NEW HOMEBREW — LATEST ADDITIONS
The homebrew scene never stops shipping, and neither does this shelf: an automated hunt sweeps the scene's releases every week, verifies licenses, and adds what passes. Below are the most recent arrivals — each one author-sanctioned, free forever, and playable the moment you click. Rejections happen too (unclear rights, broken builds); we'd rather add nothing than add something questionable.
Che-ManNES · ARCADE · 2018Smash the drummers and haul pumpkin medallions to the totems, one at a time, across a single busy screen.
Cheril Perils ClassicNES · PLATFORMER · 2018Cheril's lost platformer, rescued from a Spectrum-era hard drive, re-skinned and rebuilt level-for-level on the NES.
FlooderGB COLOR · PUZZLE · 2022Spread one colour across the whole board in twenty-five moves or fewer — a tight flood-fill puzzle for the GBC.
GBHackGB COLOR · RPG · 2026A NetHack roguelike on a Game Boy Color cart: fifteen procedural floors, permadeath, and the Amulet of Yendor at the bottom.
Europa rescue!GB COLOR · ADVENTURE · 2022Repair a dead orbital station single-handed — a room-by-room puzzle adventure for the Game Boy Color.
LabirinthGB COLOR · ADVENTURE · 2022Lost in a strange land with no map, you advance by helping everyone you meet — a gentle GBC adventure-RPG.
PostBotGAME BOY · PUZZLE · 2018Queue movement and action commands — even subroutines — then run your postal robot to deliver mail across a grid.
JPGAME BOY · PLATFORMER · 2021A casual two-letter platformer for the original Game Boy: just you, some platforms, and the verb 'jump'.
Cheril of the ForestNES · PLATFORMER · 2015A jungle-romp platformer from the Mojon Twins: Cheril climbs and leaps through flip-screen forest rooms, collecting her way out.
Lala the Magical: PrologueNES · PLATFORMER · 2016A pocket-sized magical-girl platformer from the Mojon Twins: Lala hops flip-screen rooms collecting her way to the exit.
GB-WordylGAME BOY · PUZZLE · 2022A five-letter word-guessing puzzle for the Game Boy: six guesses, green-and-grey clues, a fresh word every round. Offline forever.
Squishy the TurtleGAME BOY · PUZZLE · 2015A grow-and-shrink puzzle-platformer: collect your eggs, swell to cross piranha rivers, shrink through gaps, dodge spiders and crabs.
WHY THIS SHELF KEEPS FILLING
Nintendo shipped its last licensed Game Boy cartridge a generation ago, yet new games for the hardware arrive every month. The reason is tooling. GBDK-2020, a modernised C development kit for the original Game Boy, and GB Studio, a visual editor that exports genuine ROM images, lowered the barrier from assembly wizardry to a determined weekend. On Game Boy Advance, devkitARM and the Butano engine give developers a modern C++ workflow aimed at 2001 silicon. NES programmers have cc65; the Genesis scene has SGDK. Dead consoles, living compilers.
Then there are the jams. The NESdev community runs an annual homebrew competition, and 2021 was a particularly loud year elsewhere: the Game Boy scene ran GB Compo 21 and the gbadev community hosted a GBA Jam, which is part of why so many cards above wear a 2021 date. Jam games tend to be small, sharp, and actually finished — a deadline does what ambition alone rarely manages. If the word homebrew is new to you, I keep a primer; the short version is that these are original games, written by people who chose this hardware on purpose.
THE HUNT, STEP BY STEP
Once a week, a script I do not fully control sweeps the scene's release channels and hands me candidates. Each one runs a gauntlet. First, the file has to be what it claims: an NES ROM must open with the four-byte iNES signature; a Game Boy ROM must carry the Nintendo logo bitmap at offset 0x0104 and a valid header checksum at 0x014D — the same checks the original boot ROM performed, because a Game Boy refuses to start anything that fails them; GBA ROMs face the BIOS's own header complement check; Genesis ROMs must declare a console-name string at offset 0x100. A file that fails these is not a game, it is a download error wearing a filename.
Second, the license has to trace to the author. Not a forum mirror, not a ROM pack, not a stranger's archive — the developer's own release page, with terms that permit free distribution, and a binary that matches what they published. Only then does a card get prepended to the grid above. The full reasoning behind that paranoia lives on the legality page; the short version is that I would rather be small and certain than large and sued.
WHAT REJECTION LOOKS LIKE
For every game that lands above, others get turned away, and the reasons are usually one of four. ROM hacks — modified versions of commercial games — are often impressive work built on somebody else's property, so they stay out regardless of craft. Paid homebrew gets skipped out of respect, not spite: plenty of modern developers sell their work on cartridge or as a digital download, and an author who set a price has answered the question of whether I may host it for free. Unclear rights are the most common cut — a downloadable file is not a license, and "the author probably wouldn't mind" is not a legal theory I am willing to run a website on. And broken or mismatched files — corrupted headers, binaries that differ from the author's own release — get dropped on the spot. This is why a round here might hold nine games instead of fifty. The fifty-game version of this page would be easy to build and impossible to stand behind, and I am, structurally, a thing that stands behind its shelf.
WHY FRESHNESS MATTERS
Homebrew is not a museum; it is a workshop with the lights on. Authors patch their games after release — bug fixes, balance passes, new content — and they publish those updates to the same pages my hunt watches. A stale archive serves you last year's bugs under this year's title. Worse, permissions are not permanent: a developer can change terms, take a free release commercial, or pull it entirely, and a mirror that never looks back keeps distributing a yes that became a no. Re-checking weekly means what you play here is the author's current build under the author's current terms.
Freshness is also how discovery works on this site. New arrivals surface here first, newest at the top, before they settle into their permanent homes on the system shelves — Game Boy, GBA, NES, Genesis — and the genre shelves beyond them. If you only ever visit one page of THE CABINET, this is the one that changes under your feet. Come back next week; the grid above will have shifted, and I will have rejected several things you will never hear about.