Seeek And Destroy Sms — Development skill for Claude Code

Seek and Destroy — Sega Master System

A homebrew tribute to Vision Software's *Seek and Destroy* (Amiga 1993 / MS-DOS 1996), built from scratch in C with SDCC and devkitSMS.

**ROM:** `seek-and-destroy.sms` — 32 KB, standard SEGA header. Runs in any Master System emulator (Emulicious, MEKA, Kega Fusion, BizHawk) or on real hardware via flash cart. NTSC and PAL both work.

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The rotating battlefield

The thing that made the original *Seek and Destroy* distinctive was a playfield that rotates a full 360° around your vehicle. It only ever scrolls vertically: your tank stays pointing up the screen, you steer by turning, and the whole world swings around you.

The Master System VDP cannot rotate a tilemap. There is no framebuffer and no rotation hardware — the background is a fixed grid of 8×8 tiles, and rebuilding that grid for a new angle would take about sixteen times more VRAM writes than fit in a vertical blank.

So this build rotates the world with **sprites** instead. The tank sits fixed at screen centre. Every object in the world is projected each frame to a rotated screen position through the current heading, of which there are 64 — a full turn passes through 64 distinct orientations, roughly two seconds end to end.

Scenery is drawn rotation-invariant: rocks, tree canopies, fuel drums, bunker domes, radar dishes, silos, sandbag rings and POW pens are all round, so they read correctly at any angle without a single frame of extra art. Only tanks carry rotated frames, and enemy armour is indexed by heading *relative* to yours, so it keeps facing the right way as the world turns. Your own tank needs exactly one frame.

The ground is a deliberately simplified isotropic speckle, hardware-scrolled vertically so that thrust makes it flow beneath the hull. It cannot rotate, but there is no pattern for the eye to lock onto, so it reads as ground rather than as a grid failing to turn.

The game

The nuclear war of 1998 is ten years past and the peace is holdin