nesdev.com

I've got my local print shop working on proofs for the box and labels. Should have those to share next week, then we'll hit the presses. Should only take a week to get those printed off.

FINAL ROM
Aside from the printed materials I've got a slew of carts assembled just waiting on the final rom programming and stickers to be applied. I haven't tested RC3 for myself yet, but RC2 worked just fine on final hardware. Think we'll be good to call the rom final by next Friday (3/6/2015)? If so, then I can start flashing carts next weekend. Should have printed materials complete shortly afterwards too.

RELEASE DATE
If that all goes as planned I think we can set the release date tentative as March 24th. I'm actually quitting my day job March 13th, and then I'll be hitting the road early April. So setting the release date of that week will be best from my end that way I can get the initial wave of carts out the door before I move.

BOX PRINT QTY
So due to timing of the printed materials and another release I'm working on, we can actually get a pretty decent deal and aren't as subject to the higher pricing of lower qty's on boxes. We can effectively get them at the 500qty price point of $1.70ea. Basically qty doesn't matter much as we won't get high enough for the next break at 1k. Any votes on what quantity of boxes we should invest in? Last time around we sold 150 loose carts without much trouble over the course of ~7 months. CIB purchases typically make up the majority of sales especially in the beginning. I'm thinking 200 boxes should cover us long term. It's possible we'll run out later in life, but that should last us long enough. I suppose if we run out of boxes doing a reprint the following year assuming we kept printing boxes for new volumes in the future. If no one weighs in on the box qty I'll go with 200.

PURCHASE PRICE LOOSE CART
In the past we did $40 for loose cart and made ~$25ea. This year I'd like to include a dust sleeve and potentially a single page B&W manual. Prices of everthing have moved around a little as suppliers for everything isn't the same. But even with the addition of dust sleeve and manual I should be able to keep profit close to the $25ea with the $40 buying price. Do we have any desire to change that price point? Personally I think it's reasonable as-is, but that's for the community to decide. Keep in mind the prize clear carts for compo entrants will be free to them, compared to vol. 1 where they saved $5 off purchase.

ADDED COST OF CIB OPTION
Aside from our cost of $1.70 of the box, there are a couple other minor costs including styrofoam, and added time/packaging. Basically CIB's will cost us ~$2. What would we like to charge for the added CIB option? I'd recommend somewhere between $6-10. My gut says $8, if we're keeping the Loose cart at $40. If we opt to drop the Loose cart price to $35ish, then maybe +$10 for the box would make sense..?

VOLUME 1
Based on conclusion by crickets after my inquiry post it doesn't sound like we're of the mind to kick off a long term release of vol1 alongside vol2. Just want to mention/confirm that we have no such desires as a community. I do have a couple dozen labels left over from vol1, but I guess those aren't of much use as Streemerz prob wouldn't be included. On top of that we'd have to act quick to make a non-Streemerz vol1 rom and label, so doesn't sound like vol1 long term release is in the cards for a number of reasons..

MONEY....$
I've got our $2629.97 balance sitting in a specific nesdev savings acct with my bank. We're going to spend somewhere around $600 of that on printed materials, leaving us with close to $2k. I don't really plan on charging for the build of all the carts in one large sum, I'll just bill for carts as they sell as it's simpler to keep track of, and don't have much question about recovering my investments. So that money is available for whatever we'd like to do with it. I assume we'll have a future compo with prizes and such, but we'll earn quite a bit with vol2 sales also. Somewhere around $30/copy * 200ish copies = $6k, plus $2k we have now. Quite a bit of cash with that $8k... Perhaps that's a good argument for reducing sale price.. It'd be nice to see it go towards things like any hosting costs we may have, although I have no knowledge of what that entails other than Woahman was hosting us last I knew. I don't really have an issue sitting on this money as I have been. But I'd rather see it go towards something like we wanted, nor do I want people thinking I'm lining my pockets.. Just trying to be open about our available funds and my continued support to spend them as the community sees fit.

TAXES
Something I hadn't really thought much about until I filed taxes in spring of 2014 is how to handle this. I didn't have much for options when the time came, so I acted with the only legal conclusion I could come up with. Since nesdev isn't it's own taxable entity, I couldn't write a 1099 or equivalent to nesdev for it's earnings in 2013 for vol1 sales. Those sales were through my site/business, and from an IRS standpoint, the only thing I could really do was consider those sales earnings as a taxable earnings to my business. So in reality "I paid income tax on those vol1 sales". Truth be told, I didn't end up really paying much if anything for taxes on it based on my entire tax situation. I'm not really concerned about it, I mainly just wanted to be clear and transparent on how I handled it. That being said, if someone has a different legal proposal of a better or alternate way to handle things in the future, I'm willing to support or entertain the proposal. Keep in mind, somebody, somewhere probably have to pay taxes on these dollars unless we were to become a 501c3 non profit. I'm somewhat knowledgeable of our options there having once been the treasurer of a non-profit. Unless there's some other reason to go non-profit, I'd much rather just pay the taxes on the sales myself vs. going through all the work involved of becoming a 501c3. I suppose I could figure out exactly how much I'm paying in taxes on the earnings and subtract that from our available fund balance. But I'm not really too concerned about it personally, unless others are.

