Hey everybody,

It’s been really exciting to finally get the ball rolling on this campaign. After only a few days, we’re already over 20% of the way to our goal!

On top of the manufacturing preparations, I’m also scrambling to public events where people can interact with the GameTank in person. This coming weekend I’ll be demoing the system at VCF Montreal. The week after that I plan to bring GameTanks and dev tools to the in-person Global Game Jam event at NYU Game Center. I’ll also have a demo station at Wonderville in Brooklyn on Feburary 11th. In the meantime, I’ll continue looking for opportunities to let people try the physical console.

Hardware Progress

On the technical front, I’ve got the circuit design pretty much right where I want it to be for production and am waiting for a release candidate motherboard from PCBWay. Once I have it, I’ll send it to Sunfire Testing for EMI analysis. This will provide the test data needed for a CE mark to sell in Europe, an FCC SDoC (Supplier’s Declaration of Conformity) to sell in the US, and ISED compliance for Canada.

The testing deal with Sunfire includes retests until it passes guidelines. To lower the turnaround time on any needed adjustments, I have acquired a pick-and-place machine (Opulo’s open-source LumenPnP specifically) in case I need to do a quick rebuild in my basement lab.

Software Progress

Recently, I’ve rewritten the audio engine in my own game project "Ganymede". This had been the same code available in the public C SDK which provides four channels of 4-operator FM synthesis. Previously this audio code was only able to sample eight distinct amplitudes of sine wave, adding a distinct "stepped" quality to the sound. The new audio code, which will soon be ported to the public SDK, takes advantage of phased sine sums to produce 128 distinct amplitude levels from only one lookup table. The resulting sound is a lot smoother allowing more nuanced character for musical instruments and incidental sound effects.

Community

Finally, I wanted to share this testimonial from Nick Girardo, a GameTank developer who created "A Very Hard Game" as well as contributing several improvements to "Bob’s Barrels"

I’ve made "A Very Hard Game" for the GameTank. If you’ve been intimidated by the idea of retro-game development, the GameTank is a great place to start. There’s still the fun of working directly on hardware without all of the indirection of modern systems, but the hardware is simple enough that it never felt too overwhelming. There’s a great community to help out if you ever get stuck or confused.

I’m perhaps more proud of a bunch of changes I’ve made in other games (such as an undo and passcode system for "Bob’s Barrels" and a change to the timer in "Cubicle Knight"). As you might guess, I love the open source nature of the GameTank, which has extended to so many of the GameTank’s games. For most systems, being able to contribute to the games that you love playing is unthinkable. Having everything open source from system schematics to games is incredibly empowering.

If you’d like to get in touch you can use the "Ask a question" link on the campaign page, email me at clyde@gametank.zone, tag me on BlueSky at @gametank.zone, or join the official GameTank Discord Server by navigating to https://discord.gametank.zone

Many thanks to everyone who has already backed so far. You’re playing an important part in making this production run possible.

Game You On The Tank Side,
Clyde