11 or 12 years ago, I had an idea idea: what if I replaced the sound core of a NES emulator with the Jingle Cats? Instead of playing simple square waves, trigger goofy samples that play at the appropriate pitch.

I built a prototype of this, based on BizHawk, and it was delightful! But I never released it, because I never quite got a reasonable UI for providing and tuning the samples. The only evidence of its existence is a YouTube archive of a twitch stream I did. Over the years, the codebase got absurdly out of date, and I had no good way to bring it up to speed. But the project has never entirely left my mind, and I've been threatening to ressurect it for years.

Well, the time has finally come. Behold Meowio, a hack of JSNES that, once and for all, answers the question, "what if the NES had a sound chip that meowed at you?" Comes with a fun selection of ROMs and samples out of the box, and also allows you to supply your own!

1 large game (2 medium games), 3 small games, 1 medium game

produced by 000, 888, DEN, EIT, FF2, and GIS

The project files are included, so you can edit these if you'd like. If you do so, read the README.txt.

If you would like to participate in upcoming releases,
either join the DISCORD
or email us at jrpgcombatsystems @ gmail . com

Oh no GLorious Trainwrekcs is under a ddos threat! Hide your smartwatches kids! Will Juni be able to ward off the hacker?????? in this Knytt Stories level?

Two hacks of my favorite section of cactus’ game Psychomnium. For the first, I simply isolated the “bee” section, made it scroll, added a second checkpoint, and added a second bee. It’s extremely difficult, not impossible, super satisfying upon completion, and a perfect illustration of “masocore” design. Piano players might get a kick out of its requirement for two-handed dexterity. For the second, I used the same isolated, scrolling level and the extra checkpoint, but with a single bee and I modified the controls so that the bee accelerates upwards the entire time that the Up Arrow button is held down as opposed to the previous requirement for several distinct button presses. The idea is to illustrate just how much a seemingly minor control tweak can impact the “feel” of a game’s play. The game is currently Windows-only.

I've been kind of awful this month so all I have is a quick ROM hack of Gridball, an old game of mine. Instead of a paddle-and-ball game, this is now a Snake-like game very similar to Poing! by Rick Holzgrave, and also very similar to DragBall and, to a lesser extent, TrailblaZer.

Click in front of the moving ball to place a block. The ball will turn 90 degrees at the block depending on the ball's colour. The computer-controlled paddle at the bottom can change the ball's colour if the ball hits it. You can also click on an existing block to remove it.

Coding, art and audio by Auntie Pixelante.
Extra stuff by me.

This is a quick mod in which I merged Anna's good game Tombed and my hack Tombed II into the same game, and also providing a means of making your own levels for it. There's no editor yet, but you can use Notepad for now.

The way I did this was by exporting the level data into a very basic text file format.

The first line is "1" if you want left-right wraparound, or "0" if you don't.
The second line is "1" if you want bottom spikes ("skewers"), or "0" if you don't.
The third line is the line number where, when the top half of Jane enters, Jane does a victory dance.
The fourth line is the line number where the skewers, if any, start to break up.
Then there's at most 598 lines of text that are, at most, 8 characters long. Missing lines are assumed to be blank.
Each line corresponds to a row of blocks in the tomb. Each character equals one block.

# - metal block
B - blue block
G - green block
C - cyan block
O - wild block
! - upper-left corner of checkpoint where Jane respawns. Jane is 2 blocks by 2 blocks tall. Checkpoints trigger as soon as Jane reaches their Y position.
$ - non-solid gold (as in Tombed). Doesn't obey gravity.
* - solid gold that Jane can stand on. It obeys gravity and can sit on skewers, but is destroyed by spikes.
. - solid gold only appears here if Jane respawns near here. Use this to make gold persist from checkpoint to checkpoint.
@ - the upper-left corner of the 'debug point'. Jane will start a new game here without the opening cutscene, and with the spikes and skewers lowered appropriately. She will also respawn here regardless of any checkpoints.
Anything else - emptiness.

At the 'victory' line, Jane will do a victory dance until she is made to start falling again (which can be instantly).

At the 'breakup' line, the skewers will start to stick to blocks that happen to be underneath them, causing the floor to open so that Jane can exit.

Jane wins by falling below the 598th line.

As for the game - pick the left side to play Tombed, right to play Tombed II, and middle to get an Open File dialog to play any text file. (Note: no file error checking in this version yet.)