Building a Sega Mega Drive hardware dev kit from scratch

I know, we do not focus on games and/or consoles here, but this is a quite fascinating story of a hard- and software hack on the Sega Mega Drive. It involves Motorola 68000 programming using Turbo Assembler for the Atari ST, and some audacious reverse engineering. Also, the author, Tore Nestenius, has some serious retro computing credibility:

I have been interested in computers since I got my first Commodore VIC-20 computer around 1981. From that I went to Commodore C64, Atari ST, Atari ATW (Yes, I actually owned an Atari ATW back in the day with 5 transputer chips inside it) running the Helios operating system, then today to PCs!

After this project, my next big thing was to create Programmers Heaven; it started as two CD-ROMS that I published and then eventually became a major online community for developers from 1996 to 2008. Hopefully I will be able to write a blog post about that in the near future.

So, I think, while console-oriented and done contemporary (30 years ago), this duly qualifies for an amazing retro computing project, justifying the exception:

Via HN, discussion (including some enthusiastic comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30026896

1 Like