Seems to be some demand for new Genesis homebrew. Currently I've got on small shooter and a bigger project on my plate in that area.

I'm thinking it's time to bring back Character based graphics like the MZ-700 and Aquarius. The IntellivisionLives people haven't responded to emails since 2011 about using the Aquarius character set. In lieu I must make my own. My project for this week is to create a 256 character max set. This includes letter, numbers, symbols and character graphics. You know, shapes, lines, googly eyes.

In order to fake 16 color character graphics on the Sega Genesis I need the font to stay below 256 characters. See, the video memory can hold up to 1344 tiles. There are four different palettes tiles can use. With four copies of the character set I can assign the foreground color four times so:

0-255 Foreground color 1

256-512 Foreground color 2

513-768 Foreground color 3

767-1024 Foreground color 4

Each of these can use one of four palettes so 4 character sets x 4 Palettes = 16 possible foreground colors per character.

Let's see if I can meet my goal!