LD Retro
In the past, I’ve made a few arcade ROM hacks, new Z80/Pac-Man hardware ROM code, as well as writing some tools that quite a few people have used over the past 15 years or so (AGE and Turaco). Being that this next LD is notable as being the 10th, I figured I’d celebrate by attempting to do an LD entry that is “retro” to the fullest extent that I can think of.
I’m going to do a 16kbyte “Ms Pac-Man Bootleg” (mspacmab) romset entry. I will provide an emulator so that you can play it in a web browser (or at least via Java) or you can drop the romset into your MAME emulator port of choice to try it out. (Note: This means I’m targetting that cpu (Z80) Memory Map (Pac-Man Arcade Hardware), Color PROM (MsPac-Man), etc. You will be able to burn the roms, and drop them onto real hardware to play this!)
I’ll be using my z80 kernel (some routines to simplify screen drawing, handling a coindrop menu, that kind of thing) which is available on google code here: http://code.google.com/p/bleu-romtools/ . (Also there are the graphics tools mentioned before (Turaco), as well as a slightly modified Z80 assembler, adding some things that simplify use in a constrained ROM memory map)
It should be pretty fun and very challenging! I invite any of you as insane as I am to pick your retro platform of choice (Commodore 64? PET? Amstrad? Sinclair? Atari 8-bit? Amiga?) and go for it for this one along with me!
I haven’t really been in a Z80 headspace in a couple years now, I’ll be starting this on the end of a work business trip ,coding in a hotel and airplane, then working on it while helping care for a toddler, and that the tools aren’t as advanced as for other platforms…
I’m sure my entry and effort will go down in a blaze of failure, due to so many things being against me on this, but I’m going to give it a try anyway. 😀