GG - MD converter

[^ \/ < > ABC]

Hello all.

After searching around, it seems Sega were planning on releasing a GG - MD converter, similar to the SuperGB for the SNES. But the project was canned. Damn.

Just wondering if anyone here has attempted to make such a converter, or at least investigated the possibilities? I've found an .exe that will allow me to convert GG ROM files to MD format to play via flash cart, but I wanna use actual kosha GG carts.

Cool. Thanks for your help.

 

[Mask of Destiny]

I believe that converter program only works with an actual Super Magic Drive and not a generic flashcart. It's not really a converter, it just formats the ROM into an SMD file with a flag set to tell the Super Magic Drive to start the ROM in SMS mode. Also note that the palletes will be wrong.

You could make an adapter that would allow you to plug the carts in, but that won't fix the pallete problem.

At one point I had been working on an SMS emulator for Sega CD (never got very far) and it would have been trivial to dumb down GG palletes to SMS palletes. It wouldn't have looked incredibly pretty, but it wouldn't have been nearly as terrible as without conversion. Using VDP Mode 5 (Genesis mode) would have allowed more colors, but would have been challenging because of the differences between Mode 4 and 5.

 

[Kaneda]

I know I saw some times (years?) ago a GG2MD but I don't know for what...

now, I'm pretty sure it's what MoD say : for the SMD...

i need to test...

 

[fonzievoltonov]

"At one point I had been working on an SMS emulator for Sega CD"

And why not a Atari2800 emulator on segacd or a nes emulator (64KB of full mapping, slow CPU...) =P ?

For the GG palette thing, i always thought it was the same palette system than Megadrive, just using the full availables codes.

I mean, genesis is 0x000 - 0x222 - 0x444 (to make gray scale) > 512 possibilities

GG is (well in my head) 0x000 - 0x111 - 0x222 > 4096 possibilities > Exact palette of the GG. <<< Edited

I was wrong :/

Dont know why sega chosen a different color system on GG, whould have been compatible with genesis color code ^^.

haha, i'm flooding.

 

[Mask of Destiny]

I'm pretty sure the GameGear can choose from 4096 colors, not 2048. 4096 won't really fit into the Genesis encoding scheme.

Originally posted by fonzievoltonov

And why not a Atari2800 emulator on segacd or a nes emulator (64KB of full mapping, slow CPU...) =P ?

SMS is relatively easy to do because of the hardware similarity (same PSG, similar controllers, Genesis VDP supports Mode 4). I had managed to write most of the code that translated SMS style hardware access to Genesis style (VDP was the trickiest because of the whole word vs byte write issue), but I was having trouble with the Z80 core. I was going to start with a canned C Z80 to test the rest of the emulator and then write one in assembly, but I could never get it to work right.