Work-thread of a Volume of Action 53 with 53 Games

About 7 years ago the idea of making a better Action 52 was formed. During that time we have streamlined a process for producing original content, the Nesdev Compo. That process is soon going to leave the initial idea far behind in it's dust. So I am going to help assemble the master version of Action 53.

What I propose is that we continue normally with producing Volume 4 and in parallel I'll work on assembling the master 16mbit cartridge. We are over 53 games already so it very possible that volume 4 will contain games and things not found in this proposed master version. My target release date will be Thanksgiving 2020 and there's a lot to be done. While I'm not as busy as tepples I too need to spend time to keep food on my plate and a roof over my head.

I recently got tepples's workfiles for the previous volumes, and I'll be working from that. I'll still have to search the fourm threads and web links to find improved versions. Rom size is a big concern, so analyzing that is what I'm working on first.

I will write later on what I think would be good criteria for inclusion.

Edit 1: Removed the dot from the topic name.
Edit 2: Renamed thread ("master" left a bad taste in my mouth)

I've yet to produce the final version of MiedoW (my entry for the 2017 edition), but I can provide completed, 100% enhanced versions of all the games I've produced for Action 53:

- Sgt. Helmet's Training Day (NROM256)
- Sir Ababol (NROM256)
- Wo Xiang Niao Niao (NROM256)
- Cheril the Goddess (UNROM)
- Lala the Magical (UNROM)
- Zombie Calavera Prologue (NROM256)

Let me know what would be best for you and I'll post them in the way you prefer.

Sgt Helmet's Training Day and Sir Ababol were Mojontwins' first two NES games, so the version available in Action 53 vol.2 is pretty ancient. Both games have been much improved ever since (i.e. rewriten from scratch!).

Publicly posting links or attachments in this thread is fine, but If it's private you can PM me on this fourm, email me at jroatch@gmail.com, or DM me in twitter at @_jroatch. I went ahead and fetched what I could find from the Mojon Twins website.

Also note that i'm considering expanding the possible game selections to more then just what appeared in the nesdev compos.

This may require careful choices of the category count and names for the tabs at top, or a UI revamp to allow more categories. The original plan to have three categories with about 16-20 activies each or four with 10-15 each might be compromised by inclusion of award icons.

If I'm going for more then 53 games I would probably have some sort of key combo unlock, or multiple layers of menus, so that at first it'll appear to only have 53 games. More likely then not the ROM size requirement will limit me first.

I feel like DABG (extended into the four-player Quadruple Action Blaster Guys) and Sliding Blaster would be definite choices for inclusion, but probably not Forehead Block Guy, as it's obsoleted by DABG. Later I'm going to work on fixing up QABG because I think there's a memory corruption bug somewhere in there that I need to fix, but once that's out of the way you've got a four-player game for the cart.

I did keep Nova the Squirrel mapper 28 compatible for this purpose, but it's probably too big (~160KB) and requires extra RAM. That might be best as its own release.

Yeah the extra RAM is a real blocker.

I think it'll be alright if I assume that the github repositories is where the most up to date versions of games are.


Is there still interest in this?

If so I have a thought of a easy to implement mechanism. A key sequence (of no less then 8 buttons) would be inputted at the a53 menu, which then passes the unlock setting to the game as a particular byte via CPU register Y and RAM location $00ff [1]. Of course it's temporary and would have to be inputted every reset.

[1]: tepples, I'm aware of the memory clear loop. It would simply be moved downward by one byte.

Videogame Rating Council (VRC) in the Sega Genesis era didn't rate content unlockable only by keypresses or by hacking; hence ABACABB and DULLARD codes in Mortal Kombat. ESRB does; hence the Hot Coffee scandal in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Though we don't plan on seeking a rating by ESRB, I do recognize that the practice of ESRB is the industry's common practice.

Would it be too much trouble to offer Action 53 and Action 53 (Unrated) SKUs?

i'd say the intention would be to create a "family friendly" setting for parents who want to share the experience with their kids, without feeling they might need to talk seriously about what is experienced. The hairy bit is coming up with a standard for what is called family friendly, in which case modeling it after some industry standard might be the simplest option. The method for how we present/lock content doesn't really need to comply with any standard, though.

