Tactus Alpha: v0.3 "Rainbow!"

I'm pleased to announce that Tactus has a new mapper! Originally Action53 was used for the purposes of the NESDev Compo, but for the full game I've always suspected my ambitions were going to outgrow its capabilities. Enter Rainbow, a new cartridge in development by the lovely Broke Studio!

Despite being in prototype phase, Rainbow is nearly feature complete and already planned to be used to ship another game, Super Tilt Bro. I have reasonably high confidence that it will be available for a production run of Tactus once the time comes. That's a long way off, but Broke Studio is already in contact and I'm hoping to get a development board as soon as one is available.

Switching to Rainbow unlocks several exciting new features:

• Significantly relaxed ROM size and Art budget constraints
• Expansion audio similar to VRC6, which can work even on unmodified consoles
• Graphics enhancements roughly on par with MMC5

Additionally, ditching the admittedly clever z-saw library unlocks proper raster tricks, which means I can cleanup room edge transitions and do other typical NES things that were previously difficult / impossible.

Over the holidays I ported Tactus to the Rainbow mapper, then slightly expanded the "Zone 1" music to make use of the VRC6 channels. It takes considerable technical wizardry to stream the output from those channels so that they will be audible on a stock frontloading NES, with no mods needed. I'll do a proper technical writeup of this once I verify that it works properly on hardware. For an idea of just how crazy this is, have a look at the event viewer when rendering a typical frame:

Patreon Builds

To help fund development, I'll be publishing early test builds to my Patrons of any tier. On itch, I will continue to post development logs, progress updates, and sometimes more polished test builds, (always on a delay) so you won't be missing too much if you choose to wait.

https://www.patreon.com/zeta0134

Since Rainbow is prototype hardware, emulator support is going to be mostly missing / inconsistent at first. RusticNES is already updated, and I'll include a copy of Mesen2 for those who'd rather not play the game in a browser. A mapper configuration for modern flashcarts (N8 Pro, etc) should be possible in theory, but isn't developed yet.

Other than the technical update, for this build the actual gameplay is largely unchanged from the compo build. This is definitely a black triangle sort of achievement, but I want to get it out there and start trying to publish test builds much more regularly.

Future Plans

Persune was kind enough to submit a new music track for the game, so I'll be working to flesh out the mechanics in the area where it will play. Meanwhile I'm working on some enemy designs for entirely new zones, so look forward to those in future builds.

Enjoy!