Nominate an NES program for the soon-to-be-continued Garage Cart series of homebrew multicarts. This could be a game/demo you coded, or one by anyone else (however unlikely you may think it's inclusion to be). Nominate as many titles as you want. Nominate a song if you like.
The first Garage Cart featured Munchie Attack, Hot Seat Harry, and Solar Wars. It was produced only in limited quantities. The next ones will be more readily available.
I'm about to head out on the road for a while, so I won't be able to check back until next week. But once I get some feedback I will see how it compares with my current plans and I will see what I can do to make this a real community periodical type of cart series like it's supposed to be.
If the work is your own and gets used you can receive royalties, or opt to donate your work to the cause. Your work would still be 100% yours, I have no plans to censor, restrict, or otherwise prohibit you from doing what you want with your work (very much unlike traditional publishers).
Garage Cart #1 was a tremendous underground success. Garage Cart #2 is happening, and this is your chance to get involved.
Wow, I'd really love to see my Dragon Skill on it, but it's not released yet. I have still to design the second half of levels, the vast majority of enemies which are only on paper right now, the second half of the soundtrack and an ending.
Normally I should be able to do all of this by the end of 2008, but I can't guarantee anything. I was already saying something similar in 2007 but that was completely wrong.
It's using mapper 3 BTW, but it should probably be possible to make a version of it to use CHRRAM if that's needed.
I bet the NESSnake 2 + Dragon Skill + Sonic combo would sell well, but I don't know if it's legal about Sonic (it probably isn't).
I could fix up Tetramino (NROM, 16 KB PRG, 4 KB CHR) for Garage Cart if you want a popular Soviet mind game in the mix.EDIT (2014-05-23): Not as long as Mr. Pajitnov keeps acting confused as to whether he
really wants it to be a sport.
ChateauLeVania would be really cool to be on a cart, but the game is either going to be 256k or 512k MMC3 + SRAM, which requires an FF3j cart. Though I don't know how legal that is either, because I'd be using some music from Castlevania games as well as some Nintendoizations of the enemies. However, I'm still working on "The Great RA", which is a simple NROM platformer from which everything would be original work. You play as a green alien with buck teeth and you kill enemies. There are levels and bosses. It's pretty basic. This is more reasonable to release on a cart like that.
Bregalad: Dragon Skill looks awesome. It would be really great to feature that on Garage Cart. It always seemed like a big project, let me know when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, heheh. Looks like it's come pretty far in the screenshots (I don't know when those are from though).
tepples: Certainly, Tetramino is one of the games that made me want to make GC#2 (NESnake 2 is the other). Back then I was going to do some sound work on it, I think I restarted on that and never completed anything. I could still do it sometime, if needed.
Celius: Do you need the MMC3 CHR banking? I could maybe come up with a mapper later (and a hack). If the next couple GC releases go right, I'll want to step up to using 1MByte of memory (at the minimum). But not yet. That's the first I'd heard of The Great RA, sounds interesting. Hey, I remember also I was gonna put "The Game" on there, are you still up for that?
Memblers wrote:
tepples: Certainly, Tetramino is one of the games that made me want to make GC#2 (NESnake 2 is the other). Back then I was going to do some sound work on it, I think I restarted on that and never completed anything. I could still do it sometime, if needed.
Cool.
Memblers wrote:
Hey, I remember also I was gonna put "The Game" on there, are you still up for that?
Oh fcuk, you just made us all lose
The Game. Or did you mean some sort of
rap game where you have to press
buttons, buttons, buttons?
Dude! If you want to put The Game on it, that'd be great! It may not run on hardware because it was so sloppily coded though. It kind of wastes ROM. I can do a quick recode in no time if you're up for it. I can make it also use a ton less space.
ChateauLeVania is 512k PRG (Might be able to make 256k), 0k CHR, has Vertical Mirroring, and has 8k SRAM. It's a pretty heavy duty game. If you'd be able to put it on, it would be great. But I'm afraid I'm only nearly done with the visual part of the basic map engine. I still have to code AI and game mechanics, which are 2 huge branches. Oh, I do have the music engine done though. Oh, and also, it's gonna use MMC3's scanline counter for lots of things.
EDIT: Tepples: "The Game" was a really really basic game I made where there's a moving target, and there's a projectile moving across the screen that you move up and down to hit the target. The Bb scale is the theme song. It received the award of last place at the annual minigames competition.
If you can support MMC3 IRQs, you can put my half done game Wraith on there (I just poked around on pdroms.de but I wasn't able to find there. But it's made it's way into GoodNES collections). I can confirm that it works on NES hardware now. What's the timeframe for this? I might try to throw something together.
I'm happy peope are interested in Dragon Skill. The screenshots are new I updated them very recently (plus I figure out that some are glitchy because of .png trancparency, I'll have to fix that). I don't have a single idea when the game will come out, as I'm unsure how the following week will happen for me. I lack a few ideas, especially for bosses, and probably won't release the game until some considerable time, exept if I work pretty hard.
EDIT : It's probably possible to build a cheap scanline counter with several chips from the 74 series based on the A12+capacity trick if this is necessary.
I don't know how far the developpement of ChateauLeVania is, but making a 64 kB game take me aproximately 4 years (3 years and a half for now but it's not released yet), so a 256 kB game should take one guy 16 years in theory.... But of course this logic doesn't really work.
Bregalad wrote:
I don't know how far the developpement of ChateauLeVania is, but making a 64 kB game take me aproximately 4 years (3 years and a half for now but it's not released yet), so a 256 kB game should take one guy 16 years in theory.... But of course this logic doesn't really work.
Yeah, this logic is pretty lame. My sonic game is a 512KB (256KB PRG and 256KB CHR) MMC3 game. Very few of the PRG banks have actual code, most of them are (reserved for) data. Level maps, block maps and object definitions are the ones to blame for the ROM size.
I wish there was a chance for my game to be in a cart like this, but it's size, the fact that ot's an MMC3 game, and the time that I still need to finish it will be in the way! I must confess the game is going through a sort of rewrite process, because the source got too messy and I couldn't even keep up with the variable names anymore, so I couldn't keep going like that. The new setup is much better, I arranged it all in a neat structure of folders, each routine is in it's own file, variables are arranged according to their function... once I get it all working with the new structure, I expect things to move a bit faster.
So, Memblers, if you somehow manage to handle MMC3 games in the future, I'd love to sign up my game for the next cart! =) I only use interrupts to hide the 16 topmost scanlines (where scrolling glitches would be).
Hey Memblers, I'm finishing up the title screen for the recode of The Game, and it takes up about 1k of code now. And it will at max use 32 tiles, most of which are numbers and letters. I don't know if I'm going to stick in powerups, but there is a new score system and you can select the speed and size of the target, as well as the speed for the bullet. It'll probably be 2 or 3k at max. Just thought I'd mention it, so you can stick it on the cart and it will run, probably unlike the original.
EDIT: As for ChateauLeVania, it shouldn't take me 16 years to make. I would feel pretty bad if it took that long. But it's really planning everything out that takes so long. After I finalize the scrolling part, it'll be good since then I can put in objects and program collision detection. After that, I have to make AI and game logic. So basically I have almost everything left. Oh and not to mention some polygon filling I was planning on doing. But I won't release this until it is exactly how I want it to be.
EDIT 2: Here it is! The new and mostly improved version of The Game:
http://www.freewebs.com/the_bott/game.nes
The only thing that's a little weird is the sound, because there is no noise or triangle. But the game all together fits in 8k. Now you can change the target speed, target size, and the bullet speed. And this time, you don't have a game over when you reach 99 target hits. It uses CHR RAM too. You'll want to put this on the cart instead of the old one =).
And also, you can speed up and slow down with left and right.
EDIT 3: Sorry, had to make some quick fixes. It should be all good now.
Celius, if The Game is that small, you might be able to enter it in an upcoming
MiniGame Compo.
Anyways, I nominate:
NesSnake 2
Tetramino
Mystic Pillars
Siamond
Sudoku 2007
As for demos, one of the PolyNESes would be nice, but the third one uses 128k of PRG-ROM and MMC1. I don't know what mapper you're using (super-big-UxROM?), but it would probably take a lot of reworking to get it on GarageCart 2. The Mandelbrot demo, however, is nice and small (32k NROM). You could even rework it to fit into 64 tiles in CHR-RAM and have it run in the game selection menu.
I would do it, but it's not mini enough. If it were like 1 or 2k, maybe I would. Last time I submitted it (the original version) as a 4k game, but I don't see how it was able to go through, since it was more than that I think. Anyways, it got last place, and deserved it.
I don't feel right now like optimizing the game to fit in the minigame compo, so for now I'll just keep it an 8k game. It's more like 6k, and I'm sure if it was necessary, I could shrink it to 4k so it could share a PRG bank with another small game.
My tile editor tells me that Tetramino as of today has 9 KiB of non-empty PRG and 4 KiB of non-empty CHR. The Game could probably fit into the same bank, especially if it were to share some CHR.
Yeah, actually The Game really could share the same PRG bank, since all together it's 6318 bytes. It uses CHR RAM, so the CHR data is included in that byte count. Am I correct in assuming that CHR RAM is supported? And also, does Tetramino use CHR RAM or ROM?
Celius wrote:
Yeah, actually The Game really could share the same PRG bank, since all together it's 6318 bytes. It uses CHR RAM, so the CHR data is included in that byte count. Am I correct in assuming that CHR RAM is supported? And also, does Tetramino use CHR RAM or ROM?
Tetramino uses CHR ROM. But a lot of multicarts such as 100-in-1 Contra Function 16 and
Double Crossing: The Forbidden Four can run games that expect CHR ROM: they copy (or decompress) pattern tables into CHR RAM, put a
trampoline in PRG RAM, and then jump to the game's reset vector. The CHR data and PRG data don't have to sit in the same bank.
I actually have a 212-in-1 multicart with a ton of
compressed (!!!) CHR ROM games, hacked to use CHR RAM. It even has some CNROM and MMC1 games on it, all of which will freeze for a few seconds (without turning the APU off -_-) to reload CHR RAM at points where the originals would have swapped CHR ROM banks. It's a pretty impressive feat of engineering by pirate standards.
It's not in the GoodNES set, although "150-in-1 (Mapper 43)" and "260-in-1" are exactly the same, with differing amounts of unique games and clones. It's worth checking out for the menu alone.
*kicks topic back on track*
I'm using CHR-RAM right now, but I should've mentioned before that if anyone is using CHR-ROM, it's no problem to stick to it. I'll be compressing any/all tiles as possible, probably with simple RLE. Bankswitching is fine, but mid-frame (instant) CHR paging won't be doable on GC#2 (GC#1 actually did have 16kB of CHR-RAM, used on the titlescreen, but needlessly).
I can make an IRQ counter, but I'll have to use up the parts I have first. So it'll be later. I'm sure I can do it with one chip (maybe not exactly like MMC3). With all these interesting projects associated with it, I can make it happen eventually.
I remember Wraith, that was cool.
I can't find Wraith anywhere, including the GoodNES ROM collection. Does anyone have a link?
So wil this be a very exclusive release or more something everyone can buy? (kinda like glider ect now) How wil you sell it ect?
Jeroen wrote:
So wil this be a very exclusive release or more something everyone can buy? (kinda like glider ect now) How wil you sell it ect?
It will be a lot better available, because I'll be using parts that I'll be able to source when I need more. That was the problem with the first Garage Cart, one of the main parts is a little obscure.
To sell it, I'll be building them myself at home (not in a garage anymore, but in my basement, since I live in a new place) and selling them directly to anyone. But I still have people on a waiting list from years ago (not taking new entries currently), mostly people who bought the first one, and they'll all be getting first crack at the low serial-numbered ones.
I also have had an offer from a game store chain to carry it, I guess once ordering begins I'll see if I'm in any position to afford a quantity discount. More than likely I'll be the only source, shipping worldwide.
Also you can be sure that any profits I get from it are going back into my NESdev savings account.
Oh, Memblers. Sorry for all the last minute uploads, but here is the final version of The Game:
http://www.freewebs.com/the_bott/game.nes
I included a copyright and name at the bottom of the title screen. I also dithered the white blocks that made up the title, just as a last-minute touch up. Please put THAT version on the cart, if you put it on =).
EDIT: Any idea on what the cost will be for one of these?
CartCollector wrote:
I can't find Wraith anywhere, including the GoodNES ROM collection. Does anyone have a link?
PDRoms seems to have taken down all their pages related to the competition it was entered in. I don't have anywhere to host it, perhaps we could it get on the main nesdev site?
Tom wrote:
CartCollector wrote:
I can't find Wraith anywhere, including the GoodNES ROM collection. Does anyone have a link?
PDRoms seems to have taken down all their pages related to the competition it was entered in. I don't have anywhere to host it, perhaps we could it get on the main nesdev site?
You could email it at (my username)@gmail.com
I uploaded it here for now:
http://nesdev.com/incoming/
Wraith is a really neat game, but it has some unforgiving and strange quirks -- not to mention no music.
It's not very fun how the ship starts of in the middle of the screen and the blink/invincible time isn't very long. The ship is also pretty sluggish. Aside from those and there not being any music, it's pretty nice. Also, the title logo could use a revamp.
Not at all disrespecting your game, but just wondering what you all think?
I agree about the starting out in the middle part. I usually live near the bottom of the screen on any game like this.
It is a cool game, it has a nice finished feel to it, complete with levels, little animations and stuff. The sound effects work, but without music there's a kind of an eerie silence. I would offer to do a soundtrack for it (heh, I already have songs I wrote for a non-existent space shooter), it would change the atmosphere of the game in a huge way and probably make it really weird.
Then make music out of the same kind of instruments used for sound effects. It worked for Hip Tanaka, composer of the Metroid soundtrack.
my 2 main criticisms with the game are that the collision detection seems very unforgiving (collision field feels much larger than the obstacles / bullets) and yeah the ship could stand to move a bit faster.
What are the memory limitations for the games to be included on the cart?
Drag wrote:
What are the memory limitations for the games to be included on the cart?
With the parts I have to use now, I'd say a bit less than 256kB because I'll need room for the intro and some other little stuff. If it's a CHR-ROM design, I can free up some space with compression. Did you have something in mind?
GC#2 is 128kB in total and I'm not sure how much room is left (not totalled yet - but very little, I'm thinking), GC#3 should be 256kB.
I started on an nrom game in an attempt to make a game that was simple-ish, for the sake of finally finishing a game without wanting to add tons and tons of stuff, overwhelming myself like I usually do.
I was thinking if the GC could accept an NROM game, like if it were a multicart or something, I could propose my game, if I finished it up in time.
Drag wrote:
I started on an nrom game in an attempt to make a game that was simple-ish, for the sake of finally finishing a game without wanting to add tons and tons of stuff, overwhelming myself like I usually do.
I was thinking if the GC could accept an NROM game, like if it were a multicart or something, I could propose my game, if I finished it up in time.
Certainly! It is a multicart, essentially. A periodical one, like a magazine without text (yet). If I can put Hot Seat Harry (tho it is my own) in GC#1, it goes to show that I'll put probably anything on there. Ideally, the series would eventually have every NES program finished since Mouser.
If I can't fit it into GC#2, it might have to wait until #3.
And yeah it definitely is fun to finish your first game. After I started I don't even know how many projects and ideas, Hot Seat Harry was the first one I finished (can only do so much with 1kB).
Will this cart support single screen mirroring? I have a
Rodent's Revenge clone that uses the MMC1, but is essentially NROM. It's mostly finished except for background attribute updates, a scoring system, and sound fx.
Nope, this is hardwired mirroring. I may have to do some minor hacks to non-scrolling games. You definitely need single-screen?
Assuming you have 2 free latched bits, it wouldn't be hard to use the first latch to select between : 1-vertical mirrroing and 2-the second latch passes diretly to CIRAM A10.
You can do this with a single 74HC00 quad NAND chip.
By the way, I don't think I have mentionned this but Dragon Skill is using vertical mirroring (hardwired) and 32kb PRG, 32kb CHR, and is not going to be released in 2008 like I originally wanted to (I originally wanted it in 2007 actually....). I just tought I'd mention that.
I only used single screen mirroring in order to scroll 8-ways and have the statusbar on the second name table.
I remember reading a thread about simulating single screen mirroring with either H or V mirroring, (not sure, can't find it at the moment) so I can try and modify it to use one of those.
So what type is the mirroring going to be hardwired to?
Kirby's Adventure simulates single-screen mirroring with horizontal mirroring by writing all nametable updates to both nametables at once unless they overlap the status bar.
never-obsolete wrote:
So what type is the mirroring going to be hardwired to?
It's looking like it will be horizontal mirroring. Of the definitely confirmed games, only one is set to V - and it doesn't scroll.
If you decide to put The Game on Garage Cart, remember that I used vertical mirroring and the title screen scrolls on vertically. This can be changed easily, I think.
EDIT: Okay, I lied. It scrolls on vertically because it uses Horizontal Mirroring. Just got confused there for a second =).
Sorry, but if you use horizontal mirroring, you'd have to use heavy hacks to get Dragon Skill running with decent graphics. Sorry but I tought I'd mention that, my scrolling engine heavily relies on vertical mirroring, as well as various effects done on title screen and between levels.
The game isn't going to be released very soon (if I work hard maybe something like april 2009 would be possible) so maybe it would be for Garage Cart III anyways ?
I figured V mirroring was more common, I changed the Munchie Attack title screen scroll for the first one because the first cart used V mirroring.
There will be a Garage Cart #3 at any rate, so alternating mirroring will make sense.
quick question for memblers:
Will future garage carts have the same or a more flexible mapper? It would be cool to see this AxROM game on some future version of the cart but it doesn't fit the UNROM mold at all.
If anyone is curious about the future mappers, definitely it will be something different, it just depends on what's best at the time. I could go to 4-screen VRAM to make mirroring a non-issue. Perhaps even the nametables could be banked, that would have the advantage of 1-screen mode.
I'm accepting new programs and taking suggestions on what to pick up..
I moved to a bigger ROM and simpler mapper (32kB banks). This also means I have more ROM space that's free, so I'm hoping some of you have some demos or something you'd like to see on the cartridge. Or even another game. There will be 100kB - 200kB free, lots of space. If I don't fill it all soon I'll be burning it blank because I need to get this cart done.
Also I wonder if anyone has any decent text compression for NES that's already developed. And better compression for CHR besides RLE.
Better CHR packing? There's always that Codemasters codec we discussed a few weeks ago.
Memblers wrote:
And better compression for CHR besides RLE.
My scheme ended up compressing almost as well as the Codemasters codec, always loosing by a few bytes, but the decompression code was so complex and bloated that I kinda gave up on it.
The cool thing about the Codemasters codec is that not only it already compresses very well, but we were even able to think of a few ways to improve it. I'm too busy with my current project though, and after spending so much time cracking that compression scheme I don't feel like loking at it again so soon.
Looking through some old threads the other night I found the LZSS tokumaru posted. Haven't tested it yet, but I'm sure it will work out really well.
Mostly though I want to see if there were any more games or demos anyone wanted to get into the cart.
I would have liked to put something on it but for now I have been focusing on my MM9 proof of concept and this cannot be put on the garage cart for legal reason.
Hopefully I will have something original for the next garage cart. I should have gained enough experience (and suffered enough..) after that MM9 project.
Memblers wrote:
Mostly though I want to see if there were any more games or demos anyone wanted to get into the cart.
What's the exact deadline? My raycaster is almost working. The walls are correctly detected and the texturing seems to be working fine. I have to adjust some coloring stuff, write the whole thing to the name tables (I'm currently seeing the frame buffer on FCEUXD's hex editor!) and add movement.
It shouldn't take long to implement those things... I'm not asking of you to wait for my demo though. I just thought that it could be an interesting addition to the cart and I was wondering how much time we have until production. If I can't make it, so be it.
EDIT: Just got the display working. Good news: chances for decent gameplay are high, because rendering a complete view takes 4 frames (meaning it runs at 15 fps). After some optimization it should still be pretty smooth once the game logic is added. Of course, this is all without objects, just walls.
Production will be next year for sure, so there's a couple months at the very least. There's still some things to work out, but I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
It would be great to have a raycasting demo on there. It would also be cool if I could get a beta or placeholder ROM to know how much memory it'll use.
If you can make an intro out of your raycaster, and a whole bunch of people make other intros, try making a
demo out of the intros.
Memblers wrote:
Production will be next year for sure, so there's a couple months at the very least. There's still some things to work out, but I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Oh, that's good! I should have a clean walkable room much sooner than that.
Quote:
It would be great to have a raycasting demo on there.
Even if it's just a room where people can walk around (much like "Stuck in Castle Nessenstein", but with better rendered walls that are textured)?
Quote:
It would also be cool if I could get a beta or placeholder ROM to know how much memory it'll use.
A single level should fit in 32KB just fine. The data tables are not so big (they are slightly over 2KB, so I don't need a bank just for them or anything). It uses CHR-RAM, so you don't have to worry about packing the CHR separately yourself.
I will upload something soon and make a thread for it. It's just that the current program is missing initializations and other important things because I wanted to see the results soon, so it needs a good deal of cleaning up.
tepples wrote:
If you can make an intro out of your raycaster, and a whole bunch of people make other intros, try making a
demo out of the intros.
I must be slow today, 'cause you lost me again! O_o
tokumaru: Have you ever watched
High Hopes?
tepples wrote:
tokumaru: Have you ever watched
High Hopes?
Yup. I'm more awake today, and I can make more sense out of your sentence now.
Are you suggesting we gather a bunch of effects coded by different people and put them one after the other in a way that looks interesting and make that a non-interactive demo?
IMO, a non-interactive raycaster is very boring, and not as impressive, since a non-interactive video could probably fake a better looking raycaster.
tokumaru wrote:
Are you suggesting we gather a bunch of effects coded by different people and put them one after the other in a way that looks interesting and make that a non-interactive demo?
It could be organized like a typical demo, or it could be organized as a teaser trailer for coming attractions. Either way, letting the player take control of the demo at times would be a nice easter egg.
tokumaru wrote:
Quote:
It would be great to have a raycasting demo on there.
Even if it's just a room where people can walk around (much like "Stuck in Castle Nessenstein", but with better rendered walls that are textured)?
Yep, it can be as minimal as possible and it'd still be cool.
Quote:
A single level should fit in 32KB just fine. The data tables are not so big (they are slightly over 2KB, so I don't need a bank just for them or anything). It uses CHR-RAM, so you don't have to worry about packing the CHR separately yourself.
I will set aside 32kB for it, then.
tepples wrote:
If you can make an intro out of your raycaster, and a whole bunch of people make other intros, try making a
demo out of the intros.
What would be funny is if the raycaster itself was part of the menu for the other stuff. Walk into a room, it'd say the name of the game/demo on the status bar, and run it when you walked through a door. It should be optional though, since some people will get "wolfenstein syndrome". But it'd be like walking around inside your NES. Kind of.