A while ago I contacted Rick Mann (don't know why though :P). I asked him some questions. I thought I'd share it in case anybody cares.

&lt;b&gt;drx: How I about some general thoughts about being in the company, programming, etc? Have you met anyone from Sega in person?&lt;/b&gt;

Rick Mann: So, I worked for Visual Concepts, which was fairly fun. However, we worked very long hours, and the pay wasn't great (of course, I was more junior then than I am now). The company was run by a couple of brothers, and everyone was in their 20s and energetic. The company would pay for everyone to go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas every year, and that was a lot of fun. The actual programming environments sucked, particularly for the 32X. The tools were DOS-based, lacked good debugging capabilities, and there was no C compiler. I had to write everything in Assembly, and the 32X was very buggy. I spent days at Sega with engineers trying to debug a copy protection/boot up problem, and the few bytes of shared memory had to be treated carefully to ensure valid writes. Not a platform for the feint of heart!

I met several people from Sega, but I don't remember them now. I also met people from Electronic Arts.


&lt;b&gt;drx: What games have you programmed on the Genesis/32x at Visual Concepts?&lt;/b&gt;

Rick: We ported Toughman Contest boxing to the 32X. Basically, all we did was enhance the backgrounds as compared to the Genesis version.


&lt;b&gt;drx: Did you program the 68k or the SH2? Congratulations, if both... :)
Did you program the games engine or just things like subroutines? Or maybe sound drivers? Graphics engine?&lt;/b&gt;

Rick: I wrote code to select images according to an animation schedule. I also wrote code on a Mac to generate the animation data structures for easy access by the code. I did very little 68k code. It was a very simple task.


&lt;b&gt;drx: Do you, by any chance, remember how external interrupts worked?&lt;/b&gt;

Rick: I don't remember how external interrupts worked.