Romulus
From Sega Retro
This short article is in need of work. You can help Sega Retro by adding to it.
Romulus is a Mega Drive cartridge board emulator created and utilized by Futurescape Productions for producing titles for the 16-bit Sega Genesis. Developed internally in 1993 and maintained until at least 1994,[1] the hardware was designed to streamline the game development process by providing a faster and more efficient way to load and test games, allowing developers to quickly upload game builds from an IBM PC to the Genesis. Romulus also featured battery backup for its memory, supported EEPROM and SRAM, and enabled artists to view their graphics directly on a TV screen, crucial for ensuring accurate color representation and aspect ratios. Above all, it was designed with off the shelf components and boasted a starting price of under $1000.
Although attempts were made to sell Romulus to other developers, its success was limited, with only a few units sold to companies like Sega of America and Electronic Arts. Despite this, it reduced turnaround times for Futurescape's games, easing the strain on the company's relatively small development team for the brief years it was in service.[2]
Contents
Overview
| “ | The "host" machine would've been something like a 386DX or 486 based MS-DOS machine, this was the machine on which the developer edited, compiled and debugged the code the project. The "target" machine would be the Genesis in this case, with a Romulus plugged into it an a parallel port cable linking the two machines. You could only run your game on the Genesis itself, so build turn-around time was important. You certainly didn't want to have to go get some coffee while your game compiled, especially at the end of the development cycle when you're fixing bugs and polishing. The host machine would compile all of the code (we used mostly C and some 68k assembly) and package all of the art and audio resources into a ROM image, which would then be uploaded into the Genesis through the Romulus. For artists, I think I recall we had a way to display their Deluxe Paint Animate screen through the Genesis, which helps them see what actual colors look like on the TV and critically the objects shape, your perfectly round circles are going to look squished or elongated with the Genesis' aspect ratio. | „ |
Romulus came in a number of configurations for different uses cases. "I think an artist Romulus was less than $1,000, and the full blown all of the RAM, backup EEPROM for programmers was around $1,750."[2] By 1994, the BIOS had been updated to version 1.4[1]
History
| “ | Ken and I both agreed that we couldn't afford the standard development kits from SEGA, I think they were around $5K each and the artist stations were not much cheaper. Instead, mostly Ken (I did a little, but mostly Ken did the hardware and I did the firmware work) developed a really slick cartridge emulator with a 9 volt battery backup. It was faster and supported larger cartridges than the SEGA kit, and you could carry it to an office with your game on it to show progress, plus the paired down artists version was super cheap for us to make, so it was no issue to give one to each artist. | „ |
Development
| “ | Our "Romulus" cartridge emulator had up to 4MB of capacity, or no RAM at all for an artists board (just needed the video RAM). Artists needed to be able to see their graphics on a TV screen, and old TVs back then used NTSC (or Never The Same Color) so it was critical that they could see exactly what was presented to the player. It wasn't just an issue of color representation / artifacts, the pixels aren't square on these machines, so when you draw a perfect circle on the PC, you'll end up with an oval on the TV.
|
„ |
Sometime during or shortly after the boards' development, Futurescape Productions exchanged a Romulus with Electronic Arts programmer Ray Tobey in exchange for Tobey's Motorola 68000 source level debugger, enhancing Futurescape's development capabilities. "[That] turned it into a full fledged development platform."[2]
Prerelease
Romulus was demonstrated at the 1994 Computer Game Developers Conference in April, where Futurescape Productions made an official appearance as a vendor. According to Futurescape's Kevin McGrath, "We didn't get many buyers, probably because who can trust a tiny game development house that has yet to get something published? ... I don't recall the "booth" being more than a folding table with paper fliers describing what Romulus did, and prices I believe."[2]
Release
A few Romulus boards were sold to both Electronic Arts and Sega of America, but the revenue was not enough to keep Futurescape Productions afloat.[2]
List of developed games
 |
This list is incomplete. The following list has been marked as incomplete. If you can, please complete it. |
Mega Drive
- Monster Hunter (unreleased)
- Relentless (unreleased)
- Sid & Al's Incredible Toons (unreleased)
- Nuclear Rush (unreleased)
Gallery
References