Bored in your home office ?
interested in winning a MEGA65 Nexys version with nice printed case ?
looking for an opportunity to code a bit in BASIC10 and reuse your aged BASIC2 skills ?
look no further:
I'll post the official announcement here:
February Mega65 Basic Challenge!!!
This month everyone who successfully completes the task has a chance to win as they will be entered into the prize draw at the end of the month. Once again the prize is a Digilent Nexys A7 in a lovely 3D printed case and pre-configured with the Mega65 core.
So this time the task is to recreate/reimagine ANY classic video game you want but using the Mega65 implementation of BASIC 10. You can go simple and remake pong, or you can go all out and make something much more elaborate the choice is yours. Every entry that can be considered a game will be entered into the prize draw and we will work through them on stream on the 27th February. The rules and notes are as follows:
RULES
1) For consistency and ease of testing, entries must be created using the XEMU Emulator, using Hernans experimental VIC-IV branch found here: https://github.lgb.hu/xemu/ (bottom of page)
2) Also for consistency and ease of testing, everyone must use the same C65 ROM in the XEMU installation. Rom filename is 911001.bin with checksum $4bcf and can be found through an online search. This is not a patched version of this particular rom.
3) Games must be entirely in BASIC10 using the current state of the XEMU and C65 ROM noted in rules 1 and 2, with no machine code component.
4) Games must be considered a valid game. That is they must have some connection to an existing retro game and be actually playable. No submitting 10 PRINT "PACMAN" 20 GOTO 10 !!!
5) Music and sound effects are not required but of course would be nice.
6) Entries must be submitted by 14:00 GMT on 27th February to me via Discord DM to give me time to double check all is good before the stream that night.
https://discord.gg/gzvdc5R2
7) Entries must be saved to and submitted in .D81 format. See notes below for how to setup your D81 file All valid entries will be entered into a prize draw live on the Feb 27th stream. A winner will be chosen at random at midnight, you do not need to be present to claim your prize, but of course it would be lovel y if you were!
9) By entering you give me the right to compile all entries onto a single disk image and release to the Mega65 community for free.
NOTES
1) By default XEMU will use a D81 file that is part of the emulators SD card image. It is much easier to submit your D81 file if you attach an external D81 file instead. The easiest way to do this is to point the XEMU shortcut to an empty image somewhere using the -8 "MYDISK.d81" command line switch.
2) The C65 ROM being used was never fully completed or tested by Commodore, there WILL be bugs and/or broken features. However everyone is working on the same ROM so all is fair. Please feel free to check the Mega65 Discord to see if your particular bug has been reported/fixed and if not consider adding a bug report as this will really help the Mega65 ROM team to iron out issues.
https://discord.gg/MKWqVwha
3) Likewise the emulator is a work in progress and understandably not everything will be correctly supported at this time (for instance there is no sprite collision), if in doubt ask first in the challenge channel in my discord to see if anyone else knows of the issue, and if not then in the BASIC channel in the Mega65 discord to see if it is an issue or simply not supported.
Good Luck!!!