seriously archaic assembly

@@mvnkycheez x64 assembly is even worse.

This is programming. There are tools to simplify things, but at the heart, it's still like this.

@@forevercomputing gonna have to disagree. Modern programming uses looooots of abstractions which allow us to focus moreso on the actual program logic, while spending less of our concentration & energy on finicky technical necessities of the hardware. Printing "Hello, World!" to a screen is as simple as "print("Hello, World!")", for example.

@@WhompingWalrus the last bit of programming I did was only with BASIC. I've seen the assembly code for it. There's a spelling mistake.

; expected

Sceneria w Rainsted Requiring ; is bad language design. And I say that as primarily a Java dev.

@@casperes0912 "Requiring ; is bad language design" - Could you explain your rationale behind this please.

@@InsertCleverUsername Rust programmer here. Personally I think a compiler should be able to instinctively tell where the end of statement is. I can't find any language which implements this but I think that it even whitespace should be necessary (although personally I prefer semicolons to whitespace)

bash script has entered the chat :P

Masochists unite

Genesis dev is done in 68k assembly so you gotta know the hardware by hand if you want to code for it. That being said you dont create sprites like this by hand unlike something like the Atari VCS. Instead you use a sprite editor and create the sprite that you want for your game keeping in mind the color limitations of the system. Then in assembly you load the data and decide how would you like to use the sprite. Also keeping in mind the memory limitations.

Emacs.

Gatekeeping much? It's not about the tools but about what you create with them - just like creativity doesn't come bundled with a Photoshop license.

@@DanBowkley I actually rather like Emacs, it's just too hard to read text in it with the Lisp.

@@alameachan I'm not discounting other editors, I'm more leaning towards impressed. N++ lacks a lot of the creature comforts that other purpose-built editors include, akin to using mspaint to recreate the Mona Lisa at 2400 dpi; Photoshop (or GIMP) would be better suited, but good on him for doing it with mspaint.

@@alameachan Go to the dictionary and read about sarcasm

You can indeed fire up .bat files from notepad++ with user defined key combos =)

too sterile..

@@bepowerification What does that mean?

Contrived. Decided he wanted the full sleeve and feels validated whenever he catches a glimpse of it whilst typing.

Light background masterrace

The PC is used to write the code, then it's converted into instructions the Mega Drive can understand. If I sent you some Russian text without translation, you wouldn't know what it was until someone translated and made sense of it for you to read as though it was made in your own language.

@@forevercomputing That you for letting me know how an assembler works. Go read my comment again then google "pov atari demo compilation" cos I wrote 99% of the menus and did all the ripping/packing/depacking ALL in assembly. #MakeACommentForTheSakeOfIt #Devpac3Rocks

no. it's not worthy to build in memory for something like that since every game would have their own font or look or anything customized and this console hadn't had the possibility for a system menu or anything being loaded before the actual game cartridge is loaded.

PS1 has a huge built in character set (SJIS), which included the entire japanese glyph set too. No one used it in games.

@@SerBallister I would imagine under Japanese development, it may have been there as a place holder.

@@forevercomputing sjis is a superset of ascii so usable by all. The font was used in the system menu, it was needed to correctly display game save names as they could use anything in that charset. I think it took smth like half the ROM budget.

@@SerBallister ASCII defines the standard 00 to 127, after that, it's not the same. I don't think Japanese characters fill that. I would have to check as I haven't looked it up in years

Would you prefer FORTHy elegance?

@Aa And it reminds me why I love low-level programming. :) I enjoy knowing exactly what the processor's doing. Debugging can be a nightmare, though.

There is a different form of elegance in low-level programming that emerges when you realize that you can make the same things, maybe even with less boilerplate. In low-level programming you're only concerned with what the CPU does, so you're not going to build towers of confusing and misleading abstraction.

why sighing?

@@RussellTeapot watching the world waste away

it's a game console from 1988 lol check out the snes if you think the mega drive is unfriendly

No one would use the built font, it would be a waste of money. The PS1 also has a massive full SJIS character set built into its ROM, virtually no third party software used it.

The Mega Drive was arguably the most developer 'friendly' classic console of its era

* 0, 1, 2

@@RussellTeapot 00000000, 00000001, 00000010

@@forevercomputing ahaha ops, you are right

Yes...? The point of the video is to show how things were done back then

not if the company who is paying for the advert wants it at the start.

I didn't get a ad.

He has to put it at the beginning if that's what the contract specifies

If you are referring to them mentioning that they are sponsored in the beginning of the video they have to do that, it's literally the law to disclose sponsorship before the actual content.

ok Karen