Ah, that title...it contains a question that not everyone has to ask. I, however, am someone who had to ask this, as when trying to get into old game programming, the Sega Master System sounded like an old pile of junk to me! As, well, I'm not someone who has some heart-warming story of how I grew up with my ol' Sega System. What can I say? I'm a 2000's kid.
So, let's go ahead and answer this question.
The Sega Master System was originally released in Japan as the Sega Mark III, but proceeded to be released overseas in order to further compete with Nintendo's NES. In North America, Sega fell behind by far with its rival taking over 90% of the market. Europe and Brazil, however, had something much different going on: Sega took the market by storm! Master Systems were selling left and right, with Nintendo having no idea what to do about it.
So that's the story of the console's early years. Of course, its history stretches on much further, but that's not really the point of this post. I never was one for little pieces of trivia, anyway.
Yes, I know the real reason you all are here, and it's because you want to learn how to program for this beast. So let's go ahead and dig into the lowest of technical aspects here and find out what this thing's processor is.
Yup, this ol' thing uses the Zilog Z80 processor. The processor is basically what gets everything going on a machine. So, my computer's Intel Pentium is to the Master System's Zilog.
Unless you're playing around with hardware, though, then this is information that isn't considered entirely needed to work with.
So now we know a little bit about what this thing works on, but how are we going to program it? Well, no stalling, let's jump right on into it in part 2 of HTPTSMS!
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