Specus is the working title of a “Zeldroidania” game (basically a mix of Zelda and Castlevania).

Quote:

Right now all it does is load a map and let you scroll around it. The scrolling engine breaks up the name table updates over four frames, and updates a 16-pixel wide area during that time. That means this engine cannot handle scrolling faster than 4 pixels per frame. The same code path is used for both horizontal and vertical maps. Branches are taken to handle the differences.

http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=7765

The “NES Coding Competition 2011” is still accepting entries till end of May 2011! If you call yourself a NES / Famicom coder, this is a nice opportunity to get your game publicity and probably prizes 🙂

http://nesdevcompo.nintendoage.com/contest/

For those who wonder what happened to Jaffe’s “Chips Challenge” remake for the Nintendo Entertainment System can take a deep breath and releax, as he still works on it. A new build is out but there are still many things to do!

Release notes:

A little update (playable demo here: http://home.no/johan-af/chip/chip.nes)

Green buttons and toggle blocks have now been implemented. They can be seen in the fourth and fifth levels. To do this, I decided to make my game use CHR-RAM instead of CHR-ROM. This was really the only way the game could support the large amount of toggle blocks found in some levels. Instead of writing new metatiles to the nametables over several vblank periods (if there are many blocks), the graphics for open and closed toggle blocks are switched in CHR-RAM. This does take some time too (128 bytes to be copied), but in sum it’s worth it.

Brown buttons (or grey here) and traps have also been implemented. This can be seen in the fifth level in the demo. Cloners are also working properly, which can also be seen in the fifth level.

There are still lots of things left to implement. The most important is teleports. After that comes the blocks that have walls that block you from only certain directions. My engine currently doesn’t allow them to be implemented in a non-hacky fashion, so I’ll have to revise how collisions and interactions work. After those are implemented, some serious optimization and bug fixing will commence. Some of the bugs are probably easy to spot in the demo (objects flickering on the wrong side of the screen when scrolling them off screen for instance.) Others are only revealed by larger and more complex levels.

On the graphics side, my brother has done some polishing. It seems I have failed to mention this before, but most of the graphics in this game is done by my brother. Of course, the original design is by Microsoft, but he’s done a good job in making NES versions of the various tiles (and coming up with brand new ones where this was impossible.)

I have also written a level editor for the game, so that I don’t have to RLE code them manually and write object lists, etc. any more :p The editor is written in Common Lisp and can be found here: http://home.no/johan-af/chip/mapeditor.

http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=5957&start=30

“Nighttime Bastards” is a work-in-progress game for NES by picccca, a developer from Finland. It’s far from being complete, but at the same time it’s another proof of the NES scene not being dead!

Release notes:

You now get points for every time you refill the machine, and you loose one life for every time Basil gets you. I have uploaded the new ROM.

http://sites.google.com/site/picccca/nes/nighttime-bastards

Virus Cleaner is a homebrew NES game by Roth. Goal is to sweep away Viri from the playing field, while it’s being protected by some sort of electric waves going around the screen.

http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=7689

neslisp is a LISP compiler suite for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It compiles LISP code to assembly code for the 6502 processor architecture.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/neslisp

bigjt_2 is continously improving his NES homebrew shooter game Assimilate. A demo version is available.

http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=7087

nes15 is an implementation of the classic Fifteen Puzzle for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This version is an NROM-128 (16kb PRG, 8kb CHR) and was tested on the real system with a PowerPak. It should also work with most emulators such as Nestopia and FCE Ultra.

Discussion: http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=7356

http://sites.google.com/site/mbrenaman/Home

Happy “New Year 2011” from Shiru!

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=56489

neilbaldwin is working on a NES Drum Synthesiser!

Current status:

Way too much new stuff to show you (as I’m typing this I realised I didn’t include Phrase Cloning in the video and a bunch of other stuff…doh!) but a video was definitely long overdue.

I don’t have much to do before this is ready for some testing so register you interest in the usual way if you want to help out. Same situation as Pulsar: you need either a PowerPak or Nestopia to run PR8 as it uses 32KB .sav files.

Anyway, here’s the video, usual rambling below.

Neil

To see the video, please head over to his page!

http://blog.ntrq.net/?p=443