First of all, I wanted to say that I absolutely love the Coding Secrets series, and that it's my favorite set of videos to look forward to.
With that being said, I wanted to ask specifically about programming for Genesis games back in the days - I know you've shown a bit of code before, and while I have some experience with coding, I have to admit I don't always recognize the language from first glance. So, on Genesis and 32X hardware, what *was* the coding language that was used?
There were a handful of games that were coded in C, to my knowledge, but it wasn't very common because it was much easier to count cycles when you knew exactly how many instructions a procedure was going to take, and that was the only way you could figure out if a feature you wanted to add would lag out a game or not. When you only had a few thousand instructions per second to work with, you had to be a lot more careful about the calculations you did, at least if you were going to do anything fancy.
It's all written in 68000k assembly language, which is a 1 to 1 correlation with machine code. You can't get any lower level - it's as fast as it gets.
SVC Games, Assemblers is a low level language, it can be compiled into assembly. But I think you are confusing Nes Development with genesis. Which isn't too far off from one another to be fair. Also with C you can access lower levels, at least you use to be able to.
Genesis carts were made in 68k Assembly. http://mrjester.hapisan.com/04_MC68/
It is assembler. In the grand scheme of things let's just say that assembler is closer to pure machine code, so it's faster than higher level languages like C.