Any programmer Interested?

[Memblers]

career stats

There's a reason that no NES quiz show simulator had career stats. Saving increases the cost of making cartridges by several dollars, as you need to build battery-backed RAM into the cartridge (unless you're tearing up a copy of Ultima Exodus).

Except that now it costs nothing extra to use FlashROM, which can be saved to. This would be especially helpful here, because you could save the LFSR(s) states, used for generating the questions. So if you wanted, in one 'career' you could prevent any repeats until you've seen them all.

[clueless]

career stats

There's a reason that no NES quiz show simulator had career stats. Saving increases the cost of making cartridges by several dollars, as you need to build battery-backed RAM into the cartridge (unless you're tearing up a copy of Ultima Exodus).

Is there something special about how Exodus stores its save state (like using eeprom instead of nvram)?

Or is it just a plentiful, cheap source of parts for a board, ram + battery?

[blargg]

With Flash memory it's also possible to modify data without having to erase the Flash each time. This is achieved by representing the data in a way that changes only involve clearing bits. A simple approach is to store the byte or word value at the beginning of a 256-byte page. If it needs to be changed, store a zero over it and put the new value just after it. This assumes the value 0 can be used as a sentinel value.

[tepples]

Or is [Ultima Exodus] just a plentiful, cheap source of parts for a board, ram + battery?

This. Because Ultima Exodus (not to be confused with Wisdom Tree's Exodus, which is a Boulder Dash clone) has low review scores among SNROM/SUROM games, it's cheaper than tearing up a Legend of Zelda or a Final Fantasy.

One problem with putting a 29F040 on a modded SUROM and devoting half the space to saving is that neither the PowerPak nor any popular emulator supports it, so it's hard to test with unless you own an EPROM programmer.

But to add to blargg's point: flash would be ideal for storing which questions have been seen in order to prefer new ones. A block of 384 bytes starts at $FF, and each question has a bit if it's seen.

I do want to make this game, even if only as an excuse to explore text compression.

[Nadia]

In 2001 I wrote a very similar game not for NES but for DOS(using C). That's the only experience I have in this regard. So, I would like to help and be a part of the project(if I can)