1K Menu with instructions

vdub_bobby · August 26, 2005

Inspired by P Slocum, I wrote a 1K menu (i.e., for a multi-cart) which includes, onscreen, basic instructions for each of the 3 games.

It has a few issues...

It is displaying about 200 visible scanlines, more than the standard 192 (I shortened the overscan so it outputs a stable 262 scanlines).

It isn't extraordinarily pretty, though there it isn't as monochrome as the first version.

Other than that, it's pretty solid. Select among the three games with the SELECT switch, scroll the instructions with the joystick (L to scroll up, R to scroll down), and press RESET to start the selected game (which I think will work, but right now there are no games included so pressing RESET will just restart the menu).

There is room for about* 28 12-character lines of instructions, spread amongst the three games; each game title must be less than 12 characters as well.

So, thoughts? Anyone can feel free to use this or modify it in any way they see fit.

*The total room for instructions depends on the size of the character set. The character set used in this binary has all the letters except X and Z, the digit '1', a period, an apostrophe, an exclamation point, a space, plus the left and right halves of the goofy smiley face. Each additional character added to the character set will take up 5 bytes of ROM space; eliminating a character will free up the same amount. Each line of text takes 12 bytes, so eliminating 3 characters would allow an additional line of text. Since there are no free bytes (or maybe one?) in the ROM, adding just one character to the character set would mean losing one line of text. Make sense?

And I hope Thomas doesn't mind, but for lack of any better ideas, I used his 3 game titles and their instructions for this li'l demo.

EDIT: attached new versions with working game-start code. To demonstrate, it will play a different tone depending on which game you select.

TinyMenuWithInstructions.zip

Edited August 26, 2005 by vdub_bobby