Do any homebrew devs burn prototype / sample cartridges?

[fcgamer | 4,729]

From where I stand, we always burn a few sample cartridges over the course of development of games; sometimes it is just for fun to give out to friends, family, and collectors, while other times it's done for display at expos, to send off to someone to shop the game around hoping for an article in a magazine or to get the game into a local shop. Even at the lowest level, I sometimes burn carts just to try the game out and see how it sounds and looks on a proper CRT television. 

Nowadays though, most people have flash devices or are running emulators that connect to their monitors and stuff, so I am guessing that a lot of modern devs don't even bother to burn sample cartridges, rather just running a ROM from some other source. Perhaps I'm totally incorrect though?

So I am just curious about it.

[Tanooki | 4,936]

From what I've seen there's a blending.
- Flashing your own cart buying the pieces and they're pre-assembled or not
- Bypassing an existing cart and flashing a chip to attach
- Everdrive(etc)
- Emulator

Recently there have been some games in beta or partially into alpha that work enough you see a cart get shipped off to some YT talking head to run a preview of it hoping to build hype.

[Sumez | 2,966]

If you don't frequently test on hardware you can run into some unfortunate challenges late in development.

I had a really cool effect in a game I had to scratch entirely after working on it in emulators for days. When I finally tried it on cartridge, the effect it had on the sprite memory was pretty severe, which no emulators show! Mesen actually has a lot of features that can be enabled to replicate sprite corruption, but it's not able to appropriate how bad it can get on a real NES.

If I had a flash cartridge I'd probably test on that more frequently, but I imagine they won't be able to shed light on most potential initialization errors, which is the more common thing you'll come across on hardware compared to emulation.

[erac | 78]

They exist but are rarer for the reasons you listed. Mainly for expos, early review copies etc nowadays.

[JamesRobot | 5,806]

I've tested for a few games and it was almost always via PowerPak or emulator.  Just easier and more cost effective to distribute multiple builds I suppose.

But I did receive a tester copy of Full Quiet which was probably 85% of the final draft.  Much of the exposition and story were not in place to prevent spoiling the game for the testers.

 

I also have a unique Spook-o-tron cart which is ~175% of the final Kickstarter release.  It contains additional glitched iterations of all of the levels.  Some are very cool and playable but it does reach a point where the levels are impossible to clear.  It was custom made by Beau and is my favorite test build just prior to release.

[Deadeye | 1,596]

I have a few test copies.  As Sumez said, my understanding is you will miss issues if you only test on emulators, or on the flip side, flash carts will exhibit bugs that do not exist on hardware copies (I've run into this while testing everdrive's GTROM mapper).  It is important to test on all platforms you plan to release on (physical, digital, or flashcarts).

[dale_coop | 162]

I have a lot of test copies of the games I worked on (KUBO3, SkateCat, Underground Adventure, chibi Monster Brawl, Dungeon and Doomknights, ....). I am pretty sure all the devs still have their test carts.

[toma | 71]

I have some EB and Alfonzo test carts done before the Limited Run campaign, just to make sure they worked okay and I was happy with the quality. I think if you're dealing with manufacturing you pretty much have to do that, it'd be irresponsible not to

[Ferris Bueller | 495]

Just so everyone here knows, I buy homebrew prototypes and dev carts. It's in my sig!  

[SlowMoleDev | 33]

We do our own hardware design, so we do.

[Memblers | 22]

I have a prototype of Garage Cart, has sockets for EPROMs.  It's what I used to test it.

One of my favorite homebrew protos (I consider it one, at least) is The Incident.  It was the first release to use GTROM, I had a small run of green (vs black for production) proto boards made that I hand-soldered, maybe 6 or 8 of them, before the big production run.  I gave 2 of those to KHan.  Later, when I got my CIB copy of the game, it's the normal release except using one of those green proto boards.  So that was awesome.