HBWC 2020

A place where you can keep others updated about your NES-related projects through screenshots, videos or information in general.

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Deadeye
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Feb 12, 2020 4:49 am
Contact:

HBWC 2020

Post by Deadeye »

Hello All,

New to NESdev forum. You may know me on Video Game Sage as Deadeye or on Twitter as @deadeye_bit. If not, great to meet you!

I have come here with a help wanted posting for someone who has the time and expertise to take on the technical end of a project. It is for the next Homebrew World Championship cart (2020 hopefully).

Leading of off the previous release of HBWC 2012 (which was done in the style of the Nintendo World Championship 1990 cart expect as a collection of portions of homebrew titles to get the best score), we are looking at two different routes that could be taken for the follow up release:

1. Boss rush style concept. Which several developers have already said they would like to be on the project: Toma from Spoonybard, Greg from Retrotainment, and Antoine from Broke studio are all lined up.

2. Traditional style concept, where each game has a set goal and points given per round. Which, Brad Smith offered NESert Golfing and Vectrex offered Saturn Smash for consideration.

Infinite NES Lives is willing to take on the physical production and sale.

The project has come to a stall while looking for a team member to take on spread heading the task of consolidating the various homebrews into one game. Which would involve programing the competition cart start screen, game switching, and score points transfer. Also would involve giving technical information and direction to the original game developers to tailor their code to work in the project.

Here is a link to information about HBWC 2012: https://www.retrousb.com/product_info.p ... cc35eb982a

Here is the discussion thread on VGS about the project: https://www.videogamesage.com/topic/732 ... ship-2020/

If you have any ideas, crticism, or feedback, please comment.
tepples
Posts: 22705
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 11:12 pm
Location: NE Indiana, USA (NTSC)
Contact:

Re: HBWC 2020

Post by tepples »

Lead programmer for Action 53 menu software and two Retrotainment titles here.

The biggest problem would be getting them all on one mapper. Some games can be mapper-hacked to run on a more powerful mapper, as Super Mario Bros. and Tetris were hacked to share on the Nintendo World Championships cart with Rad Racer and share another cart with Nintendo World Cup. If all games can be hacked to run in a common discrete mapper or in the equivalent of SGROM/SNROM, then a multicart engine based on the Action 53 mapper would be practical.

But if they use MMC3 features, getting them all into an MMC3 multicart mapper supported by existing emulators (for more practical testing) might prove tricky. For MMC3, here are the options most likely to be included in FCEUX and Mesen because they are licensed:
  • Super Spike V'Ball/Nintendo World Cup: Mapper 47, 256K PRG ROM, 256K CHR ROM, no SRAM. Writes to $6000-$7FFF go to a 1-bit register that switches between the first and second half of both the PRG ROM and the CHR ROM.
  • Super Mario Bros./Tetris/Nintendo World Cup: Mapper 37. 256K PRG ROM, 256K CHR ROM, no SRAM. Writes to $6000-$7FFF instead go to a register choosing among the first 64K of PRG and first 128K of CHR, the second 64K of PRG and the first 128K of CHR, or the second 128K of PRG and CHR.
Other MMC3-based multicarts are possible with the help of rainwarrior, Sour, or anyone else with experience adding mappers to FCEUX or Mesen.

Either way, keeping score will probably require each game's original developer to make source-code-level changes: autoplay the menus, count (and possibly display) time, disable pause, automate menus, remove unused content to save ROM and work RAM size, and leave a certain set of work RAM untouched as a communication buffer among the games.

I have already signed NDA with Cash-In Culture (that is, Retrotainment). If you cannot reveal the game titles or mappers publicly, PM me and I'll be able to offer feasibility analysis based on more than a guess.
User avatar
Deadeye
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Feb 12, 2020 4:49 am
Contact:

Re: HBWC 2020

Post by Deadeye »

Thank you Tepples. I'll gather the information and post it here.
User avatar
Deadeye
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Feb 12, 2020 4:49 am
Contact:

Re: HBWC 2020

Post by Deadeye »

tepples wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 5:45 pm .... If you cannot reveal the game titles or mappers publicly, PM me and I'll be able to offer feasibility analysis based on more than a guess.
For the two options, mappers listed below. For Haunted Halloween 86, I could not find the data, but I figured you would know which one it is :wink:

Boss Rush
- Alfonzo Arctic Adventure, Mapper 1
- Twin Dragons, Mapper 34
- Haunted Halloween 86, Mapper ?

Traditional
- NESert Golfing, Mapper 2
- Saturn Smash, Mapper 3
- I have some other titles to add for "Traditional", but have not reached out to the developers yet, but the mappers are 0 and 3
User avatar
dougeff
Posts: 3078
Joined: Fri May 08, 2015 7:17 pm

Re: HBWC 2020

Post by dougeff »

Isn't HH86 a mmc3 variant with CHR RAM?

edit. yes.
Curse is unusual among games using the MMC3 because it uses more than 8 KiB of CHR RAM. The board is mostly equivalent to TGROM, except the CHR RAM is 32 KiB instead of 8 KiB.
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
bngrybt
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue May 09, 2017 5:03 am

Re: HBWC 2020

Post by bngrybt »

For Alfonzo I used mapper 11 for the cartridge release, so there's nothing special about MMC1 that ties me to that mapper. If I'm trimming it down to a single boss battle I could probably fit it into a nice little NROM release that could easily stitch together with everything else.
Post Reply