I might have fantasized about doing that at one time, but yeah, we don't need to subject ourselves to more regulation.


Yes, I feel it would be too much hassle, and IMO needlessly brings too much attention to a issue that is in reality only about a 100 byte difference.

Attached is a build with only the game list and descriptions. I wanted to get good thumbnails generated by now but I'm having difficulty figuring what the color selection algorithm would be, so I've put placeholder thumbnails and will revisit that on another day.

I did say that I would "write later criteria for inclusion" so here I go.
I have so far selected a list of 50 games, that will change over time as new things, improvements, issues, and permissions comes up.
Guidelines I'll be attempting to follow, in order of importance:

• Must be Legal to include, and proper permissions must be given for everything. A TODO item I have is to confirm that those permissions exist or need to be sought.
• Must fit. Source code availability would be preferred so that game code can be relocated and improved.
• Be well made.
• References or likeness to some point about NES bootleg. The fact we are having a multicart is a homage to the various xx-in-1 multicarts, and that the title of "Action 53" specifically calls out a specific infamous one. The limit of "53 games" doesn't necessarily mean we are limited to 53 things.
• Uniqueness between games. One aspect of the xx-in-1 multicarts we will not be doing is the repeated re-skinning of a single game to pad out the game numbers.
• Games should be complete and not just demos of full releases outside of this multicart. I found this to be a good heuristic to fulfill the "Must fit" guideline.

I guess my next responsibilities on this are

1. Get the ROM builder up on GitHub: Done
2. Allow all files related to one collection or set of related collections (such as half-volumes for PowerPak testing) to be kept in one folder, so that folder can be safely .gitignore'd: Done
3. Reduce the space between tab titles from 16 pixels to 8 pixels by making a special "between tabs" image similar to how Chrome crosses the tab titles diagonally (or at least did before the forthcoming Material Design update squared them off like in Edge): Done
4. A remix compo entry collecting all my own ROMs so far so that they can share a bank (and share library code, fonts, etc. as applicable)

So the conversation at "Why aren't more homebrew games sold as ROM only?" got me thinking a bit about how we should go about the release of this. The cartridge price is going to be $53 USD to make it $1 for every game on it (can't find the fourm thread ATM). At that price there's going to be a profit. The question is where should those profits should go (not ever going to be 100% into my pockets). I guess I could easily just direct profits to the nesdev compo fund but this isn't really part of the compo series, or does that even mater?

The other thoughts more in line with the original linked thread topic. I think it might be best both publicity wise, and for the option of donating, to release on itch.io for the digital release.

@tepples, I think allpads.nes would be a great thing to include. Would there be anything particular about the INL hardware that interferes with the controller probing? if not then again I think allpads.nes would be a great thing to include even in volume 4.

The exit patching would interfere with the "Reset to reprobe" functionality. Pressing a button to reprobe is not reliable if there's no button to press other than the button to start the test for that controller, such as the Zapper and Arkanoid Controller that have only one button. But yes, I agree that it'd be good to include, provided that we can notify the user that Reset acts differently in this program from the rest of the collection.

It's OK if I pull changes from your fork, correct?

If I made the menu restore RAM from the fourth gfx bank for certain titles, and maybe auto boot into that title when a magic string is present, would that help?


Always.

It's not a question of support in the ROM builder, as the ROM builder already has a command to disable exit patching for a particular ROM, which Waddles uses. The question is whether by pressing Reset, the user meant reprobe or exit.

Oops Right, that was the exact point I brought up when we were discussing about disabling exit patching for Waddles.
All options I can think of to resolve that overloaded button conflict are all suboptimal

• Disable exit patching, but at the risk of being stuck in allpads until a (longish?) power cycle.
• Reseting at the first probe screen exits to action53, but that makes low level results unavailable.
• Reseting at low level results exits to action53, but that would practically require pressing reset 3 times to exit. Might as well power cycle at this point.
• Resetting at any time exits to action53, and (as you say) disables all attempts at retrying and getting to low level results.

I like the second option the best, but I would still like to try saving the low level results function. Mabye I could have another menu entry that boots into low level results.

