I’ve been playing around with development for the iPhone / iPad recently, and also looking at Android. Could be a version of Chunkout on a modern portable platform yet?

Chunkout for the Gameboy Color is the first GBC homebrew game to be produced, put on a cart and release out to the public. It is now available for sale over on the NintendoAge forums!

http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?StartRow=1&catid=6&threadid=39178

Thanks to everyone involved in getting this game to where it is, it’s been a great project!

Justin Klingenmeyer has posted a great unboxing review of the game on youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1FnJ15gR2g&feature=youtu.be&a

The first 40 copies of Chunkout for the Gameboy Color go on sale at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo at the Convention Center in Portland, Oregon this weekend! People attending can find a copies for sale on the NintendoAge booth.

50 additional copies plus any left over from the expo will be offered for sale online shortly after the show. Stay tuned!

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