Homebrew games for retro consoles have seen a rise over the years thanks to new tools and community-made development kits, which help a lot in the process of creating brand-new games for older consoles.

This past month, romhacker and developer kandowontu, also known for his Starfox EX romhack for the original Starfox and several FastROM hacks for over 60 titles for the SNES, took over the mantle of main development of the hack, and alongside a team of great artists and other coders, have been working lately on a new homebrew game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) titled "Famidash", a demake of the popular rhythm-action platformer indie game Geometry Dash developed originally by Robert Topala on 2013 (also be found on Steam).

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The full list of people involved in the development for Famidash are:

• Zephyrside & kandowontu - Main developers
• Ficus - Graphics and levels
• Zenith - Graphics and music
• Aquamarine - Music
• Jroweboy - Assembly/C optimizations, and parralaxed background graphics
• jaezu - Music
• Alexmush - Assembly/C optimizations
• AleFunky - Music and levels

Famidash is currently being developed in what seems to be a combination of C language alongside 6502 assembly, which makes for an interesting combination given how most retro games were entirely developed in assembly language, only starting using C around the time the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 came along.

For those interested in trying it out, Famidash is currently in a beta/demo stage, but developer kandowontu is pushing fixes frequently on the Famidash GitHub repository with the latest update being v4.05.1 released just a week ago.

Famidash source code at GitHub
Famidash Discord server

 

[DragonMals]

Given the limitations of the NES, this is a well done homebrew port. I really like how close it looks to when GD originally was. Maybe this version doesn't have hiccups with the temp lol.

 

[LNLenost]

If GD was a Nintendo game, this was already taken down

 

[Cranesbill]

I must say this is pretty impressive

 

[Lostbhoy]

Interesting! Love playing GD with my daughter... This could help me sneakily practice as she's a jedi!

Looks pretty well done too!

 

[Xdqwerty]

Is robtop ok with this?

 

[Quore]

No f*cking way, this looks AWESOME
I can't wait for someone to pick this game and make a achievement-set on RetroAchievments

 

[Xdqwerty]

I also wonder if the "final" build will have all the official levels or only the ones avaliable on the lite version plus the ones from the spin off games

 

[DragonMals]

Is robtop ok with this?

I also wonder if the "final" build will have all the official levels or only the ones avaliable on the lite version plus the ones from the spin off games

I'm sure that Rob would be okay with something like this. This is a pretty well done port of the game and I'm sure that him too would approve of it. I hope that it has some of the stages from the spinoffs too. I wonder if there's even a wayg to play them in the base game.

 

[Xdqwerty]

I wonder if there's even a wayg to play them in the base game.

Theres an account in the game called "robsvault" that uploads (copyable unmodified versions of) the official levels from across all the games. and theres also this: https://geode-sdk.org/mods/bitz.moregames/

 

[Hanafuda]

* watches demo level *

Nope.

 

[x65943]

That's impressive

 

[Flame]

Now kids will beg they mums to buy them the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER to run famidash on Nestopia.

Great going kandowontu...

 

[CMDreamer]

Sadly the GitHub page is a 404... U_U

Hold on, the link above is wrong.

It's dangeorus to go alone! Try this. (not my property, just adjusted it a bit).

https://github.com/famidash/famidash/

 

[TheDerpyDolphin]

Imagine if they eventually get to Deadlocked lmao. Still wouldn’t be as hard as some of the official NES games though

 

[Quore]

Now kids will beg they mums to buy them the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER to run famidash on Nestopia.

Great going kandowontu...

Mommy i SWEAR i need that RTX 4080 SUPER and 64Gb RAM to do the school homework

 

[btjunior]

Looks fucking awesome!

 

[LNLenost]

No f*cking way, this looks AWESOME
I can't wait for someone to pick this game and make a achievement-set on RetroAchievments

hold on, retroachievements supports romhacks too?

 

[SuperGamer64]

This is so cool. Excited to try it!

 

[FicusmcHousePlant]

As a developer of Famidash, I can say that Kandowontu is not the main developer / creator of the project.
This port was originally started by Zephyrside in October of last year, and Zephyr has temporarilly
left the development team in December. Kando is currently taking over Zephyr's role until they return
in the near future. There are also more developers currently working on the project:

Ficus - Graphics and levels
Zenith - Graphics and music
Aquamarine - Music
Jroweboy - Assembly/C optimizations, and parralaxed background graphics
jaezu - Music
Alexmush - Assembly/C optimizations
AleFunky - Music and levels

For the creators of this post, if you can update the credits and the main developer, it would be a huge
thanks from the Famidash development team

Many thanks,

-Ficus mcHousePlant