The other reason to reset in allpads, other than to get to the low-level screen, is to provide for hot-swapping controllers, even if the menu doesn't allow selecting an activity using a particular set of controllers. It currently supports only an NES or Super NES controller or Super NES Mouse in port 1 or a Zapper in port 2. Hot-swapping controllers isn't that reliable on the NES, often causing the CPU to stop, and pressing the Reset button breaks it out of stop and begins probing the newly connected controllers.

The other option is to include a subset of the functionality of allpads and Holy Mapperel in the menu itself, as I sketched in another POST. A flow that's a bit less James Brown and a bit more Mega Man X might help in other ways, as a way of distancing ourselves from the quite Bogas way the soundtrack of Action 52 was put together.

Now that you mention it, I remember you telling and showing me this at NovaCon 2018. Which was odd to me as my whole previous experience with hot-swapping controllers have only been that games enter their paused state like the Start button was pressed as the controller port is halfway in. which when I finally tested that my waterfall plot I saw that all buttons were registering as pressed.[/quote]

When I return from my vacation I see if I can try some more tests to maybe see what may be happening.


Why distance ourselves? I thought references was the whole point.

Forgive me for being blunt here, but if it has something to do with unprovoked copyright compliance, then as what point have we complied enough? I know I said "keep it legal" but in my mind fully following the thought of not doing anything that might be infringing will cause me tear down everything and do nothing thereafter. For the simple facts are; all creative work is derivative, and nothing is new under the sun.


Nevertheless I'll read through the allpads code to see if such a waiting intro will be necessary, from what I understand now, it very well might.

What happened since the first volume of Action 53 was the "Blurred Lines" case (Gaye v. Thicke), which lowers the bar for stylistic similarity. I imagine that the entire collection is going to be promoted to a much larger audience than the individual volumes were, and some of them are likely to have friends that work in the music industry. How much would it cost to hire a lawyer to review the final version so that INL, the publisher, doesn't get bankrupted by statutory damages, attorney's fees, and court costs?

Ok, I'll try to mix up the composition of the intro screen music tonight/tomorrow someday. I hope it'll be a refreshing take of the idea, and that it would ease up your concerns a little bit.

As for the risk of liabilities, Maybe it's a bit unfair to always reflect these hypotheticals onto INL. Perhaps I should just form a LLC so that I can say in these situations "I understand the risk, and I will deal with it when the threat comes". (I might soon form a LLC for other reasons in my life, but we'll see)
Right now the strategy will be to comply with directed action like polite requests and not so polite C&D letters, and to avoid obvious common pitfalls of copyright infringement like ripping sprites/sfx in Nintendo licensed games. For the not so obvious stuff like this case of a NES imitation of a 2 second sampleed loop of a sample of a recording of music, I guess we'll just add one more layer of artistic deriving. Maybe after enough attempts it could pass as original.


"If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it."

The non joke answer is I don't know, and I don't know if that will help or not. Maybe I should phone EFF or someone like them to know for sure.

For my own convenience, and for the possibility for comments, I'm posting my TODO list as it is today in this post.
Edit: TODO list moved to github
Edit 2: moved again

WRT copyright and it not being fair to ask INL to bear all of it:

Ask submitters to agree to a statement that they own the rights to whatever materials they are submitting, and assume all liability for any consequences of that not being true.

Is this a challenge?

I agree with putting masocore stuff like I Wanna Flip the Sky later on the list.

By "horizontal rule of spaces in game list", you mean a blank line that the cursor skips, correct? What would that be used for?

I'll also need to resurrect a53extract.py before the final release in order to maintain the interpretation of ROMs in the collection as an "aggregate" of files in a file system.

I'm not really seeing the appeal of a Master Version.

It seems to me that if it is a planned thing, it would result in a decrease in demand for earlier versions ("Why should I pick up A53v4 or A53v5 when I can wait until A53mv comes out and get all the good games?")

If it's intended to be something along the lines of a "Greatest Hits" album, waiting until the ratio of included games vs excluded games is a bit more exclusive might be better? Assuming an average of 20 titles per release and five volumes released prior to the Master Version, 53 titles is still over half of the library, not very exclusive.

