2KBOS contest announced

A new contest has been announced at the Karoshi forum! This new contest is a mini-game development contest that aims to provide a collection of Open Source 2KB games with commented code that will encourage new developers to join and will provide a valuable resource to improve assembly programming skills. The contest goal is to get full Open Source games for MSX, the prize will thus be the availability of the sources of all those games, commented by the authors.

The basic rules of this contest:

Every game genre and theme is allowed
Start adress: $C000 (it must work on every MSX with 16KB RAM or more)
It must load with a "BLOAD" command from BASIC
It must return to BASIC with a RET
Max file size: 2055 bytes (2048 for the game + 7 bytes for the file header)
Submitting deadline: 26th of June 2008 at 23:59:59

When the contest is over, a PDF will be published including all sources of the games with comments by the authors, and a ROM version with a menu will be built in order to enjoy the minigames in the most comfortable way.

Relevant link: Karoshi forum

Comments (31)

By ro

Prophet (3591)

04-03-2008, 13:15

5 months 'till deadline? phew..
but, nice initiative!

(and NO, I'll not participate..)

By Google

By pitpan

Prophet (2559)

04-03-2008, 13:21

Well, 2048 bytes aren't that hard to fill. I've started a mini-project myself and most of the first kilobyte is already gone. The big issue here is selecting projects that do fit in only 2 KB. I guess that some pretty games will arise, although PONGs, ARKANOIDs, PAIRs and SNAKEs will dominate for sure.

By wolf_

Ambassador (9098)

04-03-2008, 13:22

ro? 5 months for a 2kb game?

By viejo_archivero

Paragon (1295)

04-03-2008, 13:23

Actually is June, not July (english thread has been mistraduced by me ). Please, correct the newpost: thnx

{mod: fixed, thou paella! }

By pitpan

Prophet (2559)

04-03-2008, 13:26

I'm a copy&paste victim, viejo!

By Manuel

Enlighted (7227)

04-03-2008, 14:18

Cool, it might be even possible to package those games for a distribution like Debian. Joost Damad tried this before with Waves. (It got stuck because there were some binary blobs in it that the FTP masters didn't like...)

By viejo_archivero

Paragon (1295)

04-03-2008, 15:21

{mod: fixed, thou paella!}:

By andrear1979

Resident (63)

04-03-2008, 15:48

Friends, I think MSXers with below-64K-machines (and I'm in that number ) will sincerely appreciate; most of games released today (including majority of MSXDev entries) can't work on less-than-64K-RAM MSXes, unless you burn it on a ROM. Thanks for this initiative!

By poke-1,170

Paragon (1605)

04-03-2008, 15:57

why doesn't everyone in the world buy an msx2 at least ?
it's 2008 people, not 1986

By Skyblasc

Resident (51)

04-03-2008, 16:20

I think that the best news about this contest is the comented sources. A trully library of code for wannabe MSX game developers that I'm sure would help a lot of new programmers to try its firsts games

By PingPong

Paragon (2011)

04-03-2008, 16:21

It's not specified the generations of msx allowed...

By hap

Paragon (1708)

04-03-2008, 16:37

It is: must work at least on every MSX with 16KB RAM.
Could you add a "comments must be in English" rule?

By arnold_m

Master (131)

04-03-2008, 19:14

For inclusion in debian (main) we would also need the games
* to be buildable with programs already in debian such as pas such as pasmo or binutils-z80,
* to run on openMSX with C-bios, and
* to have a licence that permits modification and redistributing.

(Off-topic: why doesn't everyone buy a pc with a 3 GHz quad-core 64-bit CPU and 8GiB at least?
It is 2008 people, not 1988 )

By AuroraMSX

Paragon (1849)

04-03-2008, 20:53

It must load with a "BLOAD" command from BASIC

DOes that imply that 2K BASIC programs are not accepted?

By wolf_

Ambassador (9098)

05-03-2008, 00:03

I assume that about the whole 2kb may be pletted/bitbusted data and may be unpacked to the 16kb ram?

By sjoerd

Hero (583)

05-03-2008, 08:34

Well, you need to return to basic with a ret, so you can't use the whole 16K.

By ro

Prophet (3591)

05-03-2008, 10:32

yes you can.

10 bload "mygame.bin",r
20 end

That basic will take, oh I dunno, max 1KB in total. So you'll have 0x8100 'till 0xDFF to fill. Thaz more than 16KBs

By viejo_archivero

Paragon (1295)

05-03-2008, 11:01

[wolfenstein_: I assume that about the whole 2kb may be pletted/bitbusted data and may be unpacked to the 16kb ram?]

Erm, wolfie, I suggest not to lose focus on the main goal of the thing, that is have nice and clear asm sources for beginners to learn. I don't think compressing like crazy, obfuscate each byte to gain more free space, etc, would help on that main goal... but anyway, let's have some paella

By wolf_

Ambassador (9098)

05-03-2008, 11:12

It wouldn't make much of a difference!

- Make binary of oodle-size
- Plet it to 2kb
- Make 2kb ROM minus unpacking code
- User has 2kb game
- User has oodle-size sourcecode

I mean, face it: you can't make a fantasy-RPG in 2KB, now could you?

By viejo_archivero

Paragon (1295)

05-03-2008, 11:29

Nah, I prefer making a small mini-game with clear sources (that will be the hardest part for me, imho)

By wolf_

Ambassador (9098)

05-03-2008, 11:35

Imagine that the source doesn't get bigger, but the gfx are.., in that case there's nothing to worry about regarding clearness.

By viejo_archivero

Paragon (1295)

05-03-2008, 12:00

Well, yeah. So, go for that rpg game then!

By pitpan

Prophet (2559)

05-03-2008, 13:01

My sample RPG

10 SCREEN0:KEYOFF:WIDTH36:COLOR15,0,0
20 PRINT"TINY RPG GAME v.1"
30 PRINT"The plane is about to crash. There's fire all around you. What do you want to do?"
40 LINE INPUT">";T$
50 PRINT"Cool. Too bad you're already dead."
60 PRINT"-Push key to start-"
70 IF INKEY$="" GOTO 70
80 RUN

Too bad that BASIC code isn't allowed in 2KBOS contest

By Edwin

Paragon (1116)

05-03-2008, 22:11

Hmmmm, do the comments actually have to say anything useful?

By dvik

Prophet (2172)

06-03-2008, 18:05

What does "It must return to BASIC with a RET" really mean.

Does the game need an option to quit the game or is it ok to just add a ret at the end that never gets executed?

By wolf_

Ambassador (9098)

06-03-2008, 18:10

While not speaking for the organization, I think a RET Z is also valid..

By ro

Prophet (3591)

07-03-2008, 10:29

unless Zero flag is not set....

By dvik

Prophet (2172)

07-03-2008, 18:01

...ah, so RET NZ is not allowed

By viejo_archivero

Paragon (1295)

13-03-2008, 13:44

dvik: newpost ="...a ROM version with a menu will be built in order to enjoy the minigames in the most comfortable way."
So, I suppose the RET is needed to be executed (option inside a menu or something), in order the game to go back to the future menu that is planned to be added in that ROM version.

By wolf_

Ambassador (9098)

13-03-2008, 14:46

Then the rule should be like: "game must have an exit function", instead of stating it must 'RET' ..

By dvik

Prophet (2172)

13-03-2008, 18:49

I think wolf_'s wording is clearer. Its sortof a given though. The games we're working on will have a menu option to exit and that should be enough, right?
I suppose the menu application will restore the vdp to whatever state it wants, so exiting the games into screen 0 should be enough, right?

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