I just found out about this a few days ago when I asked on irc. If you don't have a genesis, what's the recommended emulator to use (preferably one that works on retroarch so I can use it on my phone too)?
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Michigan
IceWolf wrote:
I just found out about this a few days ago when I asked on irc. If you don't have a genesis, what's the recommended emulator to use (preferably one that works on retroarch so I can use it on my phone too)?
I like gens, but that is PC only.
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Any news concerning this project especially this feature, where you can save your work? 
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Hello everyone, it's been a while. I have some bad news and some good news. First, let's get the bad news out of the way. The bad news is, the drive I used to store the project's source code came up missing recently. If it turns up, that's one thing but we shouldn't hold our breath and here's why:
1) I made a lot of mistakes early on when making design decisions, mistakes that were very deeply entrenched in the code foundation, fixing these issues would have broken the whole program and proven difficult to rewrite. Enharmonic spelling, gui , memory management etc.
2) The direction I was going with the development would have made Deflemask compatibility limited and less likely. I really want Deflemask compatibility and think of it as necessary.
3) I went into the coding and design having little notion what I was actually getting into. I was learning many programming concepts and an entire system + language on a pretty intense concept. This tracker was my first real program and although the project WAS getting somewhere, it ultimately had a poor foundation and truthfully, it was frustrating to deal with.
So wow that's some pretty bad news right? What about the good news?
This is a great chance to start from a clean slate. I still have all of my handwritten notes for everything I implemented. I know exactly what I'm getting into this time around as well. This time around, I would like to dev this project in C language with hand coded 68k assembly for speed critical parts and to start I want this project open source.
Why C and why open source?
Because it's a bit easier to write with imo and because there are better odds of getting other programmers onboard with the project. We might see more progress in a less amount of time with open source this time around. Besides that, there are always better developers than myself out there... that goes without saying, losing source code now will be less likely.
So in short. This project will be rebooted, made open source and will be done in C & 68k assembly instead of pure 68k assembly.
Also, I'm taking the donation links down. Things like this are much more fun when money isn't an object.
@kitch if you still want to set up that source hosting that would be awesome and it would be greatly appreciated. Sourceforge doesn't allow Android phones to register apparently and I don't have the luxury of time atm to fish around for a site that will. It's amazing how we take the internet on desktops/laptops for granted.
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france
Hi Countsymphony,
It's great you come back.
I'm able to write c code and if you are seeking developper i will be more than happy to help.
Do you have already your idea on the design of the code and the target toolchain ?
I will be more than happy to work with you on this tracker and learn a bit of 68k and z80.
Your last demo was full of bug on the gui side, but it was a real pleasure to play with a native genesis tracker.
It's a shame you have lost the source...
Great news you came back !!!
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São Paulo, Brazil
Great to have you back, County. Too bad you've lost the code, but yeah sometimes restarting a project from scratch is more productive than overwhelming. One question, how is this compatibility with Deflemask gonna work?
C coders, help the man!
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@yoyz2k Hey that's great if you want to help, I knew this might be a good idea. I just switched over to Linux from XP so I'm still figuring out some particulars. However I'm going to use the Eclipse IDE and the SGDK by stef. I still need to figure out which assembler and other binaries to use, more on that later once I figure out the Linux side of things. As far as code design is concerned, we need something that is very readable and well documented, 68k was an eyesore after a while and is one leading reason to make C the primary language. But it also needs to be efficient. When playback and sampling comes into play, there's no room for slow code... the Sega Genesis has an ancient cpu and tiny ram. So it's a tight squeeze, it sure is rewarding to get sound out of it though 
If it's something you think you want to have a go at then head on over to spritesmind, it's an online community of sega devs and there's tons of great info there. Once I finish getting the dev platform set up on my end and can compile we can start coordinating more, getting our hands dirty, etc.
@PULSELOOPER Deflemask has some interesting functionality that would be tricky to get working on a full blown native tracker. The UI will need to be reconsidered, there's a lot that needs to be reconsidered as matter of fact. It really struck me when I started getting too far along in development, I was going to have to rewrite lots of code.
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Addendum: We're looking at the gcc toolchain and I forgot to mention, there will be z80 assembly too.
Last edited by CountSymphoniC (Jul 16, 2015 2:45 am)
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NUMBSKULL
I would suggest hosting the code on github. Not only is it a great (and free) code host, it has a lot of features that are great for open source projects.
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france
When you have a full feature helloworld with c and asm on the 68k and z80 with the right toolchain I will be more than happy to help you on whatever.
I work on Debian, with emacs, gcc and git.
I've done some i386 dos asm so I think it could help me on the asm part.
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Earth
@CountSymphony Good to see you're still at it. Each project teaches you new lessons about code design, and this new code base will likely be a lot better organized, so this is for the best. Glad that you are making this open source! I don't have a lot of time to help, but in the future perhaps I will.
Good luck guys!
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Okay, that could be interesting! I look forward to hear more about the future result
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yoyz2k wrote:
When you have a full feature helloworld with c and asm on the 68k and z80 with the right toolchain I will be more than happy to help you on whatever.
I work on Debian, with emacs, gcc and git.
I've done some i386 dos asm so I think it could help me on the asm part.
Hey there. I can proceed no further with the Linux SGDK without an active internet connection to my laptop, the make process requires it unfortunately. The only internet I have is with a smartphone that isn't even mine and no tethering. However I have SGDK all set up on windows in the case that I can't find a chance to get online on my laptop. I might know someone who has internet that can help out here... just thought I'd give an update. In the mean time I've been thinking of many ways to make the tracker more efficient and have come up with good things so far. Especially in the realm of RAM efficiency.
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france
Yes, I agree working without internet connection is really difficult.
Glad to know you have idea for managing the 64KB of ram efficiently.
I will need to read some doc to understand the memory, the IO subsystem, and how the two cpu communicate it will be the hard part for me because when I work with multiple processor and numa node, it is handled by linux for me.
So lot of thing to understand
Hope you will have your internet access soon.