Although our situation a little unique (an anthology of releases from anthologies?), looking into the criticisms and successes of Greatest Hits albums in the music industry may be beneficial:

• What's the typical inclusion to exclusion ratio at the time of release of a band or musician's first commercially or critically successful Greatest Hits release?
• What's the fan response been to the inclusion of exclusive tracks on a GH release?

So, I'm wondering:

• What motivation would a user have to purchase intermediary or back versions when they know this "master version" is in the near future?
• What motivation would a user who already has previous versions have to purchase the Master Version? (Will there be exclusives to it? If so, how would inclusion of said exclusives be determined?)
• What's going to happen with the NESdev competition entries from the current year of Master Version release? Will they be on A53v6 (and not included on the Master Version). Will some of them also be included on the Master Version? Will the Master Version be released in direct competition to that year's competition anthology release?
• What's the plan for future NesDev competitions after the release of the Master Version? Do future versions of Action 53 continue to be released?

And to respond to the previous question regarding profit. I say it should all go back into the loosely labeled competition fund of "community approved projects". It'd be weird to start having funds generated by A53 sales suddenly be used for other purposes when, for years, all A53 sales have gone toward the same fund.

Sorry for the wall of text.

It's fine if this doesn't appeal to you, and It's true that this may impinge a bit on the market share. If I'm in the wrong for improperly using the brand of "action53" please tell me.
I'm doing this because the goal product (the combined volume) was what my motivation on participating from the start, and for various reasons I feel like this is a "now or never" opportunity.

The lack of appeal I heard is the reason why I kind of wanted to distance this a bit from the compo cycle (which is a great thing that's going on), and be neither a strict superset nor fully a subset of the numbered volumes. While I do feel like the current ratio of 1:1 for included games vs excluded games is good mix, I am still trying to pull from other sources. Maybe that'll make this a better exclusive mix? Already in my draft list, many notable things are missing like most of the compo winners from volume 3. Additionally most of volume 1 is included, which would be good for those who haven't been able to get their hands on that yet.

With the exception of volume 1, which is out of print, all the back versions combined have at least twice as many titles, and all the cool box art and posters that come with those releases.
What I've thought of So far; Getting most of volume 1, Having a set of tools that deal with the NES hardware all on a single cart, and getting a few games that didn't make it due to lack of effort or being outside the compo cycle.
At the risk of sounding selfish, I'll be in charge of curtailing this collection. I'll consider any and all suggestions, and adjust my judgments when right to do so.
My goal will be to I'll get everything prepared around January 2020 so that physical copies can actually be ordered at November 22. So it's likely that all titles from that 2019 compo would be completely absent from this.
Yes of course, I imagine the competitions will continue as they are now. Please don't stop because of me. I also imagine Action 53 will continue to be the brand for those cartridges.

Correct. for aesthetics like to separate the single about entry from the end of the games list. Low priority.


Suggestions for gathering copyright statements, and implementing technical mechanisms for unpacking compilation are noted.

I've been spelling it "Action 53" outside the logo typography.


Same here. It's why I made a multicart engine in the first place.


I'm not so sure we'll keep that name. Much depends on what reviewers think of it, particularly those who have already reviewed Action 52. It also depends on what we want to call the second master version if we're still going at it in 2023.

Updating the list of things that look applicable and interesting to me:

1. Document byte format of key block at $FF00 and all other data structures written by the builder (Done)
2. Remake a53extract.py based on this documentation, and test it by extracting all A53vol3
3. Figure out what I was trying to do with "new A53 trampoline"
4. Integrate autosubmulti.py
5. A remix compo entry collecting all my own entries

Today I hit a big milestone which is "generating color screenshots", expect I did all 82 of them by hand in GIMP.
It took awhile but I'm very pleased with the results, an I hope you all are as well.

Attached is today's build is demonstrating all those screenshots, with descriptions as I currently have them at, in semi-random order.
Also behind the scenes is much data compression for all this menu stuff.

I've also posted the source for the contents of this menu demonstration in case there's improvements or corrections for typos.

The next task I need to tackle is the Award Icons. After that (and some bug fixing) I think the Action 53 Menu will be ready for Volume 4.

