To make a long story short, games were written in plain Z80 assembly, that's it. There were no compilers or high-level tools back then, apart from the assembler.
Medium
Example of game cartridge .
Example of Sega Card .
The Master System supports two different media for distributing games:
- The Cartridge: The most common one, capable of addressing up to 48 KB of memory. However, by including a mapper, the system could access a wider range and handle additional chips, such as battery-backed RAM for storing saves.
- Sega offered to developers official mappers called 'Paging Chips'. The most powerful one could map up to 512 KB of memory.
- The Sega Card: Visibly thinner and cheaper to manufacture, but it could only access up to 32 KB of memory. Since SEGA never designed a mapper for this medium, the largest card found on the market contained a 32 KB ROM.