TRACKING SALES
Something I've been doing for other released titles on my site is to auto-forward all paypal invoice emails for cartridge sales to the developer. I'd propose that I do similarly for action53v2, and auto-forward invoice emails for all sales to someone(s), perhaps a moderator? Tepples? WhatULive4? others? I don't have to do this, but I like doing it as it keeps things transparent on my end, making it so I'm not the only individual with a real time veritably accurate pulse on sales. If I have email addresses, I can get that setup and run a quick auto-forward test.

_________________
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

Isn't the Tetris Company super-litigious about anyone using the same musical pieces (among other things)?

"Korobeiniki" is the only song I'm aware of where Tetris Holding actually holds a trademark, and then even on the melody. RHDE 341 used only the bass line of "Tetris New Melody" (a fan-made cover version of "Korobeiniki"), intentionally avoiding the trademarked melody. But something called to my mind that the composer of the bass line of the cover version might object. So I switched it to "Kalinka".

Good to hear things are moving along Paul, and good luck in the future with the move etc!

If you want to add NESHomebrew@gmail.com to the auto-forward rule on your email I'm fine with that. I'd be in favor of others also getting it as well to help with transparency and any complications that could arise in the future.

In your experience, what percentage of people will opt-in for a box? I can't recall if you have had any releases that offered cart only as well as CIB. Regardless @ $1.70 it is relatively negligible in the grand scheme of things, and we can always offer discounted box-only options if we are left with a bunch of extras.

As for taxes, I'm not really familiar with how things work in the US (or Canada ) but I'd be in favor of refunding any costs derived from the contest. I know you aren't too concerned, but I don't see why you should have to be penalized for your generous contributions to the contest.

I'll add NESHomebrew@gmail.com to the auto-forward list along with any others interested.

Generally early sales are near 100% CIB, but the nesdev crowd is a bit less of collecting crowd as well, so maybe we will be looking at around 80-90% CIB's..? After initial sales die down, it gets closer to a 50% mix. Over all probably looking at ~70% CIB. I think 200 is a good number for CIBs. It's also not the worst thing to only offer loose carts late in life. So CIB's are limited to some degree, they don't always have to be available.

As for taxes, I'll pay more close attention this time around to how much I'm actually getting taxed on these sales. If it's significant I'll probably deduct it from nesdev's balance, but I don't expect it to be, so we prob won't have to worry about it anyway.

Based on the silence, and most ppl being good with RC2 previously, I'm guessing we're good to call RC3 the final rom. Assuming Tepples set up the title screen text similar to last time I shouldn't have trouble manually tweaking the rom from here. I'm planning on starting to flash boards tonight/tomorrow. They can be reflashed in an emergency, or minor emergency depending on how many I've burned through and if it's worth the effort of reflashing.

_________________
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

OK, make our selection when?

Where is anyone?

Dead!

Lets get this show on the road...

Sorry things didn't work out to release before my move in late March. I'd like to get things wrapped up this week to support a release this weekend or first thing next week. I've got nearly everything I need. A few items to iron out, in reality I can make these last details work on my own, but would like approval/input from those who'd like to chime in.

Title screen:
We obviously need to remove "R.C. #3" from the title screen. For regular editions, I hacked the rom to just remove the line completely by replacing the text with spaces.

I'd like to do something special on that line for contributor's limited editions. We don't have to resolve this before the release necessarily since it's only LE's. I attempted to blindly hack the rom to display more than the current 7 characters in "R.C. #3" but failed. If Tepples could create a build that displayed more dummy characters on that line so I can hack em in a hex editor that'd be easiest. Then the question is what do we want to put on that line? My original thought was something to the effect of "Limited/Contributor Edition #1 of 15". But who get's what number then, perhaps based on each contributor's judging..? I had another idea to put "Special Thanks to <insert contributor name/alias>" or something like that to personalize each copy. I have no issue doing that so long as Tepples can make a build with enough space and I can get each contributor's input on what they'd like put in for their name/alias.

Sales tracking:
I sent NESHomebrew@gmail.com the request to auto forward and will work with him to setup the paypal invoices. If anyone else would like to be on the auto forward list let me know, I can setup as many as we'd like at any point.

Sale Price:
Never recieved input from my previous post discussing this, I'll go with what I put there if no one chimes in.

