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- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
- Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series
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Episode: 1337
Title: HPR1337: overdrive
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1337/hpr1337.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:44:04
---
Music
But we had one more important sound we wanted you to hear.
Hello everybody, my name is Seek Flops and Islavel and welcome to our show.
In this issue of Hacker Public Radio, in this episode of Hacker Public Radio, we're
going to be talking to Erg, one of the programmers of the new ground breaking, Psychogenesis
or a second Mega Drive demo over drive.
This is the best demo I've seen so far and the Mega Drive scene, the Psychogenesis scene,
is it needs to be a little bit more mature.
We are a young scene and there aren't too many demos for it and so this ground breaking
demo really, really sets the bar and I hope to see future demos that are quite like this.
Let me play it for you and after that we'll get on to the interview.
I want to apologize a little bit because you can hear me breathing.
I had my mic on too loud when I talked to Erg in mumble so I apologize for the sound
of my breath.
But let's get to the demo and then we'll get to Erg.
Let's get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the demo and then we'll get to the
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to the demo
Clybie 1.
programmer, part of the programming team for the new Megadrive demo called OverDrive, which
we just played for you. This is a demo, right? So it's visual and I'll get the link is
in the show notes to the actual demo so you can download it and watch it or watch it on
YouTube or something like that. How are you doing today, Erg?
I'm fine, thanks for having me. How about you?
I'm doing pretty well, a little lacking on sleep, but apart from that, I'm doing well.
So how did you get into the Megadrive scene?
Well, I started programming for the Megadrive in 2009 and I've been interested in the
system since around 2006, 2007, mostly by influence from the sonic hacking scene which got me
started and later it progressed. And basically it's been a lot of fun because the videos that
I saw on YouTube about Genesis programming and the availability of the tools at that time
was already pretty good, I would say. There was a basic compiler, so I just decided
to start doing things.
Really there's a basic compiler, that's amazing. Who did the basic compiler?
A guy called Joseph Norman, he's a Megadrive software or hardware wizard, one of the original
ones in the internet age I would say. He basically turned his Megadrive into a computer,
robotic, interpreter, compiler and all these kind of crazy things. He's a really nice guy.
So on to the demo scene, when was your first demo for the Megadrive?
With the aforementioned basic compiler, I made a pretty terrible demo and I released it
in April 2009 and a party called Breakpoint. The responses were mixed and leaning slightly
towards the bad side, but that's to be expected, so I decided to move from then.
What was the name of it? It's called Sega Point, I think, yeah.
Yeah, Sega Point. You did the music, I take it.
Meg, then I really had no one else to work with. I just did everything myself. I wrote
terrible code and I did Microsoft Paint Graphics and some music.
What did you do the music in? Not a curiosity, what program did you use?
TFM Music Maker by Shiru. It's a pretty nice program and it was the only one at the time
that had a replay on the Sega Genesis that was actually usable.
So what other demos have you produced for the Sega? What was your next demo? I'm sorry,
for the Genesis, I'm sorry, for the Megadrive. What was your next demo?
The next one I think was, often on, I made a music player for the Genesis and Megadrive
called SMPS Play. It's a player for the music format used in the Sonic the Hedgehog games
on the Megadrive Genesis. The real demo after that was Endem's First, which I worked
together with a guy called Georges Candace, who's Portuguese? I see that Eosla had some
part in, I'm sorry, in Project MD. What part did you have in Project MD at the Curiosity?
Apart from testing and other minor stuff, I did the music for the game and tools for
the sound engine. The music is really wonderful. Let me play a track
for Project MD. We'll be right back.
You just told me while we were listening that this is your favorite track. Why is it your
favorite track? I started rewriting the music tools that I had previously done for the
sound driver and it supported a lot more effects and things like that. So I just think it
sounds a lot better than all the other tracks in the game. So how long have you been working
with Titan? I can't really remember the exact time, but I think it was somewhere around April
of 2012. Ish? Now were you working on Overdrive before that? Before we sort of disbanded
MDAM, we already made a few concepts and ideas and also wrote a tiny little bit of code
for our next MDAM, but none of it really got applied to Overdrive, so I would say no.
I see you're not working with the Orge anymore. What happened there?
Well, we sort of both had solutions where I had to finish school and Orge had to finish university,
lots of things for him, and he just couldn't make time for any demo-crowding, so we kind of just couldn't do
anything. I'm not familiar with this other programmer to be honest with you. Did you recruit him
or was he part of Titan? Well, we were a lot of people working together and I was approached by
one of the guys who was not a coder, but more like a group-fiction musician,
who basically suggested me to join. Well, first of all, he asked if I had a group and would like
to come join Titan and I said, well, we have MDAM, which is kind of on ice right now,
but he said, okay, that's okay, we could make a collaboration demo, and then after
why we just decided we should all join, all the members of MDAM that were left should join Titan,
and that was just me, so. I see. What was it like working with Titan Gryffitians?
