After a brief hiatus from the scene, RGCD are back once again with another instalment of our popular 16KB cartridge game development competition! That's right peeps, grab your keyboard and that old worn copy of The Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide; it's time for six months of gamedev on the world's best 8-bit machine!

For those of you new to the idea of game development on the Commodore 64 and are wondering what is possible within the limits of 16KB, why not check out the entries of the previous competitions here? - 2011 - 2012 - 2013 - 2014 -2015

The Rules

So you can get started, the basic rules are laid out below:

• The competition deadline is 00:00 GMT on the 1st july 2019 (midnight on the 30th of june) - this gives you over 6 months of development time.
• There will be no competition unless a minimum of six entries are submitted by the deadline.
•  All submitted games must be in working 16KB cartridge ROM (.CRT or .BIN) format. Help is available to test ROM files on real hardware. Compression is allowed (and encouraged) but the final file size must not exceed 16KB!
• The games submitted must be your own work, and not sold commercially or released previously (outside of this competition).
• PAL must be supported, with additional NTSC support optional (but encouraged). If possible, please consider GS compatibility (no keyboard requirement).
• The maximum number of single entries from a person or group is set at three. If more entries are made, the applicant has the opportunity to replace a previous entry with a new one.
• Applicants that submit a valid entry (see above) will receive one physical cartridge copy of their game for free. This is one free cartridge per submission, not one per team member (although more can be purchased at cost price)!
• The applicant owns their work, all rights remnain with the developer/team!
• There will be a panel of judges (announced in full over the coming weeks), and entries will be scored on a point distribution basis across several criteria. The decision of the panel is final.
• Members of the judging panel *can* enter games themselves, but cannot self-vote (award points to their own release).

If you are interested in entering the competition, either submit an entry on this itch.io jam page or send us a message via the form on our website's contact page confirming that you'd like to take part and we will be in touch with more details. 

The Prizes

As well as a free copy of their submitted game on cartridge, there will also be trophies and other prizes (TBA) awarded to the entrants behind games that place 1st, 2nd and 3rd (as decided by the judging panel). 

Reference Material & Useful Links

The following links may prove useful regarding the 16KB cartridge format:

http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=base:code_frame_for_16_kb_crt-images
codebase64.org/doku.php?id=base:assembling_your_own_cart_rom_image
unusedino.de/ec64/technical/aay/c64/memcfg.htm

In addition to this, our resident cartridge expert Dr. Martin "Enthusi" Wendt has written some notes that should help, and if you are looking for an IDE for modern platforms then check out Georg "Endurion" Rottensteiner's C64Studio here.

Have fun!