Splatoon 3 keeps pulling me in when there's events going on, especially since those are about to be finished. But other than that I've been trying to revisit the GameCube, so I've been playing stuff like Wario World that I missed out on as a kid.

Rabbits are my favorite animal! I'm a fan of the bunicorns in the Dragon Quest series, and have a bunicorn OC and an adopt I got that's a holly themed rabbit, and my Neopets account currently has several Cybunnies in it, and I have a faerie one:


Robbit is super cool though I imagine part of that is just that I really like Jumping Flash! I think my family had a rabbit as a kid but I don't remember very much about that, though I do see lots of real life rabbits on walks and bike rides. I think nowadays I'm happy to take care of virtual buns on Neopets and I'm not ready for the responsibility of a real one just yet.

Hi! I'm Nova and I'm a homebrew developer. I used to romhack back when I was a teenager, but I ended up wanting to make my own wholly original stuff while still having it work on the consoles I'm passionate about. But I still continue to approach everything from a similar perspective and relate more to romhackers and fan game devs than most homebrew and indie developers, because I'm still just doing everything for fun and passion, where it feels like a lot of other people are really focused on making products and treat things like they're making products. My current main project has a lot of that "used to hack SMW" baked into it with the terminology, how the level editor is a Lunar Magic clone, how the engine features are very SMW-like, how player/level interaction works very much like custom blocks in SMW, etc. It just happens that I fully own the thing I'm making and the code is significantly more efficient than SMW's haha.

But I still think romhacks are really cool (even if I no longer really do them outside of a game balance or accessibility patch here and there). And it's also where most of the community surrounding old console development is, especially on SNES.

I've been watching the PBS Kids schedule and watching Cyberchase when it comes on, and it's been kinda neat that this show is still airing (and getting new episodes) and neat that I can just get it for free over the air. Aside from that I've been sloooowly working on watching every My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episode and I'm on season 9 so far so there's not a ton left.

Posted by Yuri Bacon

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They are still making new episodes for Cyberchase!?!?!?! Damn, color me impressed!

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Yes, but starting with season 9 in 2013 the show started to shift over toward being more science and environmentalism focused, which is kind of weird for a show that's literally supposed to be set in the Internet. And I know I'm not supposed to take it too seriously but I end up thinking about the overall worldbuilding they're doing and trying to make sense of that, like portals are a heavily emphasized feature of the series, but there are recent episodes that talk about avoiding unnecessary long distance travel to cut down on pollution, when there's a solution to that right there. Like in the episode A Change of Art, Hacker sets up a portal network to get from site to site really quickly, and they have the technology right there, someone did it, and they're just... not? But they also gave Hacker a niece when that doesn't make sense for his backstory so maybe they just don't care lol.

I think I end up enjoying the older math-focused episodes more (like often the fact that math is involved isn't really even prominent, like I could see the stuff they're doing come up as simple puzzles in TTRPGs and stuff and it's polished up with really fun worldbuilding) but the newer ones still have their charm.

I played a lot of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and I enjoyed it for awhile, though the gacha elements were what drove me to stop playing it when they got introduced, so maybe that doesn't count as playing a gacha game haha.

I've been working on a top-down maze game for Game Boy Color involving my character Maffi going into randomly generated mazes in cyberspace and guiding lost critters to the exit while defending herself from enemies. You can find some screenshots and a build of it on NesDev. It's been really interesting getting to work on something top-down, given that a lot of my games have been platformers, because that brings up new game design and programming challenges. It's also nice to have the gameplay objective be something more than just moving right (though I know that's a massive simplification)? Let me know what you think!

Yeah I think maybe setting the maximum number of active enemies to 12 was a mistake, at least for early levels. I'll definitely be adjusting that.

Posted by Snowshoe

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I really like what you did with the SGB colors, and Maffi is very cute. Also I wish I had a flashcart so I could try it on my real GBC.

