Just finished up populating a board, and trying it all out in the plastic casing. This is how the final version should look before a nice sexy label is added. Everything’s worked well with all the Gameboy Colors, Gameboys, Gameboy Advances and Super Gameboys I could find, so we’re ready to roll! Just need to get myself a solder fume extractor, and knuckle down to solder 100 of these up!
The batch of final circuit boards arrived last week, and they look great! Final beta testing is underway, then final board production should follow soon after. At this stage we’re looking like having these ready mid September.
Also underway is the production of the boxes. Ray has done a fantastic job with the artwork, and Josh is working wonders with the construction!
Over the last few weeks I was trying to debug my circuit board as my initial design wasn’t working. After discovering a few incorrect address lines, I soldered in some jumper wires and cut some traces and I thought it was 100%. Unfortunately it still wasn’t working. In the end I sent it over to an Electronic Engineer mate who took one look at it and noticed a minor manufacturing flaw had shorted out two of the address lines. A quick screwdriver scratch later and it was fully working. Reminder to self, fully check cart connector for shorts before going through the soldering process!
Final prototype boards are being manufactured now with those 2 lines fixed, if all goes well, final boards should be ordered soon!
Also, I’ve tracked down plastic cartridge cases for the games from over here at Kitsch-Bent. Matt there is a really great guy!
For the upcoming Gameboy Color release of Chunkout I’ve hired in the services of cartoon artist Ray Frisbee who has done a wonderful job creating the character Chunkout Chuck who will be featuring in the games packaging and back story!
Twin Galaxies (the Guinness World Records equivalent of the video game world) have recorded a number of new World Records for Chunkout 2 on the NES. Check out the details over on the Twin Galaxies forums.
Current World Records:
I’ve been wondering if this release of Chunkout for the Gameboy Colour will be the first homebrew gameboy game release with cartridge and box. I know back in the hey-day of Bung’s coding competitions most homebrew releases were targeted at owners of flash carts, but I haven’t found any details of anyone actually building up carts and boxes and shipping them out. I know of Qwak for the Gameboy Advance had success with publication, does anyone know of any releases for the older Gameboy systems?
A few days ago my prototype circuit boards arrived and they look great! After a few tests with a multimeter it looks like they are wired up correctly, so I should be able to burn a test rom in the next week or so and see if it works as expected!
I’ve also tracked down some plastic cartridge shells from Hong Kong, so everything’s coming together for the production.
Work has begun on the production of the Gameboy Colour version of Chunkout. After 11 years laying dormant, I’ve finally got the game recompiling again which required digging up a few archives of libraries from several computers ago (DOSBox really does work well for those older dos utilities on a modern PC too). It looks like there will be a few new additions such as level progression, adjusted scoring, graphic tweaks and an enhanced theme. I’ve also got a fantastic artist on board and someone who can build great game boxes, so this has the potential of being a rather nice release!
The prototype circuit boards have shipped today, so hopefully they work as expected! Further details when they arrive and I get the surface mount soldering sorted!
I’ve brought the website into the 21st century using the latest in WordPress technology to bring all the luxuries of a modern site such as RSS feeds, Twitter integration and much more! Thanks to Dain and Kevin for the ideas and especially to Dain for the continued hosting on the NintendoAGE webserver.
Following Australia Day this year I thought I’d create a special thankyou gift for some Australian collectors who help me out with my collection. This one comes complete with a NES rendition of Waltzing Matilda!
