pvsneslib VS SGDK

There's an open-source SDK: https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib

There is. But it doesn't get much traction for some reason. Maybe because working with SNES remains hard, even with a modern toolchain, and you'll need to deal with assembly a lot of times to get decent performance, much more than with Genesis.

I 100% recommend starting with C and PVSNESlib (https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib) as suggested by others redditors.

SNES coding is hard as fuck and probably the worst way to learn programming if you start from scratch. It might be a little less painful with a C library like PVSneslib (https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib), but you'll eventually have to learn 6502 assembly and read tons of documentation to harness SNES programming.

PVSNESLib for example provides a toolchain (some of it indeed being pre-written assembly "headers") that does in my experience allow for the development of fully-featured SNES games pretty much entirely in C.

I'm working on a game for Amiga (another 68k-based platform) and settled on ZX0 to decompress assets on the fly: https://github.com/einar-saukas/ZX0

I was originally using LZ4, but I switched to ZX0 after learning that it can do in-place decompression, which means I don't have to allocate separate memory for the compressed data. I'm very happy with the compression ratio, and decompression of large assets (~48kb) only takes a few frames on a 7MHz 68000.

Also of note is LZ4W, included in Sega Genesis Dev Kit (and discussed in the comments section of OP's article), a variant of LZ4 that only uses word-aligned operations. That makes it much faster on the 68000, which can struggle to efficiently handle 8-bit data. More info here: https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/blob/master/bin/lz4w.txt

It might have needed two at one point. I see both mentioned in a few places, but the wiki appears to say you need the full path. https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/wiki/SGDK-Usage

P.S. The plan down the line is to at some point add sprites to it and port it to the Sega Genesis using SGDK so it would no longer be a text adventure game. However for now I'm having fun practicing my C skills with this and hopefully will have a cool project for my portfolio.

Examples: - Someone I know created machine-optimized library in c and asm to accelerate compression, erasure coding, and encryption on Intel Xeon CPUs (https://github.com/intel/isa-l) which runs those ops WAY faster than the standard linux libraries. - My friend is making a retro SEGA genesis game using a C and asm dev kit (https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK)

If you are specifically looking into the Genesis you should look into SGDK, the sega development toolkit https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK.