That's awesome, very nice work.
So now there is nothing preventing somebody from making a batch of NES cart kits: PCB, lockout chip clone, misc ICs, and a plastic shell. There should no longer be a need to destroy classic hardware in order to make homebrew carts. This is a good thing.
The only thing stopping someone is money, it will take $5-7k just to make the injection mold for the nes cart. After you pay that it would only be ~$0.30-0.50 per cart but you would have to order at least 2000 at a time. Assuming you can find 2000 people that would pay $3-4 just for the plastic case it would be totally possible...
Additionally, a single error in the case design would be disastrous, wasting a lot of money AND plastic. Even if there would be some demand, I don't think more than ~50 persons in the world will be ready to buy a NES game for a medium price (~$20-$30) if they can just download it. I don't think it'd be fair to just keep any homebrew game secrete and sell it without offering the possibility to download it. I'd prefer having 500 persons playing my game without paying than 25 persons playing it with paying, personally.
Now even if I'll be selling my games, I could just buy any bad game regardless of the board it's using and replace it with my own PCB that will always be the good one.
The only remaining problem is that the source of bad games is fearly limited (while still a lot higher that a source of bad/common games with the board you want inside) and that I won't know what to do with all those stand-alone boards containing bad games.
There have been such carts made for the Atari systems and the Sega Genesis, and cart only homebrew games have sold well for such systems. The games have to be good, and the quality of the custom cart also has to be good. Then fans and collectors buy them up.
I think we first have to make good games before even considering to make good custom carts
Since the NES has had a lot more sucess than Atari, theorically it's homebrew scene has chance to get a lot more sucess too.
What about Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree/Camerica unlicenced cartridges ? Did they produce more than 2000 of each to rentabilize plastic case manufacturing ?
NB : It would also be possible to grave cases in sone... but I don't think that would be very benefic in cost efficiencly.
The Atari homebrew plastics are much more simple, mold would only be ~$2-3k. Size of the piece and how many large flat surfaces are main factors in injection molding price.
Companies like Colors Dreams would have made far more than 2000 of their games, cutting the price way down. They were also selling their games for retail prices, something I doubt any NES homebrew so far would be able to do. So If you want new plastics, write an awesome game first
Bregalad wrote:
I don't think it'd be fair to just keep any homebrew game secrete and sell it without offering the possibility to download it. I'd prefer having 500 persons playing my game without paying than 25 persons playing it with paying, personally.
You could use the
Baen Books model and put older games online for free download. Or you could put 10-minute demos of your current games online for free download.
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and that I won't know what to do with all those stand-alone boards containing bad games.
Could you
recycle them?
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Size of the piece and how many large flat surfaces are main factors in injection molding price.
A much simpler shape than the NES' official cartridges could work well, too.
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So If you want new plastics, write an awesome game first Smile
Sure, and that's an easier thing to say than to do. Without counting that in 30-40 years, there will be no petrol, so no plastic.
Bregalad wrote:
Without counting that in 30-40 years, there will be no petrol, so no plastic.
What you say may come true, but if diesel can be made from (renewable) vegetable oil, why can't plastics?
That should be the most depressing thing I've ever read since a very long time. And it's no sci-fi story this time. Even if I make all efforts to not depend on cars and mondialisation, the global crisis could left me jobless, hungry and thirsty at the same title as others. Sad perspective.
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but if diesel can be made from (renewable) vegetable oil, why can't plastics?
I think plastics are more important that diesel, at least to me. Imagine what life would be without any plastic. And even if rewenable oil would be made, the planet won't support it much longer I think. Plants are renewable if and only if you don't take more than there are new growing out. Less plant and more pertol means much much less oxygen and much more CO2, wich means end of the world.
Well, I hope that.... not much of this will hapen.
Topicality, people; sheesh.
One thing you guys should keep in mind is that for their black plastic Atari cart shells, Atari Age does indeed use existing Atari carts for parts; they offer to buy the common carts on their page for this reason.
The only cases AtariAge makes are the custom ones, which (if I remember right) cost more.
I really don't think it'd be a crime to disassemble a few hundred SMB/Duckhunt carts, or whichever, for parts. The reason you see 'em for a buck or less is that there's tons of em. I'm sure if a little homebrew industry popped up, the amount of cartridges sold would realisticly not even come close to putting a dent in the numbers of common nes carts.
If there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 16million SMB1 carts out there in the world and you parted out 1000 for homebrew sales, you've only touched 0.00625%..
In terms of numbers, I'm sure more carts get defaced, broken and/or thrown out in a year these days than you'd come close to touching with a homebrew market.
Well, yes, there are certainly a number of heavily mass-produced NES carts nobody would miss a few of, but as has been pointed out, a custom-made cartridge case could be much simpler - all it really needs is the four main sides, the bevels on the bottom corners, the four sides of the edge-protector portion, and some grasping point for removal - overall, not even remotely as complex as the standard case design. Not that I'm an expert on injection-molding, but that seems pretty uncomplex, and in my opinion a custom case would probably boost sales of any homebrew titles, since people won't see the all-too-familiar case and pasted-over label and think "oh, a couple of guys run this on the cheap out of their garage."
Moreover, why would an injection mold cost so much to make? As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong; as I said, I'm no expert on plastics,) it's just a piece of material with the case shape stamped into it and a small hole for the injection of plastic, coupled with another piece that provides the other side of the shape; sounds like something that could be made in a kiln, or shop class - not something I'd expect to go into the thousands of dollars.
I am not an expert but I have paid for a few molds ($3200 for a part thats ~1 cubic inch) so I know the process.
commodorejohn wrote:
Moreover, why would an injection mold cost so much to make? As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong; as I said, I'm no expert on plastics,) it's just a piece of material with the case shape stamped into it and a small hole for the injection of plastic, coupled with another piece that provides the other side of the shape; sounds like something that could be made in a kiln, or shop class - not something I'd expect to go into the thousands of dollars.
Thats the basic idea, but actually doing it is more complicated. The main part is the injection molding machine which has pressure of 20-100 tons to make sure the plastic makes it everywhere in the mold and so air bubbles are crushed. To survive that the mold has to be solid aluminum which means you need a mill to make it. Compared to making the mold and the time on the machine, the manual labor and materials cost is pretty much nothing. The high minimum parts is simply because it takes a lot of time to set up and clean out the machines. Each part only takes a second to inject so they dont want 15 minutes of setup then 3 minutes of usage.
Making the NES cart more simple will help slightly, but the main factors in mold cost are size and number of big flat edges. Cant change the size of the NES cart so the price will most likely be fixed. Flat sides can more easily warp when the part is cooling so having some bumps doesnt increase the price.
commodorejohn wrote:
oh, a couple of guys run this on the cheap out of their garage.
Yes there is a cheap way to do it if you dont have access to big machines. Instead of injection you can do resin casting. Basically you make the part you want, then put it in a box and fill the box with urethane or silicone. Then you cut it open and take out your part. Now you can pour a resin or epoxy into the mold. It helps to have a vaccuum pump to take bubbles out of the resin and you have to pour carefully to fill everything. Letting the part harden will take hours so you may want to make multiple molds. The cost is far less (<$50 to get started) but getting production quality parts is very hard.
The coolest part about this way is you can easily find crystal clear resins. I did this way a couple years ago to make clear case parts for the Apple Newton. It took many many MANY molds and pours before I had any usable parts that were complete, dried hard instead of mushy, didnt have bubbles, and didnt have big lines were the mold was cut open. Getting screw holes (dont even bother with threads) is hard so the NES cart would be easier if it was glued together.
Another problem is what will the custom cart look like, and are there any games good enough to want one? I am still thinking of making one for my PowerPak, but that cart wouldnt be usable for other people because of the slot for the CF card. A custom cart would still need to fit the big boards, limiting what you can change.
Hmm, I like the idea of a clear NES cart quite a bit. How much cheaper is resin casting compared to injection molding?
The cost of doing your own resin casting is pretty low, unless you value your time
Tap Plastics has a good website of products and good stores if you are in Calif. First you need the mold materials, most likely
silicone rtv (room temp curing) parts A and B. Then you need the
clear resin and the
hardener. Total cost of $40-50. Shouldnt need any additives or thinners for the nes cart. Should also have at least accurate measuring cups and preferably an accurate scale like a postal one. Using exact measurements and recording each attempt makes it go faster. Each page has a link to instructions on using the product. Of course most of the stuff is probably toxic so do it outside if the weather isnt cold or find somewhere ventilated.
Maybe next month I will have some free time to try doing it all again. I still have shirts with big blue spots from pouring the mold...
Don't resin molds have the downfall of being fragile though? Not sure entirely. Also, IIRC I've seen some people do "liquid plastic" style resin molds using chemically desolved plastics like ABS and etc..
I'd suggest vacuum forming, but that'd offer no internal supports for mounting a pcb or even screw posts for closing the case.
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Another problem is what will the custom cart look like, and are there any games good enough to want one?
I hope Dragon Skill will heheh. In all objectivity I think no current homebrew games are worth it up now (but mybe that will change until soon), but your power pack is seriously worth it. I bet a lot of non-dev people would love getting a such system, and nesdev people will even more.
Until now I've just planned to release the ROM of my games with instructions on how to modify actual carts for harware guys. Now I'm more and more seriously thinking to release the ROM, the instruction for modify actual carts, and to put some carts with homemade ciruit in them to sell. I've no experience selling however, and I must complete a game anyway. However, it would be great to sell copies of the game soon after its online release. So people can try it under emulation, and just play it only in emulation if they don't bother. Hardware guys would be able to modify their own cartridges without paying too much (only the price of their material). And the people who have no hardware knownledge nor material and that bother less paying than playing under emultion could just buy actual carts. I don't know how well it'd sell. I think I'd get problems it if would sell too well, getting not enough componant and cartridge cases, and getting too much old games' PCB without knowing what to do with them. Also, I don't know how I'd make labels and/or boxes. I think I can made labels with paper and paper glue (already made that), but they can be scratched easily, and reveal the old label.
Were I to get into this I'd go more along the lines of the early-90s shareware model, putting a demo ROM (but a full-featured demo that actually gives you an idea of what the game's like) on the Internet and selling the complete game in cartridge-only form, and include a notice with the cart that explains why pirating such a game is not cool (as opposed to ROM dumping of out-of-production games) and asking buyers to not distribute any ROMs they dump. But that's just me; you could certainly put the whole thing up for download, and if it's good I'm sure lots of people would want a copy on a cartridge. (The fact that I played Final Fantasy on an emulator first but still shelled out $20 for the cartridge testifies to this.)
As for label printing, there's special label paper available for standard printers; it's thicker than normal printer paper and adhesive-backed, typically used for mass printing of address labels. The stuff I've seen doesn't come with the nice shiny finish of real cart labels, but I have seen printer paper with such a finish, so I wouldn't be too surprised to find it in adhesive-backed form if you know where to look. Boxes can also be done in a printer on lightweight cardboard (although you'd have much better luck with a laser than with an inkjet, simply because feeding cardboard through a printer that bends the page would be an iffy thing) and assembled by hand with a little creative folding.
In short, with the revelation of the resin-casting thing, I'd say that all the tools to make a homebrew NES cart into a low-budget small business exist, if you have the time to devote to it.
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But that's just me; you could certainly put the whole thing up for download, and if it's good I'm sure lots of people would want a copy on a cartridge.
Yeah, I prefer by far doing this. I don't want to be bastard like N. since people will be able to download it anyway it's just better to do it officially.
And yeah, I've just played FF under an emulator because it won't work with any PAL NES anyway. However, playing old games under emultion largely increase the sales of their sequels on recent platforms, at least it did for me.
I wouldn't have bought any Fire Emblem for GBA without touching the series fist on NES emulation, for example.
Well there's nothing bastardly about wanting to be paid for your work, but if you feel like making available to all that's certainly magnanimous of you =)
FF won't work on a PAL NES? That's a surprise; I never thought of it as high-performance enough to be affected by PAL/NTSC differences.
commodorejohn wrote:
FF won't work on a PAL NES? That's a surprise; I never thought of it as high-performance enough to be affected by PAL/NTSC differences.
I seem to remember an "orb effect" in one of the FF games that relied on cycle timing to turn the mono bit on and off
Yes, that's true; it isn't reproduced in FCE Ultra, so I was a little surprised when I first played FF on a cart. I'm not sure that it wouldn't work on PAL, though, and even if it didn't that's only one minor special effect whose absence went completely unnoticed by me. Hmm.
Well, the game will still be technically playable (acording to Nestopia), but with a lot of effect that screw up and with ALL messages parially rendered. Also, a lot of patience would be needed in battle, it is alredy very slow in NTSC even on higher speeds, but in PAL the thing is only worsened.
Actually (and it took me a very long time to figure this out without the manual) when you boot up, on the "New Game"/"Continue Game" menu, you can press left or right to adjust the message speed. Speed 8 is actually fairly zippy.
I'm a little surprised to hear about the message rendering; I verified it in Nestopia and you're right. I don't know what's up with that though.
commodorejohn wrote:
As for label printing, there's special label paper available for standard printers;...The stuff I've seen doesn't come with the nice shiny finish of real cart labels
You can find full sheets of glossy and satin if you look around (can't remember where I got mine at the moment). The big issue I have is in cutting corners! How does one cut really nice corners?
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I'm a little surprised to hear about the message rendering; I verified it in Nestopia and you're right. I don't know what's up with that though.
It's very simple actually. The game writes the textbox in the second nametable and switch it manually trough $2000 midframe with timing code. It would be easy to hack the game to run proplrely in PAL and write it on a custom modified cart (I've done that with FF2, wich was even simpler since the textboxes are normal so I just had to hack the effect for screen fading to time correctly on PAL). However, a commercial FF1 cart would work badly. Also, message speed only change how long the message are shown, so even higher message speed will keep very long animation and just show the text for so few time you won't have time to read. It's a bit annoying sometimes, fortunately this was fixed in FF3 and higher. However, my custom FF2 carts need serious patience to be played on real hardware because battle animation is slow ! After a dozen of minutes this gets incredibly depressing.
sevast wrote:
commodorejohn wrote:
As for label printing, there's special label paper available for standard printers;...The stuff I've seen doesn't come with the nice shiny finish of real cart labels
You can find full sheets of glossy and satin if you look around (can't remember where I got mine at the moment). The big issue I have is in cutting corners! How does one cut really nice corners?
If you mean rounded corners, I think you get a punch for that. The simple, cheap way I can see to do that is to take sheet aluminum, bend it to fit the shape of your label in a cookie-cutter sort of way, and file the edges sharp. But I'm sure there's a company out there that will make such a punch for you.