nesdev.org

Thank you all. Yeah, I know I should have put more effort into the title screen. In a perfect world I would also add a battery backed highscore and lots of powerups etc. This was mainly a proof of concept for myself to see what I could do. This is usually the game I start with when I want to try something new like this, so I've done it like 5 times already. Here is a flash version that I did a couple of years ago that has some extra features (like an additional block type, high scores):

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/520622

Next game will probably be more polished.

Nioreh wrote:In a perfect world I would also add a battery backed highscore

There's a reason high scores generally weren't battery backed in the NES era, apart from a few cases like Tetris 2+Bombliss and Wario's Woods: it would have taken two extra chips (a 6264 SRAM and a 74LS20 to decode $6000-$7FFF), plus the battery and a few diodes.

This was mainly a proof of concept for myself to see what I could do.

There's always a chance for version 2 if you want to polish it later. There are still 42 more homebrew minigames I have to find before my project is "ready".

tepples wrote: There's a reason high scores generally weren't battery backed in the NES era, apart from a few cases like Tetris 2+Bombliss and Wario's Woods: it would have taken two extra chips (a 6264 SRAM and a 74LS20 to decode $6000-$7FFF), plus the battery and a few diodes.

I was thinking about this. My little game uses very little CHR ROM space. What if I moved that data into PRG ROM and used CHR RAM. Could't one use a battery to keep the CHR RAM saved and store the highscore data in the otherwise empty parts of CHR RAM?

I don't know very much about electronics engineering, but it seems doable in my mind. I don't know all the board names, but this would be an NROM with CHR RAM instead of ROM, plus a battery to keep the CHR RAM saved.

Nioreh wrote:I was thinking about this. My little game uses very little CHR ROM space. What if I moved that data into PRG ROM and used CHR RAM. Could't one use a battery to keep the CHR RAM saved and store the highscore data in the otherwise empty parts of CHR RAM?

Kevtris discovered one unlicensed NES game that does this, called RacerMate.

Cool Then I guess I'm not completely nuts for thinking it would be possible. I guess no emu supports this though?

Nioreh wrote:Cool Then I guess I'm not completely nuts for thinking it would be possible. I guess no emu supports this though?

If the emulator supports save state slots, presumably part of the saved state is the state of CHR-RAM...

But then again those emulators might also "do you a favor" and clear the CHR-RAM on reset because...why would there be anything useful there?

I'd suggest making two versions. An EMU version that uses normal SRAM and a cart version that saves to CHR-RAM. It would only take one #define.

Nioreh wrote:Next game will probably be more polished.

Please consider giving this ace little game a bit more work before moving on though

cpow wrote:But then again those emulators might also "do you a favor" and clear the CHR-RAM on reset because...why would there be anything useful there?

Programs running in emulators that support NES 2.0 can use battery-backed CHR RAM. The NES 2.0 spec refers to RacerMate by name.

Just saw this and played it. Cool as hell! Very addictive just like everyone else says.

I really liked the game! It's very addicting, and pretty well done too!

This is pretty good! I had fun.

Even though I'm very busy these days I had the chance to try it a little bit and it was good. Good work!

Nice job man! Very fun game.

This is a neat game, I like the parallax scrolling. It's a nice take on the ultra-simple-retro-platformer genre, with a twist such as "can't jump, just fall." Good job! Nice music too.