CSAF Pocket Anthology

Six Game Boy games, made from scratch, in one collection.

Every one is a real 32,768-byte cartridge: a plain no-MBC ROM with a valid Nintendo logo and a correct header checksum at $14D, which is the check the Game Boy's boot ROM performs before it will start a cartridge at all. They are not ports and not re-implementations.

Play all six right here, in the browser, before you decide. The shelf on this page runs the demo cartridge of each game. Pick one off the shelf and it boots.

What is in the collection

• ANATOMIST — a roguelike where a monster's shape is its stat block.
• PROOFMARK — a deduction game. Every day the mint changes what "genuine" means.
• WITNESS MARK — a deduction game whose every case is machine-proved fair before it ships.
• WARDLOCK — forty-eight generated warded locks, each with a proof of its shortest solution.
• SOUNDER — a night telegraph operator on single track. Key the dispatcher's order before the trains meet.
• ROSE ENGINE — an arcade engraving game. Survive inside a guilloche rosette as the lathe cuts it around you.

Bought separately these six come to $35.94.

What you download

• cartridges/ — the six full games as ROM files, plus each game's own readme and licence. Put one on a flash cart or open it in any emulator.
• manuals/ — WARDLOCK's 16-page instruction manual as a real print-size PDF, in two forms: one A5 page per sheet, and imposed 2-up on A4 landscape if you want to fold and staple a booklet.
• play-offline/ — the whole shelf, playable with no storefront and no internet connection.

The offline shelf runs the same demo cartridges as this page. The six complete games are the ROM files in cartridges/, and nothing is held back in them.

One thing the collection does that the separate games do not

All six are playable on a phone. Five of the six single releases are keyboard-only, so on a touch screen they render and cannot be played. The shelf ships a real on-screen d-pad and A/B/START.

Tested, and not tested

Every cartridge has been run frame by frame from a cold boot under binjgb, and each game's own verification harness compares what the hardware draws against a reference renderer. We have not run these on a physical Game Boy, a flash cart or an Analogue Pocket, because we do not own one. So the claim here is about the format, which is checkable, and there is no claim about any particular device. If you do run one on real hardware we would like to hear how it went.

Made with AI, disclosed

The code and the graphics are AI-written. The sound is the Game Boy's own synthesiser driven by register writes, not samples and not a generative audio model. There is no AI-generated text or dialogue in the cartridges.

The six on their own pages

ANATOMIST · PROOFMARK · WITNESS MARK · WARDLOCK · SOUNDER · ROSE ENGINE

On an Analogue Pocket

All six are standard Game Boy ROMs with no mapper, so on an Analogue Pocket each one runs through the openFPGA Game Boy core. As above, we have not run them on Pocket hardware ourselves, and there are no .pocket builds in the download.