MegaWICE

MegaWICE
System(s): Mega Drive
Developer: Westwood Studios

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MegaWICE (Mega Westwood Icon & Character Editor) is an internal IBM PC art production program for the Mega Drive, developed by Joseph B. Hewitt IV of Westwood Studios under contract for Sega of America. Shipping with the company's Genesis development kit as the dedicated art tool, it allowed artists to arranging pixel artwork in the proper 8x8 tile format for use in first and third-party Western Genesis games.

List of MegaWICE-developed games

• The Lion King
• X-Men

History

Development

“	Ok, Westwood Studios in the early 90's. I designed a character graphic editor and my bosses got SEGA to pay for it. It actually shipped with the SEGA Genesis dev kits. It was called MegaWICE. WICE was a older Westwood graphic editor that stood for Westwood Icon and Character Editor that we used for games like Battletech: The Cresent Hawk's Inception. Mega because the Genesis was called the Megadrive in Japan. The version that shipped with the dev kit was the bare bones version of the program and I've had my life threatened by a few character artists over it. The in-house version we used, however kept growing. For awhile every new programmer hired was given the task of adding some new feature. Some tasks were simple, like increasing the color gun values and number of palettes so we could do SNES graphics on it. Some were difficult, like the all powerful task of taking two characters, blocks of 8 x 8 pixels from a set of 255, which is how graphics were done back on the old console systems, and start comparing it to every other character in the set, allowing the artist to see how many pixels were different and deciding if they wanted to eliminate one character and replace it with the other, thus compressing the character set down so we could add more characters!	„
— Joseph B. Hewitt IV

Beginning life as Westwood Studios' earlier tile editing program WICE, the tool's programer Joseph B. Hewitt IV updated the software for use with the Sega Genesis. During development, Hewitt and staff used Super Magic Drive copiers to test the program, as they were reportedly much cheaper than purchasing new development hardware for all the company's artists. According to Hewitt, the version shipped to Sega of America was a "bare bones version of the program", which resulted in a number of frustrated Sega artists. However, the version used internally at Westwood continued to be updated.

Release

Upon its completion, MegaWICE was acquired by Sega of America and distributed with the official Genesis development kit, where it served as the hardware's dedicated art tool. It ran in a resolution of 320 x 200, and featured an interface designed to imitate brushed steel buttons.

Eric Iwasaki and other artists used MegaWICE to arrange the artwork for the April 1993 action platformer X-Men. Pixel artwork was first created in Deluxe Paint Animation, where it was then imported into MegaWICE. This artwork could then be viewed through a Genesis connected to a television set. Iwasaki recalls that the program could display over 262,000 colors - far more than a Sega Genesis - and as a result some colors output better than others. In particular, shades of red would often appear muddy as a result of NTSC color bleeding.

Production credits

• Created by: Joseph B. Hewitt IV

Source:

Developer statements