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I just thought of a way to raise funds for making and selling devcarts: start by selling a (fully assembled) multigame cart with five NROM-128 homebrew games on it. The games would have to be recompiled in $8000-$BFFF, meaning the NMIs and APU IRQs would have to be routed through a JMP in RAM like in Kirby's Adventure and DMC won't be usable, but I think it should work.

• Bank 0: Game 1 PRG
• Bank 1: Game 2 PRG
• Bank 2: Game 3 PRG
• Bank 3: Game 4 PRG
• Bank 4: Game 5 PRG
• Bank 5: Game 1 and 2 CHR
• Bank 6: Game 3 and 4 CHR
• Bank 7: Game 5 CHR and menu

And for each cart sold, give some money to the developer.

Would this be viable?

Yes, it's viable. And it's the direction I'm wanting to go with my Garage Cart series. But I'll come up with some new boards to accomodate more features. Of course we could get a pretty good run from just UNROM though. It's also easy to build it so the $8000-$BFFF page is fixed, and $C000-$FFFF is swappable.

The CHR can be compressed, so that gives more room for a better menu/intro or even another game.

My game, Dragon Skill, will most probably be released by the start of 2007.
If will have 32kb PRG and 32kb CHR (by 8kb chunks) using a CNROM board and vertical mirroring. It won't use DPCM.

It would be cool you'd consider including it, while I don't think you can do anything before the game is terminated and released.

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Life is complex: it has both real and imaginary components.

Er, this is fundamentally different from the cartridge specs listed by tepples and Memblers. For one thing, you have 32KB PRG, which doesn't work with UNROM since it would displace the menu. Second of all, you can't change CHR banks with UNROM unless you halt your game and write all of the data in.

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Quietust, QMT Productions
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.

It wouldn't be hard for Memblers to modify UNROM into BNROM, would it? This wouldn't allow for direct CNROM support, but it would allow for NROM-256.

As long as it's not doing mid-frame CHR switching. Solar Wars is also CNROM, and it's on Garage Carts #1 and #2. I simply hacked the CHR bank write into a JSR to a CHR unpack/load routine. GC#1 though uses 32kB banking, and GC#2 probably will also (due to a couple games using DPCM, and me not having immediate access to the source code and not wanting to mess with a disassembler unless I really have to). 16kB or 32kB, not a problem (except for my unfortunate 32kB page design error, that's pretty minor though).

But still, with the source I could probably hack Dragon Skill to run in 2 overlapped 16kB banks if I have to. I'd be willing to do whatever it takes pretty much to get things going.

And vertical mirroring btw is good, so far that's the setup for both carts. There will be an H mirroring cart in the series at some point, because I know one really nice game someone made that needs it. It'll require a special mapper anyways (yet to be designed, and no it's not Grandtheftendo). Especially if I want to carry out my plan of doubling the ROM size for each release in the series, and including all the previous games (would that be cool or what? heheheh).

Only bad thing with that idea is it dilutes the % of royalties for each developer, even if the price jacks up a bit (which I'd rather avoid). Backup plan for that is to do individual game releases also, so fans of a particular game can show their support.

Which is why there aren't any duplicates in Midway Arcade Treasures series. You don't need to carry the old games into the new collection; just keep separate SKUs.

Dragon Skill doesn't use mid-frame CHR switching right now, and I don't think I'll use it later, but I'm not 100% sure, though. Maybe a such thing will be needed on special boss-battles or for the ending or whathever, but chances are rather low.
We'll talk about that after the game will be released I think. You'll be able to have the source as long as you don't distribute it to everyone (because I don't want a thousand of variations/hacks of my game made by everyone).

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Life is complex: it has both real and imaginary components.