Hacking ROM Hack Cramming Solitaire onto a Nintendo E-Reader card

[BingusMcgee]

Found this at the top of HackerNews today and thought it was relevant to share here.

"I recently finished making Solitaire for the Nintendo E-Reader. I managed to fit it onto a single card, and it's a pretty full featured version of the game. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I figured I'd talk a bit about how I made it in what turned out to be a long blog post "

Full post here:
https://mattgreer.dev/blog/cramming-solitaire-onto-a-nintendo-ereader-card/

 

[Exnor]

Nice. Thanks for the share.

 

[SylverReZ]

Great job, this is cool.

 

[city41]

Thanks for posting my game! If anyone has any questions let me know.

 

[linuxares]

Thanks for posting my game! If anyone has any questions let me know.

I wanted to ask "Why?" then I thought.... "Why not?" so I kind of answered my own question xD

 

[city41]

I wanted to ask "Why?" then I thought.... "Why not?" so I kind of answered my own question xD

haha

Yeah Solitaire isn't exactly an amazing game. I chose it more as a proof of concept for the first one.

But the real why is I plan to release e-reader card packs. They will be professionally printed and should be very similar in quality to Nintendo's original cards. I just think this would be really cool. I always really liked the e-reader and was sad Nintendo honestly didn't do too much with it.

 

[linuxares]

It would be cool for sure!

 

[BingusMcgee]

haha

Yeah Solitaire isn't exactly an amazing game. I chose it more as a proof of concept for the first one.

But the real why is I plan to release e-reader card packs. They will be professionally printed and should be very similar in quality to Nintendo's original cards. I just think this would be really cool. I always really liked the e-reader and was sad Nintendo honestly didn't do too much with it.

Damn I love this so much! Thanks for commenting, I didn't realise you were active on this forum. Love the concept I work for a commercial printer. Let me know if I can do anything to help.

 

[city41]

Damn I love this so much! Thanks for commenting, I didn't realise you were active on this forum. Love the concept I work for a commercial printer. Let me know if I can do anything to help.

I just joined. Although I've lurked here for many years as there's lots of good info on this site.

I will eventually need to shift to getting professionally printed cards made. Any advice or help you can offer would be excellent! I'll probably message you when I get closer to that, thanks for the offer!

For now I'm focusing on making a lot more games. For the new games, I hope to have info on them and even a way to try out early versions of them in a web browser soon...ish. I'll post here when that happens.

 

[BingusMcgee]

I just joined. Although I've lurked here for many years as there's lots of good info on this site.

I will eventually need to shift to getting professionally printed cards made. Any advice or help you can offer would be excellent! I'll probably message you when I get closer to that, thanks for the offer!

For now I'm focusing on making a lot more games. For the new games, I hope to have info on them and even a way to try out early versions of them in a web browser soon...ish. I'll post here when that happens.

(Edited because I asked a very silly question)

 

[linuxares]

I just joined. Although I've lurked here for many years as there's lots of good info on this site.

I will eventually need to shift to getting professionally printed cards made. Any advice or help you can offer would be excellent! I'll probably message you when I get closer to that, thanks for the offer!

For now I'm focusing on making a lot more games. For the new games, I hope to have info on them and even a way to try out early versions of them in a web browser soon...ish. I'll post here when that happens.

But will it run Doom?!

 

[Ondrashek06]

But will it run Doom?!

I actually wonder how many cards would Doom fit on

 

[city41]

I actually wonder how many cards would Doom fit on

According to Stop Skeletons From Fighting, it's over 600



Their math is not totally correct, because e-reader card data is compressed. But still, it'd be a lot of cards

 

[linuxares]

According to Stop Skeletons From Fighting, it's over 600



Their math is not totally correct, because e-reader card data is compressed. But still, it'd be a lot of cards

Would Tetris in theory work from an e-card? Since its pretty simple

 

[SylverReZ]

Thanks for posting my game! If anyone has any questions let me know.

Glad to have you here on GBAtemp, and thank you for creating this cool concept.

 

[city41]

Would Tetris in theory work from an e-card? Since its pretty simple

Yeah Tetris would probably fit pretty well. But The Tetris Company is known to sue clones, even little ones. So to play it safe I'm going to avoid it.

 

[JeffRuLz]

Very cool! As an e-reader fan I will be following this project.

I remember looking into e-reader homebrew years ago but the scene appears to be quite shallow. The only complete homebrew game I found that wasn't an NES inject was Magic Floor. (There was also a flappy bird clone called Flapp-E Mario that I cannot find again. The download link was dead when I found it anyway.)

The e-reader's audio library has voice samples for a male and female counting. I'm not aware of any official cards using it, but I'd like to see a game or demo that speaks the players' score using those voice clips.

 

[city41]

Oh cool, I didn't know about Magic Floor. Too bad only the bmp is available, I'll have to see if I can convert that into a binary.

Yeah the counting voices are interesting, there's lots of interesting sounds available. AkBKuKU has made a system resources browsing app where you can see all the backgrounds, sprites and hear all the audio.

https://github.com/AkBKukU/e-reader-dev/tree/main/projects/system-resources/release

You can load it up into mGBA using the .sav file. There are over 800 sounds!

 

[city41]

A little peek at the next game I'm working on. People seem to love this game, it was overwhelmingly the most requested game.

 

[city41]

I started a thread about my e-reader cards in the GBA forum here