Homebrew: MashyMashy: Nes Game for Mash Skills

[RHDNBot]

Update By: mitch3a

MashyMashy is a NES "game" for measuring mash speed. Possibly more of a tool than a game, it allows you to choose a mash button and time limit, then you mash to your hearts content. Afterwards, your total hits and rate of button pushes per second are displayed.

It was written by Mitch3a as a way to learn core NES development concepts (mostly based on nerdy nights tutorials) while writing something useful, especially for the speedrunning community. It was started about a month ago and is considered complete. Although there is room for expansion and the source is public for all those who want to add to it, Mitch3a has stated that it does one job well and he is ready to move on to a full feature game.

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[Josephine Lithius]

This is exactly something I've been looking for!  Up until now, I've been using JoyToKey and any random "clicks-per-second" site, which works just fine... but with this, I don't need to do any fancy mapping and I get to see some helpful, relevant stats at the end of the mashing session!

Thank you very much, Mitch3a!

[mitch3a]

Probably a good place to mention that Omnigamer developed a far more complete/thorough tool. It allows many controller types, has diagrams, tells you what you might be doing wrong (holding the button down too long, etc). The only downside is that its special hardware that only he has. You can find more info about it here: https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/agdq_2017_mashattack_tester_and_tournament.html

[Josephine Lithius]

Way to knock your own work, man.  Heh heh heh.

But yeah, I'll check that out, too!

[Omnigamer]

For what it's worth, anybody can make their own equivalent hardware to my setup with a suitable microcontroller. Firmware isn't yet open-source, but should be soon after I clean it all up. Some version of the host-side software is already available, but probably needs to be updated. If you want to make an actual "box" yourself, I have a 3D model available for printing.

But that's beside the point; good work on the program! Several folks mentioned it at AGDQ, so it is getting some notice. SNES port soon?

[mitch3a]

Props to cleaning up your code before open sourcing it. Mine is a mess, but hoping to not go back to it. But in general, wasn't knocking my work so much as letting those who were interested in this kind of thing know about an alternative that I think is also really cool.

As for SNES, the thought of it got me really excited at first, but I'm not done learning NES and working on a real game will probably consume all my free dev time. So unless I get so discouraged that I take a SNES detour, I'd encourage someone else to pick it up. For anyone learning from scratch, I found it to be the perfect size/scope for figuring out how things work.