Cartridge Ethics

[tepples]

Demos are fine, see Battle Kid, Frogger, etc. If you are going to give out a full rom for all to make carts, why would anyone be paying you royalties?

Noncommercial licensing, I guess. If a game is distributed to the public under a license not allowing commercial distribution, the exclusive rights for commercial distribution can still be licensed exclusively.

Selling carts is SOOO much more than just soldering and I dont wanna deal with all that hassle of payments/labels/shipping/returns etc.

PayPal is OK for payment as long as 1. you're taking payment for goods that can be manufactured and shipped in days, and 2. you're ready to switch to a real merchant account (e.g. Chase Paymentech) once you reach a certain volume.

[tokumaru]

My beta-test rom has a time limit. Game will reboot after 10 minutes. From what I can tell, that qualifies.

If it still contains all the data, I'm sure someone will hack it in 10 minutes to remove the time limit, unfortunately.

Bunnyboy told me in IRC that typical homebrew titles (like the one that I'm working on) sell around 50 copies. 100 would be rare. He did mention that BattleKid did significantly better than that.

That's what I hear from everyone that sells homebrew games, that the typical game sells 50-100 copies. Battle Kid did well because it was the first game in a long time to offer much more than the typical homebrew does. I wish people would focus in releasing more of that kind of game, that would really bring the NESDEV scene to a new level.

The cost to buying that many cases is quickly approaching the cost of me getting my own mold, and more independence from supplier issues.

Memblers, it would be great if you became a self-sufficient game publisher. I would certainly prefer to make deals with you than with anyone else. I think you have the right spirit when it comes to NESDEV, while most people are just into money, money, money.

I'm still very impressed with the mapper I've come up with using a $1.50 in parts - it supersedes the MMC1 and MMC2.

Sounds interesting! Care to share more? =)

[3gengames]

That mapper sounds cool, what are the specs? And yeah games like that would be awesome, but yet.....thats alot of programming! Not even the time that is worriesome, but just making a game engine of that size.....it's insane! :/


I agree, I'd release a game through you Memblers over everyone! Not because of them being mean or anything (But BB is pretty secretive about EVERYTHING) but because you've helped me a lot and I trust you, I'd rather have you be compensated then BB who isn't really active in the community. I like BB and his tutorials are great, but you guys help more when people get into this stuff more.

If we had better access to parts from somebody inside the forum doing this, making a multicart from homebrew contests like we want would be easier to release a multi-cart. We wouldn't have to worry about the carts and boards, as customers would be buying them from somebody here, and there'd hopefully be enough in stock at any time to do such a run of 50 carts.

[tepples]

RetroUSB may have its disadvantages, but there's one thing about them that nobody can beat yet: their carts are 100% new material, there's absolutely no dependency on Nintendo-made carts.

Unless one might argue that recycling the board and case of a crappy licensed UNROM game is better for the environment.

[tokumaru]

Unless one might argue that recycling the board and case of a crappy licensed UNROM game is better for the environment.

Yeah, but one day even copies of crappy UNROM games will run out, and I think it would be nice if we didn't have to worry about that day coming close.

[clueless]

If we had better access to parts from somebody inside the forum doing this, making a multicart from homebrew contests like we want would be easier to release a multi-cart.

I would like this approach as well. My game started as an entry for the mini-game compo. I'm still undecided on if I will enter it into the compo (Hello Jereon... Is this compo active anymore?), sell through a publisher, or just GPL it and move on.

Personally, I think that an organized multi-cart would be ideal. Hopefully it would sell well and command a sufficient price such that after costs are taken care of, the developers who put work into the cart could share in some of the profits.

[Memblers]

Thanks, I appreciate the support. I do want the money to come in though, so these developments will start to pay for itself again. Of course, I haven't actually sold anything for a while. MIDINES used the squeedo-rev2 PCB, so I made a bit of money off that over a period of several years (about $1 each). Then I gave him the PCB layout so he could make changes or do whatever, it had a good run. So that has been my only 'release' since the first Garage Cart. Eventually I'll have to quit refining and improving stuff and come up with a release, to get things rolling again.

I'm still very impressed with the mapper I've come up with using a $1.50 in parts - it supersedes the MMC1 and MMC2.

Sounds interesting! Care to share more? =)

It is evolved from what I mentioned here:
http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=6590&start=15
I'll make a real thread about it once I get the prototypes. I'm real picky about the routing and part placement, as usual, heh. It's maybe about the size of a UNROM board, but has 7 chips - all on the same side of the board.

But the IRQ feature is based on the PPU address. You use certain tiles to change the PPU banks between a fixed location, and the value in the bank register(s). I'm not even sure yet what kind of stuff can be done with this. Could do easy text boxes, for one thing. This can also trigger a CPU IRQ at the same time.

There are 2 bank regs for PRG, and 2 bank regs for CHR. The best general-purpose setup I've come up with uses 16kB PRG banks and 2kB CHR banks, but the bank sizes can be adjusted (trade off a feature), only easily by reprogramming here at the 'factory' though. Mirroring control is H/V, and 1-screen H/V.

I also had an idea for an experimental 4-screen mode, that also allows nametable bankswitching. That won't be in the 'default' build (uses jumpers), but may be available, if wanted. Another feature of the mapper that isn't as interesting by itself, is that it enables an addressable parallel port to the NES expansion port. That could be fun later.

[Bregalad]

Memblers, it would be great if you became a self-sufficient game publisher. I would certainly prefer to make deals with you than with anyone else. I think you have the right spirit when it comes to NESDEV, while most people are just into money, money, money.

I agree 1000%

There's no doubt that nobody will ever sell enough carts to survive with nesdev at his only activity, let alone being rich.

