there is always demand for good games - megadrive included
there are several new commercial ones released over the last few years and I have even bought several of them - it seems to me they were a success
I say go for it!

keropi wrote on 2024-05-02, 19:01:

there is always demand for good games - megadrive included
there are several new commercial ones released over the last few years and I have even bought several of them - it seems to me they were a success
I say go for it!

Thanks for replying!
As a matter of fact, I already went for it... the game already has some foundations set (I already have the character jumping on screen and coliding with the level). A lot of the graphics were already drawn, too.

Now I'm on a point were I have to decide if I go for something simpler (i.e. a single screen arcade game), or something more complex like the idea I mentioned in the first post.

Note: The character will hold a gun at some point, plus some colors are off... the conveyor belt and the slime pool at the bottom are using the wrong palette for now.

As long as it plays well there will be people who want it. I definitely don't mind seeing new games although I don't play much anymore and in many cases the real deciding factor will be quality of the music since I spend a lot of time in sound tests of the games that have one or just listening the soundtrack in alternative ways...

Tiido wrote on 2024-05-02, 20:35:

As long as it plays well there will be people who want it. I definitely don't mind seeing new games although I don't play much anymore and in many cases the real deciding factor will be quality of the music since I spend a lot of time in sound tests of the games that have one or just listening the soundtrack in alternative ways...

Sound and music is something I’ll definitely need help with as I’m no musician, much less one that is proficient with music trackers. Mega drive music is made of a mix of FM synth, PCM samples and a square wave generator (PSG), if anyone is interested in helping with that part, I’ll be glad.

I'm intimately familiar with how the sound works on MD, having made music and tools for this purpose for the machine in 2007...2010 or so timespan 🤣. If you encounter a TmEE somewhere on the old forums, that is me 🤣.

You can find music people from places like "Battle of the Bits", which is basically a site full of people who make impressive things with all the sound chips found in various consoles and computers. It is also worth asking in actual dedicated forums although Spritesmind, one of the oldest remaining MD dev forums, is kinda dead since basically everyone are using Discord nowdays...

Tiido wrote on 2024-05-03, 05:00:

I'm intimately familiar with how the sound works on MD, having made music and tools for this purpose for the machine in 2007...2010 or so timespan 🤣. If you encounter a TmEE somewhere on the old forums, that is me 🤣.

You can find music people from places like "Battle of the Bits", which is basically a site full of people who make impressive things with all the sound chips found in various consoles and computers. It is also worth asking in actual dedicated forums although Spritesmind, one of the oldest remaining MD dev forums, is kinda dead since basically everyone are using Discord nowdays...

That’s impressive! There are a lot of contributions you made for the community!
How I’m glad I have started this thread because the first two people responding are no less than the guys creating a freaking expansion card for the Mega PC 😁.
Is there any tracker /driver you suggest that I could use for my game? I know you created both, are they still relevant?
Maybe I could give a try in music composing, just for fun.

I'm only here because Keropi showed this thread 🤣. I don't end up on this part of these forums very often on my own...

Nowdays people use a tracker called Furnace and music is often done by VGM conversion to a format called XGM that SGDK supports. I don't really know what the situation about sound effects are. For getting music done you will have to ask around in some music places, there will surely be people willing to try or even wanting to although no clue about the terms of doing so. You'll have to figure things out yourself on this regard.

My old actual MD specific tracker is a MS-DOS based thing that works on MIDI, I was in my late teens when I made it and didn't know a thing about emulation yet 🤣. The sound engine on MD side is a bit f a mess and doesn't support things like vibrato or freq slides for example. Maybe one day I'll return to MD dev and make something proper... but right now I'm all about hardware stuff and will do as little software as I can.

Tiido wrote on 2024-05-03, 11:42:

I'm only here because Keropi showed this thread 🤣. I don't end up on this part of these forums very often on my own...

Nowdays people use a tracker called Furnace and music is often done by VGM conversion to a format called XGM that SGDK supports. I don't really know what the situation about sound effects are. For getting music done you will have to ask around in some music places, there will surely be people willing to try or even wanting to although no clue about the terms of doing so. You'll have to figure things out yourself on this regard.

My old actual MD specific tracker is a MS-DOS based thing that works on MIDI, I was in my late teens when I made it and didn't know a thing about emulation yet 🤣. The sound engine on MD side is a bit f a mess and doesn't support things like vibrato or freq slides for example. Maybe one day I'll return to MD dev and make something proper... but right now I'm all about hardware stuff and will do as little software as I can.

Thanks for the tips, will probably use XGM for the sound engine, then. I’m using plain assembly for development but I see that SGDK source code includes standalone tools as well as the z80 driver. I’m assuming my m68k program just needs to copy the z80 program to z80’s memory and start it.

Played a bit with Furnace, too and it really makes me want to try making some tunes myself. I plan to take my time with this project so it is a good opportunity to learn some music skills.

Let’s hope one day it becomes a full fledged game.