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2009 Coding and Music Competitions
Post Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:25 pm
Last edited by Maxim on Wed Mar 25, 2009 8:10 pm; edited 8 times in total
That's right, this year we will be having another set of annual SMS Power! Anniversary Competitions.


Contribute to the fund

Music competition

Make something musical that is also Sega 8-bit related. It can be a remix of a game tune, or an original composition for the PSG, or just an original composition in cool 8-bit square-wave style. Check out previous competitions for the rules and previous entries:

http://www.smspower.org/music/competition/

Also check out http://mod2psg.kontechs.de/ for a tracker that makes music for the SMS/GG, and http://www.ocremix.org/ for loads of video game remixes.

Coding competition

Quote
"Code something and submit it by 27th March this year or you'll be banned"

Not quite... write some new and original software that runs on a Master System, Game Gear, SG-1000, SF-7000... and impress us all. Here's the old competitions:

http://www.smspower.org/dev/competition/

Learning to code on the Master System is fun! And really hard! Suffer with us all together!

Deadline

All entries must be received by 23:59 GMT on 27th March. This has always been the deadline and we've always been at war with Eurasia.

How to enter

Email your entry to

competition@smspower.org
* Put the text "competition" somewhere in your subject line to avoid spam filtering.
* Tell us your forum name and the title of your entry.
* If you want to include a comment then write it in a text file with the same name as your entry.
* Required file formats: VGM, MP3, SMS, GG, SG, SC, SF7. Render non-standard music formats to MP3 and include the original file.
* One zip file per entry containing all accompanying files, unless you only have one VGM or MP3 anyway
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2009 9:23 am
Woohoo! About time, have high hopes for some exciting entries this year. We've had some interesting new talent come along in recent times.
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2009 1:58 pm
Question: would be an YM2612 vgm suitable for submitting? I made Mega Drive versions of several 8-bit songs.
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2009 3:10 pm
That would count as a remix, as much as if you'd done it in a tracker or played it on a meatspace instrument or whatever.
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2009 5:59 pm
Ok so, hmm, how do I get to the submission form?
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2009 8:50 pm
This is wonderful news. Should we have a similar topic in the dev forum to bring attention to it?
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Post Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 11:02 pm
Oh just a quick note, when you click the Chip In link it goes to a french PayPal page, just be careful of that!!
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 9:12 am
Indeed.. had to jump through a few hoops for it to even let me give it money lol.
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 9:49 am
It has something to do with Bock's account being French. I don't know if it's possible to change that; PayPal is about as usable as eBay.

I had to enter my amount and then click on the recalculate button, and then log in; anything else and it gave an error.
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 12:07 pm
It's refusing my money because it's the same account obviously, so count it for +$50. Which gives you a total of $250 in the pot already. Man that's a lot of money to found t-shirts.
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:30 pm
Well, we should have plenty of entries this year. I am taking time off work to be able to enter :)
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Post Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2009 12:19 am
Maxim wrote
Well, we should have plenty of entries this year. I am taking time off work to be able to enter :)


Now thats what I call dedication, also Bock next week when I get some money, ill be donating to the fund :D
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 4:15 am
Last edited by Bock on Tue Jan 27, 2009 3:41 am; edited 1 time in total
I posted in other threads about The King of Games. As it happens they are in Kyoto and their office very close ot my house, and several of my collegues are friends with them. I am gonna try to see if they can make t-shirts for us. They would be a little expensive but generally of great quality.
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 10:56 pm
If you want to do it on the cheap too, SteveBook knows a friend of his that can do T-Shirts and Stickers too, I think stickers would be a cool idea. Just imagine..... An SMS Power bumper sticker on the back window of my car, good advertising ;)
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Post Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 3:42 am
Let's do simple sprite sticker, what do you think?
Themed stickers sheets, Alex Kidd, Wonder Boy, Fantasy Zone, etc.
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Post Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 12:35 am
If you want i can ask my friend to let me know what it would cost to make tshirts, stickers and hats (baseball caps).
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Post Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 3:54 am
Please do. And ask for constraints, available colors, etc.
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Post Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 2:37 pm
Bock wrote
I posted in other threads about The King of Games. As it happens they are in Kyoto and their office very close ot my house, and several of my collegues are friends with them. I am gonna try to see if they can make t-shirts for us. They would be a little expensive but generally of great quality.


Seems professional!

Also, I contacted a website in Brazil which works like this: you submit a stamp, users vote for the best stamps and the winners get printed to T-shirts sold in the website. It's www.camiseteria.com.br

I just asked if they accept custom prints, let's see.

