Sega Genesis Slide Generator and Viewer

Copyright (c) 2024 Joey Parrish

See MIT License in LICENSE.txt

Overview

Create a Sega Genesis / Mega Drive ROM from a PDF of a slide show.

Export the slides as a PDF, then run this tool to generate a ROM.

Burn the ROM to a flash cart, or run in an emulator.

Press left or right on the Sega to move through slides.

Requires ImageMagick and pdftoppm to convert images, and Docker to compile the ROM using SGDK. The generator script is written in Python. On Ubuntu, install packages "python3", "imagemagick", "poppler-utils", and "docker.io".

Usage

sudo apt -y install python3 imagemagick poppler-utils docker.io

# All pages
./generate.py slides.pdf slides.rom

# A subset of pages (1-based page numbers)
./generate.py slides.pdf@1-21 slides.rom

Windows

To use this from Windows, you can install dependencies via chocolatey:

choco install -y imagemagick docker docker-desktop

# Possibly needed to update Windows Subsystem for Linux to support Docker:
wsl --update

# The latest Poppler package on Chocolatey (25.7.0) is broken, and only
# contains sources, not executables.  Pin to an older version.
choco install -y poppler --version 0.89.0

Finally, you will have to run Docker Desktop once to configure it and start the service. Docker Desktop may or may not require you to reboot if it is newly installed. After that, you should be able to run this tool on Windows.

Links

• SGDK: A free and open development kit for Sega Mega Drive.
• Poppler: A PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code base.
• ImageMagick: A free, open-source software suite used for editing and manipulating digital images.
• Krikzz: Incredible hardware for retro game console hacking and development, including flash carts.