Edit: updated link

Thwaite
Might want to bump that blue crosshair to the left a pixel so it shows up entirely in one 8x8 area.

RHDE: Furniture Fight
I can tell player 1 won that round, as player 1's grass is greener. The full black pixels spaced 8 pixels apart on player 2 are a bit distracting though.

Concentration Room
It looks like one palette is brown and blue, and the other is brown and red. Could the turned-over cards be manipulated to make best use of those palettes? Also the card borders are a bit fuzzy and not the same across cards for some reason.

Pogo Cats
Not a lot of contrast here. I think my screenshot from the first volume made the cars slightly darker so that the viewer could see what's going on in the game.

Forehead Block Guy
Sort of hard to tell what's going on here too. Like Pogo Cats, it might benefit from some sharpening.

I think I fixed up those screenshot a bit from your critique. Thanks.


After some investigation about adding Award Icons.
The suggestion from NovaSquirrel to simply just use the unused palette won't work, as bits of black dots from previous lines will show up.

It could work if the light gray color was the background color instead, and drawing the text in 1 bits on top of 0 (instead of 0 on top of 1). Would a light gray color in the overscan area be too much of a distraction? Look at "Musical Controller" from Volume 3 as it uses the same trick.

The alternative would be to draw the icons in black. Would this be better or worse then light gray in overscan?

Through September and October progress was made with getting some of the large data sets compacted down.
I apologize for disappearing through November, I'm horrible with communication. My day job is kicking my butt due to all the end of year sale events, and it doesn't help that there's a general increase of drama due to things like weather, US elections, and said sale events. It's a dreadfully ironic thing that people are at their most thanklessness during Thanksgiving.

So I've had some thought about where I'm going with Action 53.
First I'm definitely moving up the planed release date to April 1st 2020. In general I think people will be more optimistic and happy at this time of the year.
Because of the timing of the compo cycle, it would make sense to merge this idea (53 games with tech tools) with the idea of being the 5th nesdev compo volume.
As a consequence I'm not going to fret to much more over ROM size (maybe even just increase ROM capacity if things are a bit tight) or optimal structure and instead focus on getting features in. There was a kind of secret plan of mine to get some sort of super animated demoscene level intro made up, but I have no time for that.
I also hope that I can get a entry in for the 2018 compo. We'll see how that goes.

Again I'm horrible with communication and I feel might need guidance and help throughout 2019 in getting things together.

I've also quit Twitter and only keeping it around to talk to some people about this project.

Wow, I've let time slip by me at an unacceptable rate lately. I really have nothing much to show.
My attempt at a compo entry failed to meet it's deadline, then I got distracted with programing traditional C programs.

Last month I wanted to get back on track by compiling a focused list of games, so that I can gather data about where each of the music routines are. This is the first step to my most wanted feature of Action 53, the Music Player. Assuming a sort of director role was also due to this planed feature. That got delayed as I had to pack and move my room.

While compiling that list I had a discussion with M_Tee and it became apparent that getting to 53 games is easier (and less duplicative) by combining the last two compos rather to have to search and contact many authors for extra permission of older games. I had already requested 4MByte roms from Infiniteneslives for what was going the combination of 2018 compo and some 30 games, so maybe the larger ROMs might be available to use for a combined 2017 compo, 2018 compo, and a handful of classics.

In consideration of the possible time line being moved up even further, and me being generally unable to put in the hours, I'm going to seriously scale back my goal here.

My main tasks *in order* are:
- Implement Music Player. (if I only make this by release, I would be satisfied)
- Make a CHR editor for the self flashable multipule chr bank board of Action 53.
- Only after those two, maybe help improve some of the rerun games.

Things that I will stop thinking about doing, due to there being no time:
- A53 Menu Rewrite. (I'll instead continue to work from the current codebase)
- My 2018 compo entry. (Chase/Mega Mountain combination rewrite with extra levels)
- About Pages, Award icons, export game signal, and other new features in the A53 Menu. (part of the Menu Rewrite)
- Russian Roulette A53 port. (I already apologized about it in the Volume 3 Easter Egg)
- Solar Wars with combined Nametable and CHR compression and reworked aiming.