Monday, June 02, 2008

TG16 fun...

With XeO3 being easy to port to the C64, I started thinking about other 6502 platforms... SNES is one I'd like to lookat, particually as I have a couple of old DevKits AND a couple of magicoms. these were copy devices, but I used to use them for homebrew development as you could squirt code down to them from a PC/Amiga.

So, I started reading up on some old PC Engine stuff, and was trying to find something (outside an emulator) that would let me code for it again. I was hunting for something called TurboRAM which was a prototype device to let you download to the TG16, but I couldn't find anything - I guess its long gone now. But this would be cool, so I started hunting for info on the expansion bus to see whats invloved.

I actually found info on the Cartridge port, and its quite interesting... It's only address+data lines, it doens't appear to be encrypted at all!! This means it shouldn't be too hard to make a RAM card that you can download to! So thats another thing on my to-do list, see if i can hack together a RAM card for a PCEngine, then I could actually code for this great little machine again!

(I also have an old MegaDrive devkit! It should work, but i've haven't used it in over10 years now).

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very interested in seeing your updates on the PCE/TG. There are a bunch of us who adore the machine, including a few (not me) coding for it, writing new games, etc.

I notice most of your comments are on other topics, but I think you'll find a bunch of us are now keen on following your PCE tales. I've sub'd to your feed already.

You may have even come across my site (gamesx.com) when looking for pinouts. I hope you did, anyway. =)

Anonymous said...

I don't suppose you've came across the SNES version of ARGASM (Argonaut Assembler) on your travels??

I've got a ton of SNES source code and gfx that were written to use the ARGASM compiler and linker and I just cant find a copy anywhere :(

Mike said...

There wasn't a version of argasm for the snes as far as I know, it was Amiga only. However there was one call SNasm (SN systems assembler), another called psyQ from Psygnosis and the offical one (which was pants) from Nintendo...

Anonymous said...

There was ARGASM for the SNES. It might have been an internal only tool though :(

StarFox, StarFox 2, King Arthurs World etc. all used argasm.

I've managed to find a version of the assembler (albeit for OS/2) in amongst all my source but no linker :(

Anonymous said...

The makefiles have in them (amongst other things)

ASM=argsfxx
ASMFLAGS=-efilelist=0 -z
LINK=arglink
LOPTS=-b30 -h1024 -t7d -f

Mike said...

Well they did the superFX chip, so I guess it stands to reason they'd have thier own assembler for it as no one else would....

Of course you dont need a linker, you could arrange the source so that its assembled to binary (most assemblers will output to a binary format).