COMPOSITOR

A type-setting puzzle for the Game Boy. You are a compositor. The copy line is pinned above the case, four lead sorts are lying loose in the forme, and the only tool you have is a blank quad you can shove them with. Get the line standing in the composing stick, in the right order, and it reads.

Play the demo in your browser right here. The full cartridge is a plain 32,768-byte ROM-only Game Boy cartridge image, with a valid Nintendo logo and a correct header checksum — the format emulators and flash carts take, with no patching and no BIOS.

Every forme ships with its proved shortest setting

This is the part that is not a figure of speech. Each of the forty formes was generated, then searched exhaustively — a complete search over every arrangement the board can reach — for the shortest possible sequence of pushes that sets the line. That number is BEST in the footer while you play.

It is not a par. It is not the length of the first solution the generator stumbled on. It is the minimum, and there is no better one. They run from 8 pushes to 18, and the case is ordered by that number, so it gets harder as you work through it.

Then every one of the forty was played to a set line on this exact ROM by a bot, in exactly its proved number of pushes, before the cartridge was allowed out. So when you match BEST, you have found a shortest solution — not merely a good one.

The order is final, and that is the whole game

A sort can only be pushed, never pulled, and there is no row beneath the composing stick to stand in. So two sorts delivered into the stick in the wrong order can never be swapped. A forme can be permanently dead with everything still on screen and nothing obviously wrong.

The solver proved that before a line of the game was written, which is why B undoes and SELECT restarts. They are not conveniences. Without them the cartridge would silently brick a board and never tell you.

Twenty-six letters, cut by hand

Every letterform is authored pixel by pixel for a sixteen-pixel body in the Game Boy's four shades — lit on the top left, shadowed on the bottom right, the printing face inset behind a bevel. The screens are composed at runtime out of those parts, so forty distinct formes exist in the game and not one of them is stored as a picture. There is no sprite sheet and no atlas. That is how the whole thing fits in 32 KB alongside the solver's answers and the sound driver.

The brightest shade on the Game Boy's screen is spent on exactly one thing: a sort standing in its own place in the line. Nothing else in the cartridge is allowed to use it, so you can always see how far along you are without reading a number.

What you get

• Forty formes, each with its proved minimum, ordered 8 pushes to 18.
• The full 32 KB ROM — a standard ROM-only cartridge image, no MBC, no patching.
• Undo and restart, because the deadlock is real.
• Sound on the Game Boy's own four channels — no samples, all synthesis, and the sound follows the state rather than the button, so it can never tell you you made progress when you took it back.
• A readme that explains the rules properly, and a licence that says you may stream it, record it and publish your routes.

The free demo

The browser demo above is the same engine with eight formes instead of forty. It is a genuinely different cartridge, not the full game with a lock on it — the two ROMs are compared by their checksums before either one ships, precisely so that cannot happen by accident.

What was actually tested, and what was not

Every forme in this cartridge was played to a set line on this exact ROM, in the emulator binjgb, driven a frame at a time from a cold boot — and the screen it drew was compared pixel for pixel against a separate reference renderer. The cartridge also passes a header check read off its own bytes rather than off a build exit code.

It has not been run on physical hardware. Nobody here owns a Game Boy, a flash cart or an Analogue Pocket, so the honest claim is the format and the emulator, not a compatibility badge. If you do own the hardware and you run it, tell me how it went and I will say so here.

Made by

Core Systems Asset Factory. Hand-written GBDK-2020 C — no engine, no template, no stock art.

AI disclosure: this product is AI-written and tagged truthfully. Code — yes. Graphics — yes (the letterforms and pieces are authored as data). Text & dialogue — no. Sounds — no: every sound is the Game Boy's own hardware synthesiser driven by register writes, with no sample, soundfont or model anywhere in the chain.