How to make PCE CDROMROMROMROM

[elmer]

I see that there's a lot to learn so I might not do a CD version as I was planning for my homebrew in development (I thought it would be way easier than it actually is to play with CDs), but I will look more into it later.

Good luck whichever route you choose ... and I hope that you have fun experimenting/learning!

You're going to laugh, but here's my suggestion. And I'm serious.

Write a HuCard game (assembler is fine, HuC not required). Get it to work. Try to keep it under 128K.

IMHO, this is great advice as a starting point.

Everything that you learn will easily transfer over to a CD later on, if you are interested, and in the meantime, you may find it easier to get started.

There's a lot to be said in having the whole System Card library at your fingertips ... but with a HuCard, at least you won't have to worry about loading things into memory (for a while).

It is simple to write your program and then test for either system in Mednafen ... which should probably be your primary tool anyway (because of the debugger).

[elmer]

This thread makes me feel retarded...

Hahaha ... you're not, we're just throwing around acronyms to make everything seem more difficult than it is. 

It's all just the details of how the System Card goes about loading and running your game from CD when you respond to the
"PUSH RUN BUTTON!" message.

It's all just boring (but critical) details ... and the big thing to note is just that "IPL" is shorthand for "Initial Program Loader". It's called that because it is the first thing that is loaded (and run) from the CD that then loads up your (the developer's) game code.

It's a small program that's put in the very first sector of the CD Data Track, and it is often also refered to as the "signature".

It is really just a piece of Hudson's copyrighted code that must appear at the start of every CD game, or else the System Card will refuse to run the CD.

The IPL looks at the information that you (as the developer) put into the 2nd sector on the CD to tell it where to load your game program into the PCE's memory, and exactly where it is on the CD.

It's not too difficult a concept to understand, it's just the details that can make it a big ugly.

PCEAS/HuC hide all the nasty stuff from you, and just make it easy for a newbie developer to get something running.

The details are all described in the official "Hu7 CD System" developer document that's been knocking around the interwebs for the last few years, as Punch eventually discovered.

[blueraven]

This thread makes me feel retarded...

:lol I was thinking the same thing.

You guys are simply the best.

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I see that there's a lot to learn so I might not do a CD version as I was planning for my homebrew in development (I thought it would be way easier than it actually is to play with CDs), but I will look more into it later. Thanks everyone, your really did help me a lot. And also thanks for the nice discussion about the IPL itself holding some code, I'll look into that later, too.

Awesome job, Punch! And thanks to the Elmer, Dave, and TheOldMan for helping you out!