M_Tee wrote:
A53 vol 4 could become the go-to suggestion for party games on the NES, especially considering the marketing abilities of "volume 4" being the one known for 4-player games.
I too see value in exploiting the 4 ports on an AVS and Analogue Nt mini. Here are a few games on previous volumes that are for 4 players or have been updated to be so:
- Super PakPak is on volume 2.
- Spacey McRacey is on volume 3.
- NovaSquirrel has an updated version of DABG.
infiniteneslives wrote:
In general suggestive themes haven't worked out for us in the past in the form of sub-compo either.
Perhaps what discouraged entries to the 2014 sub-compo was the size limit. Or we could tweak the prize structure, giving the highest-scored sub-compo winner a first place prize in that category and awarding the main first, second, third, fourth, and fifth place prizes as if the winner of the sub-compo had not entered. Does NintendoAge have members who have competed in game jams and can add thoughts about multi-category competition?
infiniteneslives wrote:
Something to keep in mind is that we probably will be hitting our 53 game target with this compo.
There are a few entries on volumes 1 through 3 that are not fully baked, to put it mildly. That's why I want to have the remix compo as at least a side deal before we release the all-in-one anthology.
Sumez wrote:
would it be terribly hard for the A53 menu to initialize all 8 RAM pages and relevant registers to zero during its routine for starting up a game?
Initializing almost everything is practical. Initializing absolutely everything isn't.
The menu needs to set the outer bank, inner bank, game size, and default register (CNROM: CHR bank; others: inner PRG bank), and jump to the game's entry point. The last of these need to be done in RAM because the menu bank is no longer visible. And I can't make code in RAM clear itself; it's not like loading an SPC700 saved state (.spc) on the Super NES, where the last steps of the process can execute out of the I/O ports. Would it be enough to clear nametables, clear $0000-$00F7 and $0100-$07FF to value $FF, and leave eight bytes of code at $00F8-$00FF?
Code:
clrzploop:
sta $00,x
dex
bne clrzploop
jmp entrypoint
Another thing we could try is to provide a stand-alone version of the ROM builder, so that a developer can test how a game will behave when added to a collection. For this, I might need someone's help with
py2exe.