drludos

Hi everyone!

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)

Hi everyone!

As you may know, today (November 21st) the Super Nintendo (SNES) console turns 30!

To celebrate this event I created a new SNES game, available for free online but also sold on actual SNES cartridges.

To help people create new SNES games, I open-sourced it, and you can download the heavily commented source code from the link below:

https://drludos.itch.io/the-last-super

The game was developed 100% in C using modern tools, namely the PVSNESLib SDK: https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib/

I hope you'll find this useful, and feel free to ask me if you have any question!

Thanks a lot for your comment, it's really motivating :)

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!

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!

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:

- Making a Game Boy Game in 2017: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DoctorLudos/20171207/311143/

- Making a Mega Drive /Genesis game in 2019: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DoctorLudos/20191019/352537/

I hope you'll enjoy them too! :)

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

Hi! For the legal aspect the other comments have already answered with loads of details (thanks!).

But to answer your question more precisely, this game uses the CIC chip alternative made by Infinite NES lives: http://www.infiniteneslives.com/snessupplies.php

This is one of the several CIC alternatives available, including the most popular that is the open-source SuperCIC chip: https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic

Yes, I've seen this project, this is incredible! I can't wait to be able to play a NES multiplayer game over the network! :)

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)

Thanks!

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! :)

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).

Today, there are several different lockoutchip available on the market, including the opensource "SuperCIC" one: https://sd2snes.de/blog/cool-stuff/supercic

For Yo-Yo Shuriken, we used the CIC chip made by Infinite NES Lives (a great producer of NES and SNES hardware supplies!): http://www.infiniteneslives.com/snessupplies.php

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the article! :)

Hi everyone!

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!