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Thanks! And I'm glad you think Maffi is cute, hehe. I want to really take advantage of having as much space as I need for the game (as opposed to when it was originally going to be a 32K game) and have some larger illustrations in there.

I feel like a lot of Super Game Boy games are pretty much just shades of a single color and that feels like a waste. I guess my somewhat cartoon-y art style is a good fit for doing something like this, since I have a lot of flat areas of the same colors, and that leads to having a areas that "read" as red, or blue, or white, even if there's others stuff going on.

For people who do try it on a real console I'm definitely interested in hearing about how people think it looks on different screens, since I know GBC screens actually have a good amount of variation? I'm also not doing the super saturated colors a lot of games do so it might be a little dark potentially, though I am planning on having it be an option. It does look OK on mine with reasonable lighting.

Pretty simple: I like level design, and doing level design for old games that don't have an official level editor happens to be romhacking.

Though nowadays it's just because I know my way around consoles due to homebrew development, and I'll happily take opportunities to spend an hour in Mesen to make a game more fun or allow more people to enjoy it. Sometimes rebalancing a little bit makes a huge impact on how fun a game is.

I did see one project play with going really far with running custom code on the SNES: https://mastodon.social/@eggboycolor/110626022523335370

For me personally I've thought about playing with my own custom enhancements, but I wouldn't want to rob myself of the opportunity to play with the very unique aesthetic you get from the way Super Game Boy normally works. I can just make a regular SNES game alongside it.

Color-wise, I suppose on SGB you can just use any arbitrary colors you want, since a TV will do a better job at a wide range of colors than a non-backlit GBC screen. But there's a really unique aesthetic detail in the form of only being able to color screen regions, not on-screen elements like sprites, so you'll end up with setups where the game area itself is all one palette and then the status bar (or other static screen elements) looks a lot more colorful. Having a high-color border that's meant to fit alongside a low-color game area in the middle is also very distinct.

Have you seen https://www.darkpattern.games/? It's not quite the same thing but does specifically try to help people find games that don't have things like microtransactions. I feel like specifically highlighting different aspects and how they apply to the game helps more than just a numerical rating.

I'm not sure what's going on with DraStic, given that it seemed to play things really safe (using homebrew games for its store screenshots, not supporting encryption, using its own clean BIOS implementation, etc.) but I don't think it's a sign that (most?) emulators are in danger. At least in the United States I think if people aren't infringing copyright, trademark, or patents, then the only applicable thing remaining is DMCA's anti-circumvention rules, which doesn't apply to consoles that don't use encryption.

I was hoping to have it be a place where I could talk about cool homebrew stuff that doesn't have much of a community presence otherwise, but I don't think there's really demand for that, and there's probably even less on romhack.ing

Having a new version of a game potentially shift things around to new locations is a problem I hadn't even thought of for this kind of thing; I know the Nintendo DS had a solution there with an actual formal filesystem (and disc consoles were already doing that) but I guess Nintendo wasn't there yet. I'm not surprised there's a lot of misinformation out there considering how much there is even for consoles and addons that English speaking countries got, and I think there's a lot of people just repeating lazily researched stuff from other people.

I've been having a lot of fun playing through Donkey Kong Bananza, and it's doing a good job at really validating the Switch 2 for me

Posted by Zoinkity

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The answer is obvious: download to physical media from satellites. You could even do it on a rotating schedule. (Not that any major game publisher ever did that before or anything...)

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As an over-the-air TV fan I would gladly welcome another Satellaview-like. There's just something cool about non-Internet connectivity in this era of smart devices and Internet streaming.

That said, while it's cool to dream big and have a lot of ambition, it's also very important to start small if you haven't done anything like this before. I'm thinking something more along the lines of Uzebox and GameTank, or even trying to make something with a small computer like a Raspberry Pi.

Getting a new platform to take off is also extremely difficult, even for a big company with a lot of money. Like Google wasn't able to do it. I was also really excited for Ouya and the stuff it was trying to achieve, and then was disappointed with how poorly it did. It's probably best to approach it as a for-fun thing.