Procedurally generated 2d terrain for side scroller on Sega Genesis hardware?

Question

I'm working on the Sega Genesis that has a 8mhz Motorola 68000 CPU.

Any ideas on how to generate fast and decent 2d tile terrain for a side scroller in real time? The game would generate new columns or rows depending on the direction the player is scrolling in. The generation would have to be deterministic. The same seed value would generate the same terrain.

The style of game would be a platformer like Sonic The Hedgehog. Maximum size would be around 1024 x 1024 tiles, but smaller could also work.

A column or row doesn't have to be calculated every frame, just when a new one is needed. If the player moves 1 pixels a frame, then a new column is only needed every 8 frames.

I'm looking for algorithms that would satisfy the memory and CPU constraints of the hardware.

Answer 1

I would limit this to a SMB(1) style game where the Y-axis is bound throughout the game. Instead of randomizing everything, I would stick to building mini-stages in advance and then determining which of them will be next using a hash-like function that takes the seed and the current 'x' value to pick the next area. I suspect that because of the computational abilities of the Mega Drive (~7 MHZ), it would be unwise to further burden it with sophisticated level generation when it should be sufficiently occupied with collision detection, enemy behavior and other game mechanics.

If this experiment works out, you could layer mini-stages on top one another, breaking the y-axis bound and getting something similar to what your described.