Nominate a game/demo for the upcoming Garage Cart(s)

[Memblers]

Nominate an NES program for the soon-to-be-continued Garage Cart series of homebrew multicarts. This could be a game/demo you coded, or one by anyone else (however unlikely you may think it's inclusion to be). Nominate as many titles as you want. Nominate a song if you like.

The first Garage Cart featured Munchie Attack, Hot Seat Harry, and Solar Wars. It was produced only in limited quantities. The next ones will be more readily available.

I'm about to head out on the road for a while, so I won't be able to check back until next week. But once I get some feedback I will see how it compares with my current plans and I will see what I can do to make this a real community periodical type of cart series like it's supposed to be.

If the work is your own and gets used you can receive royalties, or opt to donate your work to the cause. Your work would still be 100% yours, I have no plans to censor, restrict, or otherwise prohibit you from doing what you want with your work (very much unlike traditional publishers).

Garage Cart #1 was a tremendous underground success. Garage Cart #2 is happening, and this is your chance to get involved.

[Bregalad]

Wow, I'd really love to see my Dragon Skill on it, but it's not released yet. I have still to design the second half of levels, the vast majority of enemies which are only on paper right now, the second half of the soundtrack and an ending.
Normally I should be able to do all of this by the end of 2008, but I can't guarantee anything. I was already saying something similar in 2007 but that was completely wrong.
It's using mapper 3 BTW, but it should probably be possible to make a version of it to use CHRRAM if that's needed.

I bet the NESSnake 2 + Dragon Skill + Sonic combo would sell well, but I don't know if it's legal about Sonic (it probably isn't).

[tepples]

I could fix up Tetramino (NROM, 16 KB PRG, 4 KB CHR) for Garage Cart if you want a popular Soviet mind game in the mix.

EDIT (2014-05-23): Not as long as Mr. Pajitnov keeps acting confused as to whether he really wants it to be a sport.

[Celius]

ChateauLeVania would be really cool to be on a cart, but the game is either going to be 256k or 512k MMC3 + SRAM, which requires an FF3j cart. Though I don't know how legal that is either, because I'd be using some music from Castlevania games as well as some Nintendoizations of the enemies. However, I'm still working on "The Great RA", which is a simple NROM platformer from which everything would be original work. You play as a green alien with buck teeth and you kill enemies. There are levels and bosses. It's pretty basic. This is more reasonable to release on a cart like that.

[Memblers]

Bregalad: Dragon Skill looks awesome. It would be really great to feature that on Garage Cart. It always seemed like a big project, let me know when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, heheh. Looks like it's come pretty far in the screenshots (I don't know when those are from though).

tepples: Certainly, Tetramino is one of the games that made me want to make GC#2 (NESnake 2 is the other). Back then I was going to do some sound work on it, I think I restarted on that and never completed anything. I could still do it sometime, if needed.

Celius: Do you need the MMC3 CHR banking? I could maybe come up with a mapper later (and a hack). If the next couple GC releases go right, I'll want to step up to using 1MByte of memory (at the minimum). But not yet. That's the first I'd heard of The Great RA, sounds interesting. Hey, I remember also I was gonna put "The Game" on there, are you still up for that?

[tepples]

tepples: Certainly, Tetramino is one of the games that made me want to make GC#2 (NESnake 2 is the other). Back then I was going to do some sound work on it, I think I restarted on that and never completed anything. I could still do it sometime, if needed.

Cool.

Hey, I remember also I was gonna put "The Game" on there, are you still up for that?

Oh fcuk, you just made us all lose The Game. Or did you mean some sort of rap game where you have to press buttons, buttons, buttons?

[Celius]

Dude! If you want to put The Game on it, that'd be great! It may not run on hardware because it was so sloppily coded though. It kind of wastes ROM. I can do a quick recode in no time if you're up for it. I can make it also use a ton less space.

ChateauLeVania is 512k PRG (Might be able to make 256k), 0k CHR, has Vertical Mirroring, and has 8k SRAM. It's a pretty heavy duty game. If you'd be able to put it on, it would be great. But I'm afraid I'm only nearly done with the visual part of the basic map engine. I still have to code AI and game mechanics, which are 2 huge branches. Oh, I do have the music engine done though. Oh, and also, it's gonna use MMC3's scanline counter for lots of things.

EDIT: Tepples: "The Game" was a really really basic game I made where there's a moving target, and there's a projectile moving across the screen that you move up and down to hit the target. The Bb scale is the theme song. It received the award of last place at the annual minigames competition.

[Tom]

If you can support MMC3 IRQs, you can put my half done game Wraith on there (I just poked around on pdroms.de but I wasn't able to find there. But it's made it's way into GoodNES collections). I can confirm that it works on NES hardware now. What's the timeframe for this? I might try to throw something together.

