Congrats Matt Greer for solving software distribution! E-Reader card with Solitaire delivered in an envelope by mail earlier today. Love it!
@sethmlarson Did they fit that on one side of one card?
Because if yes, that's
@joshbressers It fit into two "long" E-Reader strips so that's a maximum ~4KiB of Z80 assembly. They actually published a complete write-up, too!
https://mattgreer.dev/blog/cramming-solitaire-onto-a-nintendo-ereader-card/
@sethmlarson That's pretty cool. Have you dabbled with development yet or is that huge lift?
@webology no not yet, but Matt has some resources and tools for developing for Z80 w/ the E-Reader's specific APIs.
@sethmlarson Back in the late 90s, I wrote a GameBoy game maker using VB6 that spit out Z80 code. it was more or less a multi-step dialog to get the basics. That's the last time I touched Z80 code and I'm not sure I ever will again.
@webology @sethmlarson This sounds like fun piece of Game Boy dev history. Are any of the games or the tool itself still around?
@bbbbbr @sethmlarson Na, GB Studio or whatever it was in the 00s was way better and I switched to it. Plus they worked with C so I could code a Zelda-clone with it.
Mine was a Wizard that let you pick the screen options for a fixed, side-scrolling, or four direction (like Zelda) and then I had some other options. It basically wrote out some files, and after you compiled it, you could move a box around the screen.
@webology @sethmlarson Still sounds kinda cool to me, I love nooks and crannies of devtool history. :)
@sethmlarson Now this is really cool!
I never would have imagined that the e-reader would be getting homebrew support in 2024.
I have always been curious about the e-reader and always wanted to mess around with one but could never justify the purchase.
This seems like such a novelty more than anything but impressive nonetheless and hopefully is just the beginning of many small games being released on this format.
@Judeau heck yeah! We love late Homebrew :) Matt created a web emulator for E-Reader games so you can play without the hardware too: https://github.com/city41/ereader-z80-emulator
Definitely a novelty, I'm just happy to cheer for someone keeping these niche consoles from childhood alive :)