SGDK

Or an alternative for the Sega Genesis https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK Or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib Or the Gameboy / GBC, Sega Master System, Gamegear, Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020 Or the TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, Nintendo Entertainment System (alt), Commodore 64, Vic-20, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Apple II/IIe, or Pet 2001 https://github.com/cc65/cc65 Or the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple II (alt), Gameboy (alt), Sega Master System (alt), and Game Gear (alt) https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk Or the Fairchild Channel F https://channelf.se/veswiki/index.php?title=Main_Page Note: Some are slightly pre-1999 (all these, I have at least successfully made a "Hello World" with) ---------------- If they're really wanting 1999, that's the 5th to 6th generation co

I'm working on a game for Amiga (another 68k-based platform) and settled on ZX0 to decompress assets on the fly: https://github.com/einar-saukas/ZX0 I was originally using LZ4, but I switched to ZX0 after learning that it can do in-place decompression, which means I don't have to allocate separate memory for the compressed data. I'm very happy with the compression ratio, and decompression of large assets (~48kb) only takes a few frames on a 7MHz 68000. Also of note is LZ4W, included in Sega Genesis Dev Kit (and discussed in the comments section of OP's article), a variant of LZ4 that only uses word-aligned operations. That makes it much faster on the 68000, which can struggle to efficiently handle 8-bit data. More info here: https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/blob/master/bin/lz4w.txt

I've been looking into the SGDK for the Genesis / MegaDrive and from what I've seen performance seems to be pretty competitive. There's been a resurgence of homebrew commercial releases for the console, and I believe the vast majority of them use SGDK. They seem to perform quite well. https://github.com/Stephane-D/sgdk I'm not sure if this is a matter of GCC itself being smart enough in general to generate performant 68000 code. There may be a lot of custom work within SGDK itself to ensure that the generated code is performance competitive.

There's a lot of retro dev happening now across the board. SGDK has led to a big interest in making Genesis/Megadrive games. Jo Engine is increasing interest in the Saturn, etc. I'm also attempting to help contribute by writing a book on Neo Geo development (it has a long ways to go) https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK https://www.jo-engine.org/ a Saturn homebrew showcase - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKKExcTaKo https://neogeobook.mattgreer.dev