Once again I'm inviting people to come make games for the GameTank at roughly the same time! And this time there's a theme! A real actionable theme, I'm really gonna do it!! It'll be announced at the start of the jam!!!

The theme is:

FISH

"Okay hold on though, what the heck is a GameTank?"

Glad you asked, hypothetical reader! The GameTank is a brand new 8-bit console! It's got a lot of old-school limitations and is conceptually similar to a "fantasy console", except where Wikipedia describes a fantasy console as "an emulator for a fictitious video game console" this thing is a VERY real console. To be clear, there IS an emulator but the hardware came first and the emulator came when I realized it'd be somewhat useful for debugging and testing.  So you don't necessarily need to have the hardware in hand to develop for it, _{it's just the best way to play GameTank games without pesky operating systems and memory management getting in the way} but they are still quite playable!

Also the GameTank hardware is entirely open source! As are the emulator, the C SDK, and the cartridge flasher!

What kind of specs does it have? BOY HOWDY DOES IT HAVE SPECS

• 3.5MHz 6502 CPU
• another 14MHz CPU doing SOMETHING ELSE (it's sound)
• 128x128 pixels of resolution! have we got any PICO8 fans in the audience??
  • (real CRT displays will end up cutting off the first four or so and last ten or so rows, no wait come back PICO8 fans!)
• Hardware sprites? Where we're going we don't need hardware sprites, we got a BLITTER! You like Amiga? Atari Lynx? I hope so because I'm REALLY BANKING ON THE NICHE HARDWARE ENTHUSIASTS SHOWING UP
  • BTW A BLITTER IS A THING THAT COPIES PIXELS REAL FAST
• We got 200 distinct colors here but unlike a NES we can SHOW ALL OF THEM AT ONCE
• The standard cartridge holds TWO MEGABYTES which is SO MUCH DATA _{BY 1980S STANDARDS}

How do I jam for the GameTank!?

You can write games in assembly, or in C, or we even have somebody working on a Rust toolchain. A C SDK is available to use with the cc65 compiler. Or if you have some other wacky way that you already write code for 6502-based platforms make something in that! On the wiki you can find deep technical descriptions of the hardware and register addresses, and there's even a few video tutorials on GameTank assembly programming on YouTube.

Ultimately you'll be looking to create a GameTank ROM file (*.gtr), make an itch.io page for it and submit it on this here jam page! There will be a tool provided for wrapping your ROM file into an embeddable web player format. After the end of the submission period I'll load submissions onto cartridges and play them on stream!

There's also a discord channel you can join to get help, answers, ideas, or even just say hi!

Finally check out gametank.zone for general info, where you can find links to git repos, the wiki, development blogs about the hardware, and some existing games for the system!