SMSLib - Sega Master System Z80 Libs

Low-level Sega Master System libs for the WLA-DX Z80 assembler (v10.3+). Its aim is to provide a consistent API for the hardware with zero/very low cost abstractions and to minimise the boilerplate required to get homebrew projects up and running quickly.

Quick Start

.incdir "lib/smslib"    ; set the working directory to the smslib directory
.include "smslib.asm"   ; include the libs

; SMSLib will jump to the 'init' label once it has booted the system
init:
    ; Write palette colors
    palette.setIndex 0
    palette.writeBytes myPalette, myPaletteSize

    ; Load patterns (tile graphics)
    patterns.setIndex 0
    patterns.writeBytes myPatterns, myPatternsSize

Each module is decoupled from the others and can be imported individually. smslib.asm is just a file that pulls in all the modules for convenience.

Examples

See example programs in the examples directory. Build the examples using the build.sh script (Linux). wlalink and wla-z80 should be in your system path. The compiled .sms ROM will appear in the examples/dist directory ready to be run in an emulator.

Docs

• init.asm - Initialises the system and smslib modules
• input.asm - Interprets the joypad inputs
• interrupts.asm - VBlank and HBlank interrupts
• /mapper/*.asm - Memory mapper handlers
• palette.asm - Color palettes
• patterns.asm - Patterns (tile images)
• pause.asm - Pause button
• sprites.asm - Manages a sprite table in a RAM and pushes to VRAM when required
• scroll/tiles.asm - Scrollable tilemaps
• scroll/metatiles.asm - Scrollable maps of metatiles
• tilemap.asm - Background tilemap and scrolling
• vdp.asm - Graphics chip register settings

Additional utils

• utils/ram.asm - Utilities for setting values in RAM

Design Principles

Low level

The modules in the root directory act as a thin layer to the Master System chips to ensure they are applicable across many projects and engines. They provide macros and routines to abstract many of the nuances of Master System development so you can build a more fuller-blown engine on top of them. The repo does though include additional modules that provide some higher level functionality such as scroll handling that build upon these lower level libs.

Priorities: Speed > Ease > Size

Over time the routines will be optimised for speed and size without one aspect adversely affecting the other. There will however be an emphasis on speed as code size is less of a problem in Master System projects (especially compared to asset sizes) whereas speed can be a bottleneck, especially within VBlank timing constraints.

• The lib is designed for ease of use so long as this doesn't reduce the speed of the generated code (within reason)
• The lib makes heavy use of macros to generate inline code and save on call and ret costs. The macros are though mindful of code size so will generate calls to large shared routines where necessary

Unsafe Register Preservation

As part of the speed priority the library routines will happily 'clobber' register values without preserving them onto the stack. This is because push and pop calls on multiple register pairs is expensive, and you may not even need some of them preserved.

The register values before and after a call may therefore change. This shifts the responsibility of preservation to you, mainly for efficiency reasons; you know best what registers you actually care about, so only need to preserve those. The flipside of this is that it is a bit of a 'gotcha' to be aware of.

Decoupled

SMSLib modules for the most part are independent of one another so you can pick or choose only the ones you want. For convenience you can just include smslib.asm and this will pull the main ones in for you. In either case WLA-DX will only assemble the code you actually use.

Namespaced Prefixes

Each library file prefixes its labels with its name and a '.' (i.e. input.readPortA). Although it can make things more verbose it makes for much easier code tracking and prevents naming collisions.

Customisable

Many of the lib files include settings that default to sensible values but can be overridden if required. These are defined in the 'Settings' section near the top of each file. The overrides must be defined at some point before you .include the relevant file.

Tricks and Optimisations

The library includes a number of optimisations and quality of life tricks, including:

• An 'OUTI block' - the fastest way to write data to the VDP
• Sprite buffer offset - table is offset in RAM to allow efficient sprite adding
• Fast sprite buffer write - only used sprite entries are sent to the VDP
• VDP register buffer - allows changing of settings without affecting other settings
• Fast interrupt handling - HBlank handling pretty as fast as practical (OutRun handler)

Sources

The code and techniques utilised by the lib try to credit original authors where known. Of particular help was the thread A few hints on coding a medium/large sized game using WLA-DX on the smslib.org forums.

Much of the information contained in the docs was learned from https://www.smspower.org, in particular the Development documents section.