Here’s some video of the Chunkout GBC game in action! As you can see, this version brings in level progression amongst the typical Chunkout gameplay. Production is progressing well, 40 of these will go on sale at the Portland Retro Game Expo in September!

So far I’ve gotten over 50 carts soldered up, and learned a lot about surface mount soldering along the way. Flux is definitely your friend when you’re surface mount soldering by hand! Here’s a pic of the soldered carts all packed up in a business card holding folder ready for shipping to the US for final construction.

Box building is also underway, as is the finalisation of the manual and label artwork. 90 of these will be initially made, with an extra 10 special edition versions as well. If demand goes beyond this initial 100, we’ll have to consider production beyond that (hopefully I can speed up the process by getting the pcb fab shop to do the soldering next time!)

If anyone’s interested in getting into gameboy development, I can highly reccommend the use of GBDK the C compiler for the Gameboy and Gameboy Color. Also, Harry Mulder’s GBTD and GBMB are great graphical editors. If you’re interested in getting a game onto a cart, let me know!

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:

• Easiest: 3,181,400
• Easy: 1,081,900
• Medium: 279,400
• Hard: 101,900
• Hardest: 77,800

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!