EUC Thrills — SNES Edition 1.1

A homebrew game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, by Edwin Rodmen.

<img src="euc-thrills-snes-box-front.png" width="360" alt="EUC Thrills SNES Edition box front">

You ride an electric unicycle down a route that runs from a city plaza out to a forest trailhead, and the only thing you really control is your speed. Lean forward to go faster, lean back to slow down, jump the gaps and duck the birds. Hits cost wheels; losing your last wheel ends the run.

The six zones of one round, in the order you ride them.

Play it

Download euc-thrills-snes.sfc and load it as an ordinary headerless NTSC Super NES ROM. It is a 512 KB LoROM cartridge with battery-backed save RAM and no enhancement chip. Use a compatible SNES emulator or homebrew-capable console.

Every button is in the manual below, but you can work the whole game out from the title screen, which is the point.

Playing in Delta on iPhone or iPad

1. Save euc-thrills-snes.sfc into the Files app — iCloud Drive, On My iPhone, anywhere Delta can reach.
2. In Delta, add a game and pick that file. The exact menu wording moves around between Delta and iOS versions; there is nothing to patch, and no companion file or external game data to supply.
3. Tap the cover to ride.

HI is a battery save, not a save state — the cartridge writes it itself, so your best run survives closing the app without you having to remember anything.

Delta's on-screen pad works. If you have a Bluetooth controller, pair it and use that instead: this game wants Right held down almost continuously, and that is easier on a stick than on glass.

Controls

Input	Action
D-pad Right	Lean forward — accelerate
D-pad Left	Lean back — brake
B	Jump. Distance scales with your speed. Also stands you up out of a duck
Y or D-pad Down	Duck. Held posture; clears overhead birds. Costs you speed for as long as you hold it
Start	Start, pause, and return to the title from game over or from the ending
A	At the sign-off after every completed round: ride on into the next round — faster, harder, your score carried
L / R	On the title: select an unlocked round
Select	Credits — from the title screen; press again to go back

Ducking costs you speed. Staying low is not free: every frame you hold the crouch bleeds off exactly as much speed as a frame of throttle puts on. Duck for the bird, then stand up and rebuild — because speed is what clears a gap, and a rider who never stands up cannot jump one.

Ducking never clears a gap either. The wheel has one contact patch — only being airborne gets you over a pit. If SPEED UP starts blinking on the HUD, the gap ahead is wider than your current speed can jump: accelerate before you reach it. The game guarantees every gap is jumpable from the speed you can reach on the run-up, and that promise holds in every round.

New in 1.1

Sound effects now work on the SNES Classic Mini, with the pause sound fix and reliable start cue included. One effect voice is reserved for cues; crashes and other important sounds take priority over repeated smaller cues.

Clear a whole round to unlock the next starting difficulty, up to round 5. Choose with L/R on the title; a selected-round start begins a fresh score and the usual starting wheels. Unlocks and your high score are saved. Existing high scores carry over, but earlier clears cannot be recovered because version 1.0 did not record them.

A run

One round is six linked zones — City Plaza, Park & Riverside, Hillside, Industrial Edge, Underpass, and Trailhead — each with its own scenery, road surface and hazards. Clearing one earns you a wheel back, up to five, and a short intermission before the next — press Start if you would rather not wait.

Reach the gate at the trailhead and someone is waiting for you. Stay as long as you like — then the sign-off offers the choice, after every round: A rides on into the next round with your score intact, Start ends the run at the title. A natural spot to pass the controller.

Each round is harder than the last up to round five, after which the route settles at a fixed difficulty, so two players' scores mean the same thing. The minimum speed climbs, hazards sit closer together and gaps get wider.

SCORE counts distance, hazards cleared, zones and rounds, all multiplied by how fast you were travelling. Extra wheels come from two places: one for every zone you clear, and one at 10,000 points and every 50,000 after that. Either way the stack stops at five. HI is the best run this cartridge has seen — it lives in battery-backed SRAM, so it survives being switched off, exactly as it would have in 1994.

Sound

Nine sound effects, silence between them, and a theme for every zone.

There is deliberately no engine noise and no road hum. A real electric unicycle is a nearly silent machine, so what carries the sense of speed here is a driving arpeggio in the music rather than a noise floor underneath it. One rider theme runs through all six zones — stated in the City Plaza, brightened in the Park, tilted downhill at the Hillside, fractured at the Industrial Edge, stripped to bass and echo in the Underpass, and resolved in major at the Trailhead.

On your last wheel the machine starts beeping at you, the way a real one does when it is near its limit.

None of it is sampled from anything. Every instrument and every effect is synthesised from arithmetic.

Verify your download

shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt

Run it from inside this folder. Every file should report OK.

What is in this package

File
euc-thrills-snes.sfc	The game. 512 KB, NTSC, LoROM
euc-thrills-snes-box-front.png	Box front artwork, 1400×2000
media/	Gameplay screenshots; artwork is unchanged in 1.1
SHA256SUMS.txt	Checksums for everything above
LICENSE	CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, in full
PERMISSIONS.md	Extra permissions the author grants on top of it
NOTICE.md	Authorship, provenance, and non-affiliation
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt	PVSnesLib and SNESMod attribution

There are no other builds. Anything you find elsewhere with debug, test or autotest in its name is a development diagnostic and is not this game.

Verification status

The exact 1.1 ROM passed the targeted Mesen 2.1.1 logic/save, on-screen text, audio-preservation and pacing checks, and the author playtested it in ares. The audio fix was previously accepted by the author in Delta iOS and on a SNES Classic Mini; 1.1 retains the same sound driver and soundbank while adding round selection. Original Super NES hardware and flash cartridges are untested. Start fresh after updating rather than restoring a save state from an older ROM.

Licence

Released under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — keep it, play it, share the whole package for free with credit. Do not sell it, and do not publish a modified version.

Free does not mean unowned. Selling this game — as a download, on a cartridge, on a preloaded console or SD card, or inside a paid bundle — is not permitted, and neither is putting it behind a paywall.

Read PERMISSIONS.md before assuming something is banned. Getting the ROM onto your own console or emulator by whatever patching or repacking that takes, sharing the package for free, and streaming or monetising video of the game are all explicitly allowed.

Full terms in LICENSE. Authorship and provenance in NOTICE.md — including which parts of this game are and are not the author's own work, stated plainly.

Notices

An independent, unofficial homebrew project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Nintendo, or with any manufacturer of electric unicycles. "Super Nintendo Entertainment System", "Super NES" and "SNES" are Nintendo's marks and are used only to identify the hardware this game runs on.

Written in C, with the art, music and sound generated by the project's own Python tools. Built with PVSnesLib; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt.

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Edwin Rodmen — instagram.com/edwin_rodmen