While the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis homebrew scene is constantly flooded with new and unique games, as well as ports of existing titles, the Mega CD / Sega CD, by comparison, has traditionally been somewhat neglected, due to both the lack of available tools and the increased complexity of developing for the CD-based hardware.
Recently, however, there's been a pretty exciting update that could potentially help give Mega CD development the kind of push it needs, with the retro game disassembler and researcher Sudden Desu revealing over the weekend that their Sega Mega CD development kit, MegaDev, has officially hit 1.0.
MegaDev is described as a "collection of utilities, headers, documentation, and examples to make development for these systems less painful than starting from scratch," and is described as a little "less user-friendly" and "a little less hand-hold-y" than SGDK. It is primarily aimed at those who already have "some experience with C or M68k assembly programming and have at least a passing familiarity with embedded systems," and features "no [built-in] graphic conversion tools and such," with developers encouraged to make their own, or wait until Sudden Desu releases their own in the future.
MegaDev was originally made available in version 0.1 back in April 2023 and had previously been stuck at version 0.1.1 since April 4th, 2023.
That is, up until this past weekend, when Sudden Desu finally released the "first 'full' version," which they admit has "been a long time coming."
According to Sudden Desu, they have been "sitting on this project in a near-release-ready state for well over a year," but decided to release it now, "with a few ugly parts," after realising that if they keep tinkering away with it in private, it will likely never see the light of day.
Some of the notable changes introduced in this latest version, as outlined by Sudden Desu on Twitter/X, include a "more sane" build system, "using standard makefiles instead of the wacky 'module definition' files" of earlier versions; a new example project demonstrating the Mega CD's scale/rotate functions; and a move to gitflow (a Git branching model for a more structured workflow) "in an attempt to have a proper release architecture."
There's also been a "significant effort" made to clean up the documentation; however, Sudden Desu states there are still improvements to make to the "Main BIOS system call documentation", which they still describe as "very lacking."
You can check out the latest release here.