I haven't had time to work on this compo's cartridge release because of other obligations, such as something that will see limited release at an upcoming convention, as well as translated version of a previously released game. Heck, I didn't even judge this time.

So anyway, up to 480 KiB of entries will fit on a 4 Mbit cartridge. But we appear to have more than that, and infiniteneslives explained that with a 3 volt memory, we can go up to 32 Mbit.

I'd like to push a very picky recommendation that the anti-aliased text from the Vol. 1 title screen be nixed. Compared to all the sharp, designed-for-crisp-pixels text elsewhere, it ends up looking fuzzy and hasty, even if it represents a technologically more modern way of rendering text.

In a later post, I plan to break them down by PRG+CHR size, as I can split CHR ROM out into a separate file, compress it, and insert it into unused parts of PRG ROM. But a 4 Mbit release ain't gonna happen.

So PRG ROM covers 8 * 12 = 96 KiB. Though the mapper supports CNROM, the current menu software does not, and I imagine that NES emulators with mapper 28 but not NES 2.0 do not either. This is part of why Solar Wars in volume 2 was hacked to UNROM. Sinking Feeling is CNROM, but it could be hacked to NROM.

I'm making a bunch of behind-the-scenes progress in the builder. I haven't got around to proper CNROM support yet, but one big round of refactoring that I did today lets me mix games of different PRG ROM sizes more freely.

After using submultis to combine two pairs of NROM-128 games, I'm getting PRG banks arranged as follows:

Sinking Feeling, Wrecking Balls, and jroatch's toys are currently not included but expected to occupy banks 20-21. I don't see any way to get it under 512 KiB (15 game banks and one menu bank) other than by voting entries off the proverbial island, but at least this shows how much space remains for late (category 2) submissions.

These remain for me:

Move the title screen out of a fixed place in the menu

CNROM support

Ask JRoatch about integrating his toys

Tentatively I want to set the deadline in late March, but that depends on when INL is ready to produce cartridges.

I don't see any good reason to restrict ourselves to 4mbit. We surpassed that threshold with the submitted entries, and all submissions are more than worthy of inclusion on the cartridge. It does cost us a few more dollars in hardware and fine pitched assembly, but it's still well within the budget.

I had the same late March deadline in mind for submissions to have any last min changes and polishing. In reality there probably will be a bit more time for changes bug/fixes before cartridge assembly starts. But March 31st is a good date we can plan to stick with annually so we can always tell devs how much time they have remaining. Anything past that date can't be promised, and it's probably time to start working on next year's compo entry anyway!

How we decide to address printed materials will have a bigger bearing on when cartridges will be able to start production. Specifically if we choose traditional cardboard boxes again which I'm unable to print myself in house. It'll easily take 1-2months to get traditional boxes printed off and in my hands once artwork is finalized. And we effectively need the cartridge rom in release candidate status with final title lineup before artwork can be finalized. For this reason March 31st deadline for rom submissions also makes sense. The alternative to large initial investment and long lead time of traditional boxes is to utilize bitboxes from stoneage gamer that I'm able to print the inserts for in house. Looking back on last volume, it's hard to say the traditional boxes were financially worthwhile. We've only consumed a small portion of the large volume that was printed 2 years ago. But people appreciate them, so perhaps that's good enough, we can just plan to not print as many this time. If we run out of traditional boxes we can always shift over to bitboxes and consider the traditional box limited print.

I plan on printing the cartridge labels in house. And if the manuals are relatively simple I would print them in house as well. If the manual is has more than a couple pages I'd prefer to send them to a print shop with the traditional boxes.

I expect May, and possibly part of June to be consumed by printed material production. Cartridges can be produced in that same time frame. Which means we could expect release in July perhaps. Opting for bitboxes and printing everything in house could pull that date in quite a bit if we preferred. Either way works well with my current schedule.

_________________If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

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