GamesCare's New Genesis Dev Cart Will Help "Create Games Beyond The Power Of The Console"

Projects like this are cool, and to some extent this kind of thing was going on during the 16-bit era with advanced mappers and chips like FX and SVP. But even those enhancements were still limited by the technology at the time.

Once you're making use of an additional 30 years of technology to push this far "beyond the power of the console," I'm not sure I understand why you'd bother making your game for that console to begin with. Novelty? Programming challenge?

@Razieluigi Yes. I think there's a lot of reasons people are doing this and 'just because we can' is certainly on that list too. I see a large portion of the gaming market getting tired of the direction modern gaming is going. My last tattoo my artist was telling me about getting a PS2 and how shocked he was he could just put the disc in and play. He'd never experienced gaming without updates, DLC, and insane install times. The trade off in graphics didn't even phase him because if he only has 20-30 minutes he can actually play something instead of sitting and watching an update or something. This stuff is also dramatically cheaper for devs and consumers. I see this trend only growing over time.

I just hope it doesn't damage the console. It's one of my growing concerns with all these stories you hear about these carts drawing too much power.

If it's "beyond the power of the console", then it's not really a game for the console anymore, is it?

Or just port their games to the 32X which is 4 times more powerful than this thing.

Agree with kingmike, if you're going to make games beyond what a stock system can play, its no longer a MD gamre. You may as well develop for a current low power system such as the raspberry pi.

Yep, I agree with everyone has said. With something like this the Megadrive is barely more than just a power supply and controller port. There’s a similar thing with Krikkz’s Mega EverDrive which has a port of Doom running on its ARM CPU.

The magic comes from pushing the original hardware to its limits and finding clever ways to do things, not “cheating” with modern hardware. That said, WiFi support for cloud saving or online gaming could be interesting!

@KingMike I think cartridge games have always been above the power of the console as far back as the NES extra chips were placed in carts to extend beyond the original expected capabilities of the base system

@X68000 Tbh while I love my old retro tech, I also do love modern projects like Pico 8. What you just said would be a fine thing to do in my book, like work around and within the power limitations of let's say a Pi 5, but stay within predefined "Mega Drive-esque" designphilosophies. Most importantly: Drab colors and rough synth sounds we all grew to love!

But just imagine a "proper" 3D engine within the color palette of the OG Mega Drive, or gigantic open world or even MMORPG style games, isometric top-down view, in original resolution and such... oh one can dream. Would love that...

@Profchaos The majority of NES mappers merely increased the amount of ROM available to the CPU (something nearly all 8-bit consoles/computers needed. The 32-48 kilobyte ROM max size those CPUs could afford otherwise was pretty limiting even by 1985 standards.) Even the most "powerful" NES mapper, the MMC5, I think at most video-wise allowed every 8x8 pixel tile to have its own palette definition (the NES normally allowed palettes to only be assigned in 16x16 pixel, or 2 tile x 2 tile square, increments). Not a huge stretch.
Adding on a whole other mini-computer (which essentially what an FPGA is) that probably far outclasses the host console is another thing.

I do wonder it would have been like if that Hellraiser "Super Cartridge" for the NES would have been if it had been developed. Then again, Color Dreams didn't have the highest quality standards in the games they did release.

From what I have seen in the demo scene the MD can already do good quality multichannel PCM audio through a DAC so I assume the emulation of sound chips is like a sampler like the SNES to save storage - the arm processor probably required for this. I have also seen really good 3d demos (and doom-esqe portal/Wolfenstein engines) - like the mapper I'm guess it uses the same type of chip. I feel this cartridge could have been feasible back in the day and utilised based on the demos I have seen in the past 5 years, recently saw a MD video player playing the GenesisDoes advert here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE4HLnmD0g0&list=LL&index=3 this guy also made a fullscreen Doom demo too. There are good 3D demos from Resistance and Titan and Manifold is a portal Doom engine are already doing amazing things without a 3d calculator chip. MP3 streaming is being worked on too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU7dmbmXtYs&list=LL&index=11

Additional chips for 16-bit consoles in the cartridge, nothing unusual. The Snes has a bunch of them and the MD has its SVP. Much better than adding useless addons.

@Protion9 I wonder if all those chips could be made permanent upgrade as a cartridge in the expansion slot?

@avcrypt It's free for developers

Here lies the problem: if you change what the MD can do too much then it's not the Mega Drive any more. It seems like developers are having trouble putting their modern tiny pixel games on Mega Drive when those games don't need to be ported in the first place. Make do with what you have. 👍

@slider1983 Never actually hear developers talk about storage as a restriction I assume because Sega Mapper was used in SSF2 and is a known method and flash carts support it. I'm very impressed with what developers are making do with now. Love the chip tunes being made but now that PCM can be achieved with just DAC drivers I wonder how this cartridge helps and how the game 'The Secret of the Four Winds' is managing storage of their CD like audio. I don't think developers would need the graphics compression or the 3d chip, may do in the future but people are already developing games with the current raycasting engine and there is voxel drilling game in development too.

@mootint That's not what I was referring to. I was talking about the capabilities of the Mega Drive.

While the idea of this sounds good but if you are using the co-processor in the cartridge to do most or all of the work then you are using very little of the original hardware then the original console is more of a pass though. I get the argument that consoles then often used extra chips on the cartridge to enhance the games but they often worked equally with what the original system could do not replace it. Even the 32X relied on the Mega Drive heavily. This is one reason I wasn't that excited for Paprium as it really just used the colour palette of the system and the vast majority if not all of the game was only using the fpga chip that was used.