User:Tepples/Bribe me

On this page, you get to choose what I make next.

Submitting a bribe

Each project or feature has a bounty amount. Notes from donors specify a list of projects to work on. Once I finish one project, I look for the next project that is funded the most times over, take proportionally from each donor, and reassign the bounty to the rest of the list. I first consider only first choices, then first and second choices, then first, second, and third choices.

Send money to ebay at pineight dot com on PayPal, and in the additional instructions, list the projects you want funded in order of preference. The one funded the most times over will get worked on first, and remaining funds will be allocated to other projects on your list. Some bounties are subject to change based on prevailing hardware prices.

Open bribes

Game using Vaus controller

The Vaus controller is a paddle, or miniature non-centering steering wheel, marketed by Taito for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The paddle was originally bundled with a Breakout clone called Arkanoid, in which the player twists the knob sideways to move the lifeboat Vaus and presses the trigger button to serve the ball. In Chase HQ, the player steers the car with the knob.

The Vaus controller has a known, emulated protocol: trigger on D3 and angular displacement as serial on D4 (big-endian, roughly 160 units wide increasing counterclockwise).

This bribe will fund buying a Vaus controller and developing a driver for the Vaus controller in ZapPing.

Price: $70

Game using Power Glove

The Power Glove is a glove-shaped positional input device marketed by Mattel for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It senses the roll and position of the hand, as well as whether some of the fingers are flexed or extended. Only two games, Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler, have native glove support.

I am unaware of any technical documents or emulator support for the Power Glove.

This bribe will fund buying a Power Glove and developing a driver for the Power Glove in ZapPing and Thwaite.

Price: $120 plus technical documents

Game using Super NES Mouse

The Super NES Mouse is a two-button mouse marketed by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It reads distance increments using a quadrature encoder which returns the accumulated distance in the X and Y coordinates after each read.

The Super NES Mouse has a known protocol that is emulated in Super NES emulators but not in NES emulators. The mouse can be connected to an NES using an adapter soldered from a Super NES controller extension cable and an NES controller extension cable. But such cables aren't available locally, and famiclones with Super NES style controller ports, such as the FC Twin, do not work with the PowerPak.

Support for the mouse in Thwaite was sponsored by infiniteneslives, who provided two Super NES to NES controller adapters. The remainder of the bribe will add support for the mouse to ZapPing.

Price: $20

Game using Power Pad

The Power Pad is a floor mat game controller marketed by Bandai for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It has twelve pressure-sensitive panels arranged in a grid of four across by three down.

The Power Pad has a known, emulated protocol: serial on D3 and D4.

This bribe will fund development of a clone of Mole Patrol that uses the Power Pad. A rhythm game was originally planned, but this was canceled after the 2006 claim construction verdict in Konami v. Roxor.

Price: $50

Poorlords

Poorlords is a mode in FlapPing for Atari 2600 that places a wall made of breakable bricks behind each paddle. (The name alludes to Warlords.) In Poorlords, the game is to 3 points, not 11. Heat Up Hockey by Sega uses the same concept.

This bribe will fund a Poorlords mode in ZapPing.

Price: $20

Speech compression demo

Few NES games include voice acting in their cut scenes due to the amount of ROM needed to hold sampled audio. The most efficient codecs suited for playback on microcontrollers were patented in the NES's commercial era, and few video game developers wanted to pay a royalty. But as of 2011, NES-era patents have expired.

This bribe will fund development of a Mozer compression tool for PC and playback software for the NES.

Price: $50

Text compression demo

Few NES games include the complete text of their manual or even a complete tutorial on how to play. This may have been for copy protection, so that pirates wouldn't know the object of the game in the pre-GameFAQs era, or it could have been just for ROM space reasons. But in the homebrew era, ROM space is somewhat cheaper, and feelies-based copy protection is easy to defeat by copying the information out of the feelies on the Internet.

This project was first proposed in this NESdev BBS topic but abandoned when it was discovered that the target platform, an emulator built into a portable DVD player, wasn't very compatible with some NES programming techniques.

This bribe will fund development of a Huffword text compression tool for PC and an e-book reader for the NES.

Price: $50

Russian Roulette

Russian Roulette began as a simple demo of reading the Zapper's trigger. I want to make it more.

One betting structure is like that of poker, with players betting against one another and the winner taking all money wagered in a round. Another is more like ordinary casino roulette, where players can place side bets against the house on who will be eliminated when.

This bribe will fund exploration of various betting structures, play testing with family members, extension to other put and take rule sets, and improved graphics (that is, something other than text).

Price: $50

President

This bribe will fund development of a side-scrolling engine to the point where it can be used to recreate the opening level from a classic NES side-scroller.

Price: $50

FK Convey

Back in 2009, I made a Klax clone using the Allegro library. But since then, I've learned that SDL has more professional attention paid to keeping it working. For example, SDL is in Ubuntu main (packages supported by Canonical), while Allegro is in Ubuntu universe (free packages maintained by the community, which are more likely to break when someone falls behind on maintenance). This bribe will fund porting FK Convey to SDL.

Price: $50