Re: Sega Vector Development Tools Project

Hey everyone,

Obviously it's been a while since I've been on the list... ;-)

NeilB sent me a copy of Mark's post so I'm here to help out a bit. (...and
yes Mark, I *did* get your email. Patience grasshopper-- takes a while to
find 8 year old source at my house. ;-)

Anyway, I managed to scrounge up the source and executables for (I think)
all the old Sega G80 stuff I did. It was all Borland Turbo C 2.0 with their
BGI graphics extension-- it kinda runs from WinXP. Win98/ME seems fully
functional.

The ZIP of everything is here:

http://www.multigame.com/sega_G80.zip

There's an unzipped version here if anyone just want to browse:

http://www.multigame.com/sega_G80/

>From the best of my recollection and brief digital archaeology this morning:

FONT_G80 - converts Borland BGI vector stroked fonts to a format readable by
the editor (could be useful 'cause I think some modern 2D/3D vector programs
can output in BGI font format)

G80A and G80B - a viewer meant to decode raw binary (like from a EPROM image
from the boardset) and display valid G80 vector display lists. I think I
added some sort of text-dump to the G80B which will need to be removed to be
very interesting (it draws the vectors but dumps an text display at the same
time)

G80ASCII - I think this just takes a binary and spits out the hex data in
the format my assembler liked

G80BIN - not sure. ;-) I think it was meant to read a binary with an image
and spit out hex or something?

G80ED1 and G80ED2 - I think G80ED2 is the one to use. It's an G80 shape
editor. A couple things to play with--
    - under WinXP it does not appear to be able load files-- not sure if
that's a side effect of my system or in general-- WinME and 98 seem to work
OK
    - left mouse button draws a vector in the current color, right mouse
button plots a 'move' (invisible)
    - the *.G80 files should be able to be loaded with G80EDx
    - use F1 to load GOTH.G80 and you can see a BGI converted font in the
editor
    - you can turn on/off the move markers ('h') If you turn them on you
can also turn on the move vectors 'a'
    - if you hit [SPACE] it will draw the shape mostly like real G80
hardware would, if you hit the left and right arrows and then space you'll
see the effect that the Sega hardware rotation would have.
    - the source is a direct descendant of my Nintendo NES font editor from
1988, so there's plenty of old references and really crusty old code to be
had.
    - quick tutorial-- run G80ED2 (even under WinXP this seems OK), click
the left mouse button around. You're drawing lines. Click the right mouse
button in a new location. You make a 'move'. Click the left mouse buttons
again-- you're drawing. Now hit 'h' a couple times. That's shows/hides the
move endpoints. With the endpoints shown, hit 'a'. That shows the 'moves'
in yellow. Now hit 'space'. The purple drawing is about how the G80
hardware will show it (only one draw color-- it's EGA and I didn't want to
get confused between then!). Now hit the left and right arrow keys-- that's
how the G80 hardware rotation would rotate it. Hit space to clear the
rotation. You can use F4/F3 to go to the next sprite and back to clean up
the screen...

G80PROM - decodes the CPU board address PROM (82s123) into chip selects.
Just something I used making the old multigame.

G80SCAN - I'm not sure. I think it was supposed to tear through a BIN file
and look for likely shapes and spit out starting locations? Might have been
hacked into something else. Beats me. ;-)

Anything *.G80 is a shape file for the editor.

Anything *.I80 might be an intermediate format from converting from a BGI
font file.

G80EDx should have the important bits WRT encoding and decoding the data for
the G80 vectors. (IIRC it was just angle/length/color type stuff) I think
I actually wrote most of the section in Al's G80 hardware reference on the
display system. I just used the Fluke 9010 and figured out what everything
did, so the whole description of quadrants for rotation and whatnot was
based on what I was seeing by flipping bits. ;-) Al used my description
(that section was basically an email I sent him) to implement the display on
his G80 simulator on the Mac, and then I used the that program to make the
Multigame menu and patches for the games.

-Clay

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Received on Fri Jun 10 14:39:28 2005