For the GB compo 21, I made a new Game Boy game titled "GB Corp." It's an idle / incremental game: you hire different GB models and put them to work. But there is a catch: each console you hire will only generate money if you run the game cartridge on the actual console model it represents.
The game goes as far as rewarding you when you switch the cartridge between various console models: the Original GB, the GBC, the GB Pocket, and the Super Game Boy!
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this one, it looks very cool! I love how they wrote their full MML based driver!
(my game use the SNESmod driver, that can take Impulse Tracker (.it) files for input)
Well, you're lucky, because there are a lot of people making very high quality NES cartridge already (the NES homebrew scene is very vibrant compared to the SNES scene).
I can recommend you to shopping at Infinite NES Lives, they are selling blank cartridge (loads of mappers variants available) and a tool to "write" the game on the cartridge:
http://www.infiniteneslives.com/nessupplies.php
(we actually used their flasher to write the SNES cartridges of Yo-Yo Shuriken, as it works for SNES too!)
With that you can make your own physical release too! :)
That feels like a bit of cheating if you are not designing & soldering your own cartridge :P
I wonder how this was like 40 years ago. Would developers use services similar to this: find a company that makes the mapper you use, send them your binaries and leave them to production details? Or would you design your own boards and use a service to create and assemble them? Perhaps very large companies could even afford build their own boards.
There are some complex/unique mappers out there which makes me believe at least some companies out there were designing those mappers and building their own boards
Well, for my project I did partner with someone to make the PCB, as I have about 0 electronics skills (maybe someday...). People like INL or Catskull are usually one-man operations, and they design their own PCB from scratch, so we are still in the "homebrew" spirit ;). But I get your feeling of wanting to build your own PCB on your own - I think you may find some schematics / documentation online to get you started if you want.
During the 80's-90's, AFAIK, Nintendo was the only company authorized to manufacture cartridges. So any publisher / developer would have to buy hardware from them. And you wouldn't be able to make a small lot, but you had to buy tens thousands or maybe hundreds thousands of units - this was a large scale business!
From what I've read, the process was indeed: build the final rom, have it pass a thorough QA session at Nintendo, pay for the cartridges and Nintendo will build them for you.
For the NES era, several companies did manage to make their own mappers. For example Konami designed a mapper to add extra audio channels in a NES cart. But, for some reasons, Nintendo didn't allow third party mappers in US and European releases. That's why only Japanese version of games like Castlevania III have such mappers "not made by Nintendo".
And of course, many unlicensed companies did create their own cartridges from the ground up, like Codemaster and Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree. They were not big companies at the time. So I think even middle sized ones could create their own cartridges and mappers if they had the skill inhouse!
Here is an article I've just published about making a brand new game for the Super Nintendo (SNES) console using today's technology. It starts with the various steps to designing and program the game, and then details how me manufacture new cartridges (with box and manual) for a console whose commercial support ceased more than 20 years ago!
I hope you'll enjoy it, and don't hesitate to ask me if you have any question!
Thanks for writing! I'm impressed by your dedication and effort, but also a thanks for your writing style, which was really easy to follow. I've read a lot about the SNES and Mega Drive before, but you've given me the best understanding of how the sprite updates per frame are limited by CPU time (and it's nice to see someone else who suffered with bad 50Hz versions). Are you tempted to try this for another console. I've always wondered how horrible programming the N64 must be!
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the article! I actually have made several games for other consoles (GB, Mega Drive, Atari 2600, Atari Lynx, Neo Geo), that you can find here:
https://drludos.itch.io/
And I wrote two other articles like this one, that try to cover "how the console works" and their limitations I faced during each project:
For the Nintendo 64, this is way beyond my current programming skills (3d and all that). But I know that Matt Philips (who made the incredible Mega Drive game Tanglewood in 2018) was toying with N64 development and sharing about his experiments on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/bigevilboss
That was a fantastic read thank you — even If I'm far to understand the whole programming part. The cartridge with the box (and pictures) plus the manual really make it feels like it was done 20 years ago. Nice feeling.
10NES is the algorithm running on the CIC lockout chip of the original Nintendo Entertainment System; the SNES had a similar lockout chip, but used a different algorithm.
These days, the SNES CIC algorithm is fully understood, and you can program an ordinary microcontroller to run either the "cartridge" or "console" ends of the algorithm for every region, or even for a cartridge to detect at runtime what region the console expects. See https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic
Hi! The cart works on all SNES consoles from any region. For the lockout chip, it uses an "aftermarket" lockout chip that is able to play on any console region (you simply need to hit reset 5 times to change region).
Thanks for your feedback! :)
I did take a long time to write (I didn't keep track of it, but I'll say somewhere between 20-30 hours in total), so I'm glad you enjoyed it!
For the GB compo 21, I made a new Game Boy game titled "GB Corp." It's an idle / incremental game: you hire different GB models and put them to work. But there is a catch: each console you hire will only generate money if you run the game cartridge on the actual console model it represents.
The game goes as far as rewarding you when you switch the cartridge between various console models: the Original GB, the GBC, the GB Pocket, and the Super Game Boy!
The game is free and open source, and can be downloaded from here: https://drludos.itch.io/gb-corp
If you still have one or more Game Boy lying around at home, I hope you'll enjoy it! (you can play it on emulator too of course)