Streemerz bundle

[thankyouforfu]

I'm looking forward to getting my grey cart in the mail!

[juef]

Just got my clear cart - #22! This thing is probably the nicest cart that even went in my NES Thanks!

[Jeroen]

Just got an email that mine's been sent

update: It arrived! yay!

[rainwarrior]

I got mine. I'd forgot about the awesome "wooh yeah" title music.

[Karatorian]

The website says the second run is a preorder, but it also says that it'll start shipping in early August. As it's now September, are orders now shipping, or has there been some sort of delay? In other words, if I order one tonight, will it ship shortly, or will I have to wait?

[infiniteneslives]

Sorry for the lack of updates on the status...

Things are moving along nicely. I finished shipping the first 50 carts last week, which covered sales up to Aug 13th. We've sold a total of ~70 carts from this second release, so there are ~30 left under the current agreements. The last batch of 50 boards completed assembly last week and is now in route to me. If all goes well I'll be shipping all carts that have sold thus far next week catching everything up. At that point there won't be any more pre-ordering or delayed shipments. Orders will ship within a couple business days from purchase.

As for the cash and everything, we're right on target as planned. I'll give the full 'financial report' once I'm all caught up.

We're still getting sales trickling through, something like 1-4 carts a week I'd say. At this rate we'll dry up right around the start of the holiday shopping season. I can't help but think that we'll loose out on potential sales not having things up over the holidays, but not sure if that's really much of a big deal anyways. The main blocker for another release (or potentially long term release) is cases at this point. Both of the large orders for cases I placed with retrozone for this project did not go according to plan. As such I can't get myself to see them as a reliable source for cases. Good news is I'm working with an injection mold maker who's local to me. I'm expecting to get the quote from him this week. If all goes as planned it might be possible to have that source of cases rolling in a couple months. Not sure it would be in time to try and capitalize on the holidays if that was something we as a community wanted to do though...

Now that summer is over and the days are getting shorter perhaps it's time to start putting our plans of another competition into action. IMO, it's safe to say we'll have the full income from all 150 carts of the first and second releases at this point.

Thoughts anyone???

[tepples]

I've received an invitation from someone looking for indie GBA games to publish. Dwedit, a regular here, is also the maintainer of a decent NES emulator for GBA called PocketNES.

I haven't had a chance to test most of these games in PocketNES, all my GBA stuff having been packed away for years. PocketNES doesn't support the Action 53 mapper or $4011 speech, but all these games are NROM-128, NROM-256, or UNROM, so we can just treat the menu as a manual and use a static screen that PocketNES does support. The MUSE music player in some of the games might pose a problem: it does tricky things with the sweep register and has a couple unofficial instructions. Most of the Toys would disappear because the Zapper is unsupported and TapeDump is superfluous.

The GBA screen is only 160 scanlines tall, but there's an option to scale the graphics. There are three ways to go about optimizing an NES game's graphics for PocketNES:

• Unscaled static: Rearrange the graphics so that everything is in a 160-line window.
• Unscaled follow: Store the player character's current vertical position in a memory location, document this address, and set a flag in PocketNES to have scrolling follow it. Can be confusing for games with a status bar.
• Scaled mode: Blend 4 scanlines into 3. May need a bit of adjustment to graphics, especially fonts, to improve clarity. The "Classic NES Series"/"Famicom Mini" releases on GBA use a mode similar to this.

[thefox]

The MUSE music player in some of the games might pose a problem: it does tricky things with the sweep register and has a couple unofficial instructions.

Shouldn't be a problem: viewtopic.php?p=101040#p101040

[infiniteneslives]

That'd be pretty cool to see a GBA release as well. Probably have to play around with the games to see the best method of scaling. From what I recall last time I played around with pocketNES the scaled mode is best, while doesn't look as nice is best for universal playability.

[tepples]

Which version of Driar works in PocketNES? The NROM version that I used for the bundle is marked as "Incompatible" and just resets to the title screen after I start level 1. The others can be tried below:

EDIT: Replaced Driar with working UNROM version

[lidnariq]

Assuming it's tickling the same bug in PocketNES as is tickled in NO$NES, the older UNROM builds seem to work fine. When I try to use NO$NES's debugger to figure out what's going on, I seem to trigger some kind of bug inside it...

[tepples]

You could always use VisualBoyAdvance's debugger to debug PocketNES.

Anyway, I re-uploaded it with a different build of Driar. Now the GBA ROM needs testing on your GBA flash cards.

[lidnariq]

The only funny thing Driar NROM does, as far as I know, is execute code across the mirrors of RAM...

For curiosity's sake, I tried making a build that doesn't use the unrolled code (but still generates it). PocketNES seems to works fine, then. So then I tried building a version that only unrolled as many times as we could and still fit in the primary address range for the internal RAM. And yes, that's exactly what's gone wrong; I'm not even certain if PocketNES supports any of the mirrors of internal RAM.

But PocketNES does provide the 8KiB of memory from $6000-$7FFF, and I've made a build that puts the unrolled code there instead. "Hilariously", this version wouldn't work on the NES multicart. I'll PM it to you, tepples.

By the way, in my opinion, Driar works better in Scroll-follow-sprite-0 than scaled.

[infiniteneslives]

Okay well things are finally caught up with production. No more pre-sale delayed shipments. I'll have to go change things on my site accordingly.

Tallied up the current money situation just now. I'll have to verify this at the end once everything is all accounted for. But currently we've sold 80 of the 100 carts in the second release. We have ~$2700 in the bank, and should make another $800 from the sale of the last 20. That'd give us $3.5K at the end of these 100 carts. Pretty close to my $3.7K estimate, I'll have to figure out where my discrepancy is on that estimate.

[thefox]

What's the status of the 2nd batch? Have they been sold out?