It was absolutely fantastic. We basically had only had to tell the Gryffitian
alien, by the way. We just had to tell them, I need graphics for this and this and this,
and it has to look like this. I like 10 minutes later, he would already deliver a concept
that you could use, or basically he would also pixel that work if he had to. It was really fantastic, yes.
Did you lead the direction of overdrive, or did the Gryffitian lead the direction, or was it more
of a consensual, not consensual, but was it more of an equal relationship leading the demo?
I would say it was rather an equal relationship. Sometimes it would happen the one way around,
and sometimes it would happen the other way. Basically, while alien was still experimenting with
the graphics format that this consensual uses, he would make all kinds of really, really awesome stuff,
and some of it was so awesome that we used it in the demo, and other times we just were working
on effects that I like to call them colder graphics, which are furs that look terrible, but
yeah, we just asked for new graphics, and he would just give us them immediately, basically.
Other times, we were just other members of the group, suggesting things, and we would just
agree to each other, and we would start coding the effect for it, and alien would start making the
graphics, and our musician strobe would just start making the music part for it, and that's how it
worked, basically. How did alien give you graphics? Was it just through graphic files, and then you
did the conversion, or how did that work exactly? We stumbled upon a graphic tool called Promotion,
it's on Windows, I think, only, but it's a tool that is aimed at pixel artists, I would say, and you
can do all kinds of limitations, and you can set it up to work exactly with the color palettes that
may make it right for you, so he actually pixeled with the color restrictions that the console had,
and he would export bitmap files that could be one-to-one mapped to the console colors.
That's pretty cool, there's a program out there that works for the restrictions of the
Mega Drive, I've always worried about that, to be honest with you. The common problem, yes?
I have a few questions about a couple of the effects. I'm wondering, first of all, if it was your
effect, the 500 and 12 color effect, I'm wondering how the animation was done. Was it a lot of memory,
or did you recompute things on the fly? It was basically, I didn't make the effect, it was made by
our fellow group member, Cabuto, and he basically saw the original, the DMA-502 of
color scene and thought, well, this can do a lot better, and then he delivered, basically, but it
works. To sort of make this work in full resolution, we had to work around a lot of timing problems,
and the music couldn't get stuck at all, we couldn't afford that, so we also had to not use any DMAs
in that scene, because the sound engine excesses 68K address space all the time, and so we had to
not do that, ideally. It's basically like a raster loop that waits for the blinding to start,
because the horizontal interrupts just figure a tiny little bit too late for us to do what we want,
and the timing isn't reliable, so we just do a hard raster loop, and the advantage of that is that
we neither break music nor do we break sprite display, we actually can display a few sprites on the
screen while doing this, so there were a lot of advantages, and I think we rotate between three
pellets that we reload dynamically. The next effect that I was wondering about, again, if you
had any pardon it, was the 3D checkerboard effect, do you know what I'm talking about?
Yes, it was towards the end where we also displayed the reddits, and the scene is unique in two ways,
well first of all I didn't make it either, it was also made by Kabuto, it was originally in after
thought, so to say, which we wanted to implement it first as a hidden part that you could like
access with a code or something, but after one of our coders seek made the original version,
which was just scrolling in one direction and no zoom at all, Kabuto sort of took it and made it
like you see in the demo, and just for fun I guess, or because he could, he made a real-time text renderer,
which rendered the reddits text at an angle, and I'm not too sure about the internal specifics
because I hadn't had time to study it because of deadline pressure, but he basically does rendering
of the background tiles, he just basically renders them at whatever zoom level he specifies,
which of course can be manipulated in real-time every frame at something or something like that,
and he renders them in the adequate size and just loops them, so that minimizes the work that
has to be done, and then if necessary, update the name tag for it, but yeah, that's basically a
how it's done. The sound, the music on it sounded very sample-heavy. Did you use
what, how did you make the sound at a curiosity? We actually, this might sound a little odd,
but it's the exact same sound driver as used in Project MD. It's just a very optimized
at sample playback, and the way we achieve this kind of holiday, it's still not as perfect as
it could be, but the driver is open-source, so we just kind of, and we happen to be able to get
to see who made the driver to work with us, and I basically spend a lot of time trying to
optimize sample playback, because when there were huge DMAs, it would slow down and stuff like that,
and to try and work around that was very hard, but in the end we managed to do that,
and then wrap up the sample rate to about 13 kHz, and yeah, that's all we did, we just basically
use all the open-source tools that we already released for the sound driver. Are there any
interesting effects that you've done that you want to us to take note of before we leave?
That's a hard question. I think what I liked the most of what I did was the horizontal
twister near the beginning. Oh yeah, that was very nice. I really liked that.
Which was done using modifying all of the vertical scroll RAM indexes
in the horizontal interrupt, and that's all it was basically. Okay, yeah, it was very pretty.
Thank you, thank you for interviewing with us. No problem, thank you for having me.
Yeah, thanks for, thanks for working on the Mega Drive. You do awesome work.
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