Hey, we have a lot of designers here (Remember for instance Embryo with his FZ 3-D rendering), I am sure someone will make a good t-shirt layout. Perhaps even in a contest for it!
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 10:46 am
The idea with 'The King of Games' seems tricky to implement because of legal issues.

We need sticker sheets and shirts design ASAP. Can anybody volunteer in creating sticker sheets out of sprites from certain games?
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Post Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 8:40 am
I have made a nice tune, which consists of 8 channels of PSG and 2 channels of PCM... its done on MD (you can nicely do PSG like instruments on FM)... could it fit for music compo ?
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Post Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2009 3:50 am
TmEE wrote
I have made a nice tune, which consists of 8 channels of PSG and 2 channels of PCM... its done on MD (you can nicely do PSG like instruments on FM)... could it fit for music compo ?

Tricky situation. Is the tune a remix or related to a Sega 8-bit game?
I suppose we can accept it but with PCM and 2 PSG it might be confusing or difficult for people to judge the song on a technical point of view.
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Post Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 6:53 am
Its not a remix nor a rearrangement, its original piece...

The 2x PCM channels are strictly percussion only (bass, snare drums, cymbals, toms). 8 channels of PSG are lead, bass and other stuff...
My sound engine does not yet make good use of PSG noise channel so its not used.

I'll prepare a VGM on Saturday (when I get back home).

EDIT: If that will not be enough, I have some tunes that will be :)
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 10:14 am
How are you guys doing with the entries?
Did anybody - coders in particular - have already started something? :)
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 12:12 pm
I have a project underway, but progress is slow and I have doubts about making it in time for the deadline but its not going to stop me from trying anyway.

I have a solid storyboard & outline in place, including charactor sketches etc (mind you I'm a programmer not an artist lol).

I have a bare skeleton framework with some placeholder tiles for the time being.

At this stage I need to both work on the tiles/sprites some more & pad out my game engine to something functional.

Currently my road block is working out proportions, the irony is that there is lots of screen realestate to play with, but sprite limitations etc make filling that space efficiently a bit of a challenge so I am researching how other games approached this.
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 1:29 pm
I have a text file with some ideas in it.
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 1:38 pm
I got many remixes in the process, if I find time to overdub the melodies, ill be pretty much done :)

If only I had my EWI and Boss RC-50 loop station.
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CODERS WAKE UP!
Post Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 3:36 am
Hope you're still there guys :)

I'm not too much concerned about the prize now, we'll find something, but let's work on entries first.
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Post Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:29 am
Well, I didn't write anything yet. For some reason I am instead rewriting BMP2Tile, removing size limits and adding plugin support.
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Post Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 10:54 am
I intend to get stuck into it this weekend, been too distracted lately to do anything solid.
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Post Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 7:10 pm
One week to make something anybody to help me to setup compiler and do a little thing ?
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Post Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 7:35 pm
You can download WLA-DX from this thread:
http://smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10779
And perhaps grab Maxim tutorial as a basic framework to start hacking in:
http://smspower.org/maxim/howtoprogram/
Or source code from an existing project.

What kind of help you would like?
Don't hesitate to move this to the Development forum and ask any question you feel.

I started three days ago, and I've been relatively busy, but everything is possible :)
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Compile.bat
Post Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:49 am
The zip in the thread you mentioned lacked the compile.bat file.

I found it on Maxim's tutorial, just for the record of it:
http://www.smspower.org/maxim/howtoprogram/wlaz80win32.zip

Cheers.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:10 am
Niloct, would you be up for making another little flash animation banner thingamabob again? I quite liked the one from last year :D
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 10:13 am
I added entry information to the first post.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 3:01 pm
Jacko wrote
Niloct, would you be up for making another little flash animation banner thingamabob again? I quite liked the one from last year :D


Too late! And this time I'm on the game Jacko! But all things are conspiring against so lets see how everything goes till Friday.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:15 pm
Maxim wrote
I added entry information to the first post.
Ouch, my submission e-mail didn't follow those rules, did it get through or should I send it again?
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:21 pm
Oops, I forgot that I already posted contradictory instructions! I'll sort it out.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 10:35 pm
Niloct wrote
Jacko wrote
Niloct, would you be up for making another little flash animation banner thingamabob again? I quite liked the one from last year :D


Too late! And this time I'm on the game Jacko! But all things are conspiring against so lets see how everything goes till Friday.

