Some more news from 2016-2017

Another year has passed and here's my timely post. I bet some of you thought I would forget, right? ;)

Well, during the past months I've mostly been busy nurturing my SEGA Master System / Game Gear development kit and libraries, devkitSMS/SMSlib, and the time spent on that is bearing fruits. For example, the 2017 SMS Power! Coding Competition winning entry is a game developed by a fellow forum user eruiz00 using it - the game is called Astro Force, it's a vertical shoot-em-up, and it's a great game! It has many levels, lots of enemies, bosses, music and SFXs. The author is also distributing the game C source code, so if you feel inclined to see how he did it, you can see that for yourself.

Here are some screenshots, and the ROM (with the sources) can be downloaded from this page.

Astro Force - SEGA Master System homebrew game by eruiz00

The game is also using my SN76489 audio library, PSGlib, as does another great homebrew that won the second place in the very same aforementioned competition: a team of seriously talented guys (Psidum, Calindro, RushJet1 and Sim1) made a 25 fps FMV (full motion video) of the famous B&W video "Bad Apple" at full SMS resolution, 256x192 pixels. You can check out the video and audio at this YouTube recording. It's worth every second, it's just amazing what they achieved.

Besides the 8-bit world, there are some other news. The most important one for me is that we finally released Waimanu Grinding Blocks Adventure (for the Gameboy Advance) on a physical cartridge (!!!). This became possible thanks to our publisher, Piko Interactive. You can read all the details (and find out how to get a copy of it!) on Disjointed Studio's blog post. We're so excited and we can't wait to hold a copy of that in our hands!

Waimanu GBA boxes stacked up - picture by @thebitstation

Speaking about Disjointed Studio, we're finally approaching the beta phase of our new game Weka Invaders... well, unfortunately I can't tell yet how soon it will be released.

Finally, it's true I'm posting on this blog very infrequently. Nowadays I'm (slightly) more active on Twitter, so you can follow me @i_am_sverx for news between my blog posts.

See you!