SMS Power 2026 Compo Entries

[RT-55J]

it's that time of year again!!!

If you want to peruse other entries to the 2026 SMSPower compo, you can follow these links:

• Coding (23 entries)
• Music (10 entries)
• Hacks (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

[RT-55J]

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 should be familiar to all viewers of this forum, so I will refrain from elaborating on it.)

Multicolour Mars by joe

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!)

Ship Schematic Demo by badcomputer, LOVEPENGUIN

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.

Letter Home by Mark Tree SMS

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.

El Viento Opening Demake by lunoka

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.

[neen]

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

[RT-55J]

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

[RT-55J]

Super Mario Bros.
SMS Port Proof of Concept
by LackofTrack

This baby can be considered the "main attraction" of this compo. It's sort of the holy grail of console alt-history, and it's a pretty decent effort too. The author manually translated the original 6502 source code to Z80 assembly, and the result is astonishingly accurate! The physics are so spot-on that I was able to do a walljump with some effort.

Graphically, I'm not particularly fond of the Super Mario All-Stars style that this is aping, but I will admit it at least makes for a good demonstration of the SMS's graphical strengths versus the NES.

The demo only contains the first level, which is fine, but the author has shown some interest in completing the thing. But who knows? Maybe someday, someone will do the opposite with Alex Kidd in Miracle World...

ERRATA: The original version of this demo had very noticeable loading times for the levels. The author originally chalked it up to some weird refactoring of the code they did to get the game to work with the SMS's single nametable. I had my doubts, so I took a look at the nametable viewer when the screen was disabled, and saw that it was taking the game 5 or 6 frames to draw a single 8px wide column to VRAM. I informed the author of this issue, and they noticed that they were accidentally loading the level tileset (an operation that takes 4/5 frames) for every single column they were writing, causing the initial level load to be nearly 3 seconds instead of an imperceptible half-second. The author uploaded a hotfix very soon after that.

[RT-55J]

Egle in Parallel Worlds by Guy

This is an Alex Kidd fangame in an original engine. In it, you play a Prince Egle, the less famous brother of Alex Kidd. Unlike Alex, he doesn't know the martial art of "punching", he's been cursed to be tiny unless he eats burgers that slide on the ground after coming out of boxes, and he has a lot of momentum... hey! Wait a minute!

This game is a trick! It's a secret Mareo game! All these people on this forum that still censors the unholy word of Ni****do are sure to be offended!

Anyhow, this little demo has you going through four "parallel worlds" of mareo-likes to find a plumber who can solve your plumbing problem. The controls take a bit of getting used to, and the game likes to lag in certain situations, but it's a pretty decent platforming engine at the end of the day.

I wouldn't mind seeing this turned into a full game. I can already imagine a few other worlds this guy could add to it...

[RT-55J]

We interrupt this thread to bring you and important discovery about Lock-On Technology for the SMS.

[RT-55J]

I just finished trying out all 23 coding entries, and the last entry I played was AI slop, so we're going into the Slop Corner tonite!!    

Jet Pack by Luckaosts

That cover art certainly is a choice, especially when the game looks like this:

Credit where credit's due, though: I pointed out a couple bugs to the author and he fixed them, which is nice.

It's a very rudimentary CVBasic game, but I don't begrudge it for existing. I'm just confused why they wanted cover art that looks like that, when classic SMS-style box art is within the artistic capabilities of every human on earth.

Stalactites by haroldoop

This is a nice little single-screen shmup that would be home on the Atari 2600. I liked it. It's a fun 10-20 minutes.

However, looking at the author's GitHub, apparently the title screen (and a couple other assets) were created using Google Gemini:

I guess the awful lettering at the bottom and the word "CONPETITION" should have tipped me off, but again: why do this??

[RT-55J]

Master System SFX Generator

Not going to bother posting pictures of this, since it's just an electron app. It has an AI generated logo in the window at all times, which makes me wonder if the whole app is vibe-coded.

Feature-wise, it's okay, I guess, but there were a couple things I couldn't figure out. Aside from allowing you to use a combination of channels, this feels like a lesser version of the lovely sn_jsfxr.

Akalabeth1000 by dark

Any now we come to the biggest disappointment of the jam for me: this port of Akalabeth, by somebody who beat me to the punch.

At first glance it appears to be rather competent and polished. It claims to be feature complete and winnable, with just a few bits of polish straggling behind...

...but the description contains an ominous sentence:

The code is written entirely in C and optimized using AI so that it runs on the SG-1000 with 1KB of RAM.

The game is very unstable. Issues include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The border color on the title screen flashing (if you have borders enabled in your emulator)
• The screen flashing a bright color every time you take a step on the overworld
• The game randomly hanging when you exit a shop
• The screen going completely dark if you enter and exit a shop multiple times (game is technically still playable)
• Item counts not being reset upon resurrection (including your food, which will be negative if you happened to starve to death).
• Some dungeon palettes being hard or impossible to see with:
• The video on the SMS Power channel ends when it becomes impossible to see.
• The game randomly crashing spectacularly (either immediately or after making a choice) when you enter the castle (meaning you cannot even initiate the main quest).

I think I should campaign for an AI ban for next years compo.


Next up: Some good entries!