[Bregalad]

I'm happy peope are interested in Dragon Skill. The screenshots are new I updated them very recently (plus I figure out that some are glitchy because of .png trancparency, I'll have to fix that). I don't have a single idea when the game will come out, as I'm unsure how the following week will happen for me. I lack a few ideas, especially for bosses, and probably won't release the game until some considerable time, exept if I work pretty hard.

EDIT : It's probably possible to build a cheap scanline counter with several chips from the 74 series based on the A12+capacity trick if this is necessary.
I don't know how far the developpement of ChateauLeVania is, but making a 64 kB game take me aproximately 4 years (3 years and a half for now but it's not released yet), so a 256 kB game should take one guy 16 years in theory.... But of course this logic doesn't really work.

[tokumaru]

I don't know how far the developpement of ChateauLeVania is, but making a 64 kB game take me aproximately 4 years (3 years and a half for now but it's not released yet), so a 256 kB game should take one guy 16 years in theory.... But of course this logic doesn't really work.

Yeah, this logic is pretty lame. My sonic game is a 512KB (256KB PRG and 256KB CHR) MMC3 game. Very few of the PRG banks have actual code, most of them are (reserved for) data. Level maps, block maps and object definitions are the ones to blame for the ROM size.

I wish there was a chance for my game to be in a cart like this, but it's size, the fact that ot's an MMC3 game, and the time that I still need to finish it will be in the way! I must confess the game is going through a sort of rewrite process, because the source got too messy and I couldn't even keep up with the variable names anymore, so I couldn't keep going like that. The new setup is much better, I arranged it all in a neat structure of folders, each routine is in it's own file, variables are arranged according to their function... once I get it all working with the new structure, I expect things to move a bit faster.

So, Memblers, if you somehow manage to handle MMC3 games in the future, I'd love to sign up my game for the next cart! =) I only use interrupts to hide the 16 topmost scanlines (where scrolling glitches would be).

[Celius]

Hey Memblers, I'm finishing up the title screen for the recode of The Game, and it takes up about 1k of code now. And it will at max use 32 tiles, most of which are numbers and letters. I don't know if I'm going to stick in powerups, but there is a new score system and you can select the speed and size of the target, as well as the speed for the bullet. It'll probably be 2 or 3k at max. Just thought I'd mention it, so you can stick it on the cart and it will run, probably unlike the original.

EDIT: As for ChateauLeVania, it shouldn't take me 16 years to make. I would feel pretty bad if it took that long. But it's really planning everything out that takes so long. After I finalize the scrolling part, it'll be good since then I can put in objects and program collision detection. After that, I have to make AI and game logic. So basically I have almost everything left. Oh and not to mention some polygon filling I was planning on doing. But I won't release this until it is exactly how I want it to be.

EDIT 2: Here it is! The new and mostly improved version of The Game:

http://www.freewebs.com/the_bott/game.nes

The only thing that's a little weird is the sound, because there is no noise or triangle. But the game all together fits in 8k. Now you can change the target speed, target size, and the bullet speed. And this time, you don't have a game over when you reach 99 target hits. It uses CHR RAM too. You'll want to put this on the cart instead of the old one =).

And also, you can speed up and slow down with left and right.

EDIT 3: Sorry, had to make some quick fixes. It should be all good now.

[CartCollector]

Celius, if The Game is that small, you might be able to enter it in an upcoming MiniGame Compo.

Anyways, I nominate:

NesSnake 2
Tetramino
Mystic Pillars
Siamond
Sudoku 2007

As for demos, one of the PolyNESes would be nice, but the third one uses 128k of PRG-ROM and MMC1. I don't know what mapper you're using (super-big-UxROM?), but it would probably take a lot of reworking to get it on GarageCart 2. The Mandelbrot demo, however, is nice and small (32k NROM). You could even rework it to fit into 64 tiles in CHR-RAM and have it run in the game selection menu.

[Celius]

I would do it, but it's not mini enough. If it were like 1 or 2k, maybe I would. Last time I submitted it (the original version) as a 4k game, but I don't see how it was able to go through, since it was more than that I think. Anyways, it got last place, and deserved it.

I don't feel right now like optimizing the game to fit in the minigame compo, so for now I'll just keep it an 8k game. It's more like 6k, and I'm sure if it was necessary, I could shrink it to 4k so it could share a PRG bank with another small game.

[tepples]

My tile editor tells me that Tetramino as of today has 9 KiB of non-empty PRG and 4 KiB of non-empty CHR. The Game could probably fit into the same bank, especially if it were to share some CHR.

[Celius]

Yeah, actually The Game really could share the same PRG bank, since all together it's 6318 bytes. It uses CHR RAM, so the CHR data is included in that byte count. Am I correct in assuming that CHR RAM is supported? And also, does Tetramino use CHR RAM or ROM?