Progress Thread - Misc Stuff

I kind of planning a unorthodox submission. It would be a collection of small things that I made throughout the year using only about 8KB of ROM. Two of them would be ideally integrated in tepples menu software.

I'm posting this now to ask would any or all of this list be desirable/allowable for the multicart Category?

• Button Logger tool
• Musical Controller toy - hopefully I can get some vibrato in the sound before the deadline.
• Coredump tool - with the menu software having a controller shortcut to boot directly into it without touching RAM.
• Bagel CHR compression - if I can help integrate this into the menu software.
• An implementation of main(t){for(t=0;;t++)putchar(t*(42&t>>10));} AKA the "Forty-Two Melody"

Other things I wish I had started on had I the time.

• 8-digit 4 function calculator with negation and multiplicative inverse buttons.
• Resurrection of last compo's entry.
• "color a patent art" - if pubby wanted to submit his COLOR A DEER tech demo.

These would have fit well into the 2014 "app" category. Most of the judging criteria is based on gameplay, and the judging will be done mostly by the other entrants. There is no rule saying you can't submit something that isn't a "game".

There is always the anything goes category.

This is the current source for what I submitted to the compo.
I plan to work producing lean versions according to any requirements to the multi-cart. I posted the source here now just in case I become incapable of doing that, and also so that others may see the approach I take with some ideas.

There's like 3 different threads this post belongs to, so I'll post it in this thread instead.


So the 2 things that even need integration, and not just mere inclusion, are coredump and bagel.

Bagel is going to be complicated because of all the adapting with the surrounding tools. Considering that we now have double the space it may not be worthwhile to fix what isn't broke.

Coredump is very self contained but yet it requires (for the integrity of studies of uninitialized NES memory) that nothing touches RAM or Stack Pointer from reset to the special controller read. So the most simple way to meet that requirement is to place coredump in the menu bank and relocate setting the stack pointer to after the special controller read.

Based on the Current Action 53 multicart engine I went ahead and did just that. It's a tight fit but it works. Attached is what I did as a patch file.

As for Button Logger and Musical Controller, I'm thinking of including them in the same ROM with a rewrite for Russian Roulette. If that fails, I'll just compile them to fit in some bank that has a simple counter NMI.

and lastly I don't know what to do with "the Forty-Two Melody", it really only works as some deep Easter egg. So I say just forget about it.

P.S. (congrats to infiniteneslives on the 190000 post of the forum)

Preparing for the failure case first I looked to see which entries operated with a simple nmi: inc counter; rti;. and out of the four candidates (Flappy Jack, The Paths of Bridewell, 240P Test Suite, and Spacey McRacey) 240P seemed to be the most stable. After choosing to fit my stuff in one of the banks of 240P I found that I didn't need to piggy back on an NMI routine after all.

So attached is my toy things built into $F300~$FFEF of bank 01 of 240P Test Suite v0.15.
To run, load bank #01 to $c000 and jump either to $F300 for Musical Controller, or $F304 for Button Logger.

Do you have source code for your things? I've already added one small thing to 240p Test Suite, and it's GPL anyway.

The code is a mess, and the final merge was done manualy with a hex editor. but OK.

The Musical Keyboard appears to depend on uninitialized memory.

Some bug fixes, maybe new bugs accidentally introduced as well.