CIB vs Loose cart:
Here's my plan, please advise if you'd like to see something different:
CIB: Box, manual, dust sleeve, styro block, cartridge (probably provide box protector for $1 extra like I do with other titles)
Loose Cart: Cartridge & Dust sleeve. Print the manual yourself if you'd like a copy..? I might change my mind on this and include the manual since it's easily printed.

Back side Labels:
I included a template for the CAUTION label in my previous post and haven't received any other suggestions. I'll just move forward with my "default" option for these two labels unless someone chimes in asap. We can also put special text labeling limited contributor editions if we'd like.

_________________
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

Quick title screen hack without waiting for a rebuild:
In a hex editor go to offset 0x07ef22, and change the three bytes there (0x1f, 0xef, 0x30) to (0xc0, 0xfe, 0x00). Those three bytes are the little endian address of the "R.C. #3" string followed by the number of pixels offset from the left.

Then put your null terminated string at 0x07fed0. Maximum string size here is 64 bytes (0x07fed0~0x07ff0f). The field is also limited by 128 pixels.

manual prints:
If the manual is easy to print, I suggest printing it. I personally had trouble getting it to print the correct size (Even though I did compose it lol), and I suspect people might have some difficulty printing the pdf file as is. If time allows I could try to learn how to make a letter sized (8.5in x 11in) template to print out. Edit: Nope, time is not allowing.

If there's still time for minor bug fixes, I just found and fixed a minor bug in DABG involving the second player being able to make the first fall through a platform because I used the wrong addressing mode for a few opcodes. (zeropage instead of zeropage,x)

This and changing the build date are the only changes between this version and the version accepted for the multicart (there should only be a few bytes of changes and everything else should be in the same place). This doesn't affect 1-player mode at all and if it's too late then it shouldn't matter very much.

I've produced Release Candidate 4a with a longer serial number field in the menu, no Zapper support in the menu (turned off at assembly time) because there are no games in the collection that use it, and the updated DABG.

Why 4a? Because RC4 is deprecated. (Also because of an issue that NovaSquirrel found.)

There's actually a fairly easy trick to get it printed properly using adobe viewer alone. Have to get the print settings exactly right. If you're only printing one copy, enter "4,1,2,3" in pages to print, "multiple" under page sizing & handling, pages per sheet "custom 2 by 1", page order Horiz, print on both sides, flip along long edge, with portrait orientation. I printed them off "4,1,4,1,2,3,2,3" with 4 pages per sheet so I can print two manuals on one sheet of paper and then cut in half. Those options does put a little extra blank space in the binding/crease, but not enough to worry about.

My apologies on the delays with the release. I've got the sales webpage up and ready to go. Only left to do is put a link from my products page. I'm effectively ready for people to start checking out, just wanted to give you guys a cursory look before officially announcing the release. People can go ahead and start checking out if they'd like. I have all the carts flashed with the RC4a rom ("RC4a" text removed from title screen). I went with consensus by crickets on the majority of stuff I brought up in my last post. Still need to sort out some items for the Limited Editions though, I had hoped to tackle the LE details before releasing, but it's been my scape goat for far too long.

Fair warning I will be out of town for two weeks starting 8/26/2015. I was wanting to get this up at the beginning of the month so the initial rush would be behind me before I left, but here we are. I expect that I'll be able to ship all copies that sell between now and then before I leave. I'm not going to be completely out of commission while I'm on the road, so I'm going to make an effort to bring some copies with me so I can ship them without waiting for my return after Labor Day.

I set up paypal invoice autoforwarding with NESHomebrew, and can do the same for anyone else who would like it. I do need the new .zip for all the required GPL stuff assuming we're doing that all the same as last time around. The link on the current page is unchanged since last volume.

As for limited contributor's editions, I need to track down everyone's mailing address, and get their input on what text they'd like on the title screen of their copy. I figured I'd number them "LE #1 of 18" at a minimum, thought putting "2014 compo 1st place" for those that apply. I can put whatever people would like that fits though. Here's my list that NESHomebrew forwarded me, please let me know if I'm missing anyone. Does anyone know if the mojontwins are two people or not? I guessed maybe based on the name..? I'll ask them via their contact page on their site, but wasn't sure how we got a hold of them in the first place, don't think they ever responded to my PMs.

Anyone on this list (or anyone I missed), please feel free to email me (paul@infiniteneslives.com subject: "Action53 contributor info") with your mailing address and any special request on your title screen text. I'll reach out to those who don't reach me first in a couple days. I will ship LE's out as I get the needed details along with the cat3 snes-nes adapter prizes as well.

_________________
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

I'll give it a look tonight or this weekend.


None of the entries this time were GPL that I'm aware of, but I'll go through all the entries this weekend to see if the source code for any of them is available.


Aren't those "RHDE" and "editor" and "Helmet" and "NintendoAge"?

Did you base your robotfindskitten implementation on the POSIX version? (Or did the other person who made a NES version?) POSIX base is GPL, others might not be.