SABS Forum

it's that time of year again!!!

Quote from: RT-55J on Sat, 2026 - 03 - 28, 05:13 PMIf you want to peruse other entries to the 2026 SMSPower compo, you can follow these links:

• Coding (https://www.smspower.org/Competitions/Coding-2026) (23 entries)
• Music (https://www.smspower.org/Competitions/Music-2026) (10 entries)
• Hacks (https://www.smspower.org/Competitions/Hacks-2026) (3 entries)

Lots of fun looking stuff here.

gonna be posting short reviews to these games off and on this week, in lieu of a stream

From a cursory glance, it appears that 5 of the entries in the coding category are "demos" in the demoscene sense (rather than "demos" in the game or productivity software sense).

(My Last Minute Demo (https://www.smspower.org/Homebrew/RTsLastMinuteDemo-SMS) should be familiar to all viewers of this forum, so I will refrain from elaborating on it.)


This is a demonstration of the almost-never-used "multicolor" mode the SMS's VDP had. It was a legacy mode inherited from the SG-1000's TMS9918 video chip, but even in that context it almost never got used. It basically was a direct-color bitmap (kinda) mode, with the caveat that you were stuck with some really chunky pixels. Like all of the SMS's legacy video modes, it doesn't work on the Mega Drive.

This demo, interestingly, is meant specifically for the SMS rather than the SG-1000. It uses the SMS's color palette, line interrupts, and increased video memory to make these effects possible.

(There was a bug when I first tried it where one of the effects wouldn't animate in some emulators (if the RNG was initialized to 0x00 it would be stuck there), but I reported it and it got fixed!)


This is a simple demo demonstrating a single effect (a 16-frame animation). It looks very polished, and has a good little tune. Very nice.


This is a very simple "Hello World" style demo with two illustrations, very similar to mine. I like it. Just brace yourself for an Auditory Experience at the start :)

I hope to see more from this guy.


I hadn't seen El Viento's intro before this, but it turns out that this is an astonishingly accurate demake of it! Only like 3 effects from the original are missing!

Apparently the author of this wants to demake the whole game like this. I wish them the best of luck.

very cool jam with good turnout. i played some of these recently and there's some impressive stuff.

i really want to participate in a game jam at some point. but i think i work too slow

The secret is to find a jam that doesn't care about when you started your project. Some jams are chill like that.