No worries, do your best :) If it doesn't happen this year its no big deal
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Post Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 6:31 pm
Is unfinished stuff allowed? I'm in rush since 4day (bit too late :p) to code something but i don't think i can finish it at time... it will be more a demo than a game i think...
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Deadline Police
Post Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 8:12 pm
The deadline is officially 23:59 GMT on 27th March. Any suggestion that me and Omar have conspired to extend the deadline by a day would be wholly inaccurate. We only extended it by 23 hours and 59 minutes.

People who submit their entry during 27th March are strongly advised to contribute to the fund to avoid bad karma.
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Post Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 8:23 pm
So he have an extra day left, cause at least one previous competition had this same deadline but for 26th instead.

But that still is not enough I think... Perhaps is better to have a few more days (the weekend ?) at the exchange of more entries ?
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Post Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 8:48 pm
Well, even if more days is available i think it will be still more a demo than a game (i have still big parts to write and some bugs to fix) and i can't contribute to fund... so better to don't release it for the contest... :)
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Post Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:48 pm
Grz, better to release even if unfinished :)
If your embarrassment is too high it will be a motivation for you to actually release a proper fixed version later. But for now I think it will be great.to release what you have.

Failure = Tried = Took Risks = Embody the spirit of competition
Consider everyone who has not tried..

Good luck!
.. I am late too ..

Of course I would love to get it extended to Saturday. Maybe I can hijack this website?
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Post Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 12:25 am
If only there was some way for you to edit the forum posting...

(Saturday is no use for me, I'm married and therefore have no choice about what to do on the weekend.)
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Post Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 8:47 am
Bock wrote
Grz, better to release even if unfinished :)
If your embarrassment is too high it will be a motivation for you to actually release a proper fixed version later. But for now I think it will be great.to release what you have.

Failure = Tried = Took Risks = Embody the spirit of competition
Consider everyone who has not tried..

Well, when I released the Robbie game for the MiniGame compo some years ago, I got so much slammed and trashed about it, simply because I did not implement a single bit check, even if I had left the space for it and put a lot of effort in the rest. I did not have the time then, but I received so much garbage with the comments, that I demotivated myself and stopped coding games for the SMS for years.

P.S. The fund image on the index page seems to not work from here.
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Post Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:15 am
Guys, I dunno if I can get an entry in, its mostly done but I don't think ill have the time to cut in the melody track. I will do my best, hopefully at like 11.58pm GMT right before the 27th I can get something in (this is like early morning Saturday for me).

Thanks Guys,
Scott

P.S. If anyone wants reasons why, please PM, im quite happy to tell you :)
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Post Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 3:25 pm
DrHirudo: Sorry to hear that. As far as I remember it, it was on another website competition with lots of computers and computers scene generally have higher experience and development standards. Anyway it doesn't excuse it. Glad you are back at it! Feel free to update your entry if you feel so, you still have about 36 hours left :)

The fund thing use a Flash applet. Can you see flash on your computer? It says $371 but it is missing $50 that I am donating myself (Paypal doesn't allow to send myself money) so we're at a total of $421 - enough for plenty of t-shirts and trillions of stickers. Hmm.

PS: Do you want to have your old posts, including those with your names, imported under your new forum account?
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Post Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 4:01 pm
Bock wrote
DrHirudo: Sorry to hear that. As far as I remember it, it was on another website competition with lots of computers and computers scene generally have higher experience and development standards. Anyway it doesn't excuse it.
I am planning on updating it soon, even if it passes the 1KB limit, it will not be a compo entry anyway. I hate myself for being so lazy then though.
Quote

Glad you are back at it! Feel free to update your entry if you feel so, you still have about 36 hours left :)
I worked to try to compress the graphics and free space for title music, but I failed with aplib pack, because I was not able to find a packer. The one I found under DOS worked only for .com files, so it did not work. I think I will leave as it is now.
Quote
PS: Do you want to have your old posts, including those with your names, imported under your new forum account?

Yeah, I have seen the old posts claim thread, but I missed the deadline back then. I think I have my posts under different names if that is a problem.
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Post Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:23 pm
Maxim wrote
All entries must be received by 23:59 GMT on 27th March. This has always been the deadline and we've always been at war with Eurasia.
Wait, last time I checked it was 23:59 on the 26th, your old post said something like "that way we can play and listen all together on the 27th"
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Post Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:27 pm
Yeah, but deadline extensions are a tradition around here... also, we still only have three entries in total.
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