Develop: Mega Drive SDKs must be fairly thin on the ground. How easy was it to begin development for the Mega Drive?
Godde: Because discs were easy to burn, the project started as a Mega CD game. There is/were no SDK for Mega Drive or Mega CD so all was written from scratch for the game. The Mega-CD hardware is a nightmare to code for, especially if you want to load content in real time from the disc. Later, because of the Mega CD memory limitations, we moved to cartridge + disc format.
Gonçalves: The Mega CD is not very well documented on the web, and without Sega support, many solutions are reached based on trial and error. All tools and libraries were developed by us, so it provided us absolute control over the SDK; still, technical barriers were there every day.
Develop: How did the decision to create a physical product come about, and how has the process of creating the carts been?
Gonçalves: Our engine explores hardware techniques that were discovered only after the Mega Drive was obsolete making our game incompatible with emulators. This was the main motivator for a physical release.
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Develop: It’s great that you've got a world first with the simultaneous Mega Drive/Mega CD use. Why did you decide to implement that?
Gonçalves: Well, we were very sad to drop the Mega CD version but Fonzie said he knew a way we could enable the Mega CD from the cart, and it would be possible to play streamed or CDA songs from a disc. Doing this we wouldn't lose the hi-fi soundtrack already being composed for Pier Solar in PCM format.
Godde: Because the game started as a Mega CD game and ended as a cartridge game, we wanted to keep the best feature from the Mega CD (the music) in the cartridge version so as not to deceive anyone and allow them to enjoy the very best from their Mega Drive setup with or without a Mega CD.