Some people on this board (I won't cite names ) seems to refuse to admit the obvious and are wanting to talk about this "industry" thing.

If I ever sell 500 copies of a game I'd be the happiest man ever even if I did a very little or no profit.
But I'd be just as happy if 500 people downloaded a game I made and had hours of fun with it.

[tepples]

Some people on this board (I won't cite names ) seems to refuse to admit the obvious and are wanting to talk about this "industry" thing.

True, by now, NES development alone is no more than a hobby. But if I ever want to get hired into the mainstream video game industry, having developed a video game and sold copies is still something impressive on a CV.

If I ever sell 500 copies of a game I'd be the happiest man ever even if I did a very little or no profit.
But I'd be just as happy if 500 people downloaded a game I made and had hours of fun with it.

True, convincing 500 people to part with $0 for a ROM to run in an emulator is an achievement. But I imagine that people in charge of hiring and firing think that convincing 500 people to part with $25 for a cartridge is a more relevant achievement.

[3gengames]

I think making and releasing games for older systems like the NES would look better on a CV then people give it credit for. Especially when you do the Sound, Graphics, Engine, Interface, everything! It should you know what needs to go into a game in every department. How any programmers out there can do such a thing? Not a ton, it's hard work in the end.


I know no NES game released is on this scale yet, but look at Pier Solar, I bet they could probably get a developers license for Xbox 360 Arcade, or even WiiWare if they fake it hard enough. (Like "VBlank Entertainment" somehow did. 0_o )


Yeah I agree, you becoming a self-sufficient publisher would be awesome. If you really LOVE messing with stuff like you do, you could use the money to tinker more at least. Even if the industry is a little shady, who cares? If they go crazy on the NESDev community, they'll probably go after bunnyboy with all those proto'd roms and VS arcade games. I doubt the parts to make carts would raise much hell, I think PowerPak and RetroPak's would still be there in the end, I just think the Reproduction section of the site would be gone.

[Bregalad]

I agree it would look good on a CV. Well I'm not into CVs anyway... but yeah it would be great to work for modern games all day and work for your oldscool games on weekends...
Even though I'm pretty confident you'd be mad of it after awhile.

If someone wanted to make a living off selling NES games, if you have a wife (I should say a "partner" to not disciminate anyone) that has a regular job and that you can live with $2.5k a month (which is considered extremely slim in my country), counting a $5 profit per cart, you 'd have to sell $500 every month.
This doesn't seem a realistic goal to me, as I already said selling 500 copies for one game already seem fantastic to me.
With all the time you'd have to spend building up carts, making and recieving packages of material, you'd have only half of your time left for development at best.

To be honnest I don't think I could live this way even if there were 500 people ready to buy carts from me every month. Maybe one year or so, but then I'd be tired of it and switch to something else.

BTW I agree with tepples that selling 500 carts is a higher acomplishements than having 500 downloads.
However, having, say, 5000 downloads (which isn't really all that much considered how many people there is on the net), is a better acomplishement than selling 20 copies.
If you build some random game and sell it at retrousb, and keep everything totally private with only a very small demo that barely gives people an idea what your game is about, chances are that you won't sell more than 20 copies.

If you make a really good freeware game, there is no doubt it will snowball and that people that played it will show it to their friends etc... So even if it's not a masterpiece, you'll reach the 5k downloads eventually I guess.

[3gengames]

Maybe if somebody took the risk and started programming NES games as a living, if they had releases every X months, maybe people would start buying retro games as often as new games? I doubt it, but if there's always something new being added often, like newer systems, who says people wouldn't be interested?


And maybe you wouldn't need to work on retro games on the weekend, Maybe you could get permission from Cap Com to do stuff like that? I mean, if theres enough money for companies to do that, there's enough money in it for the homebrew guys to maybe someone make a living off it, it's just that they have to give alot of good reasons to bust out and even fix a old console. And plus, if you start programming the NES every day for a job, I'm sure after so long, you'd have ready-to-go source for hit detection, sound, etc and building a new game could even maybe turn into a 2-month thing from beginning to end. I'm not 100% sure, but I could see something like that happening.

[Bregalad]

The problem is that a lot of people have their NESes no longer functioning, so they won't buy your game even if they'd be interested.
Also there is people who just never had a NES or that sold it.

Even for those who still have it, many will prefer to play on real HW because the lack of the crappy connector issues that causes games to randomly fail, even during gameplay sometimes (I'm one of those).

[3gengames]

Yeah, but there's nothing we can do about that, can't force people to change the connector, and if we could, I'm sure 1/2 the population couldn't do it lol.

[Memblers]

Don't forget all the Famicom systems out there, and all the clones being produced to this day. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of clone systems produced is more than the amount of NES systems remaining in good condition. I've been planning for Famicom version of some stuff, if things go well. In the past I had talked to a Chinese company that said they could make Famicom carts for me. It's something I could look at again, later (I doubt a small quantity is even worth the bother). It would be great to sell those world-wide though.

One of the reasons behind the Squeedo design actually is cut cost by making it be the only hardware you would need, for multiple games. People like to have cartridges of course, but I'm sure those who just want to play new games would be glad to have it on one cartridge (which is why the PowerPak is so useful for replacing other hardware). But Squeedo is still an unborn platform, I think it will be a 6-year gestation period so far, heh. Along with that cartridge I've (long) hoped to set up a server online, that could be used with it. You could then download/save and run demos, games, NSFs, text views right from the NES. Point being then, if you wanted to you could sell a game cartridge for $30-$40 and the same ROM for $5 - $10. Or whatever price range, maybe for free and take donations.

In any event though, there's not much money to be made, writing NES games for a living would be a really rough life. Like a starving artist.