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In his website he explains a bit more of the things he is doing in the videos and with the tracker. The only sad thing about it - at least to me - is the price of a nes flash cart. 
The big thing about it is that people could start doing trackers that run natively in the consoles, inspired by ntrq. /me dreams.
Mute City might be up to the task of doing carts when the time comes. I already talked to him about. Run about 35$ shipped. It would be nostalgic to have permanent cart for NTRQ, but also scary since im sure there will be many updates. i for one have no beef with buying a power pak, there is just too much great homebrew out there anyway.
The problem with flashing this onto carts would be transferring data off of it. I don't really think you can unless you have some dev tools. It's just like with a blue EMS cart and LSDJ, if you don't have some sort of transferrer, you're fucked!
I'd cough up the money for a powerpak just because it'd save a lot of time and hassle!
Either that or buy a USB gamepad and use an NES emulator, that's about as close to the real thing as you'll get.
this is exciting, but like you say thretris, it's probably best to wait a while for a stable build before committing it to a perm cart - or shell out for a rewritable+transferrer (do these exist?)
The problem with flashing this onto carts would be transferring data off of it. I don't really think you can unless you have some dev tools. It's just like with a blue EMS cart and LSDJ, if you don't have some sort of transferrer, you're fucked!
Either that or buy a USB gamepad and use an NES emulator, that's about as close to the real thing as you'll get.
Arfink already said that with the right cart design, you could indeed transfer data to and fro.
it's probably best to wait a while for a stable build before committing it to a perm cart - or shell out for a rewritable+transferrer (do these exist?)
i dont think they do. .
... a rewritable+transferrer (do these exist?)
I've had my eyes on this. A CF card cart. A bit pricey though.
The videos he's put up so far are of the software running in NEStopia (which is an emulator for Mac, right?). So I'm hoping NesterJ will run it 100%. I loaded it up on my PSP to check out "Teletime" earlier and it seems pretty slick...
Yeah, as far as I know, he is doing his testing on NEStopia for Mac. It should take to any emulator just fine.
this is exciting, but like you say thretris, it's probably best to wait a while for a stable build before committing it to a perm cart - or shell out for a rewritable+transferrer (do these exist?)
A cart can be created using a ROM socket so that the ROM chip can be taken out and replaced easily. arfink over at ChipCo mentioned he'll probably be making carts using those.
I sent a note over to Neil suggesting that he get in touch with the guys over at RetroUSB to see about having a scaled down version of the PowerPak cart for just NTRQ made if it can be done cheaper (since it'll only need to support one mapper). I'm not sure that would be the clincher for making it not $135.. as the interface with the SD card could be the bulk of that cost, but if it's possible, it'd be a hell of a lot nicer.
Phew! I finally made it here. I registered a few days ago but today I found out that the spam folder in my mail client != spam folder in my website control panel. Damned modern technology. And I still have the flu. OK, enough excuses... 
If you've any questions/suggestions, fire away!
By way of a starter, here's what I still need to do on NTRQ before I consider it fit for release (taken from my dev log so might not make much sense);
+ Fix bug with insert/delete in Pitch & Duty Tables where indexes get wrongly updated
+ Get to the bottom of hardware sweep instability (it's a bit "wild" at the moment)
+ Vibrato rewrite using sine table
+ Make notes on Triangle channel display an octave below others (as that's how they sound)
+ Add simple Delay command to Pitch Table
+ Add "Wait For Release" command to Pitch Table
+ Pitch Slide still needs more work. Slides in lower octaves not really fast enough at maximum speed
+ Muting needs to kill DPCM immediately
+ Add Sample Offset to DPCM commands
+ Implement remaining play modes (play from marker, loop single song step etc.)
Bug count is currently not *too* bad. Major thing is the odd occasion I get a bit of screen corruption. I think I'm just trying to write too much to the screen in places and when it spikes (say if you have a pattern with a note/command on every step), it messes up a few CHRs and only a power cycle can restore it.
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Just picking up on a couple of things from the thread here;
1) Is NTRQ a great leap forward for NES music? Probably not. Computer-based trackers are always going to be (able to be) faster and more fluid to use (well, some of them anyway) and you certainly don't face the same limitations that I have when making NTRQ. I think NTRQ started out as something to prove but it's actually turned into a very, very usable and fun tool. The videos I put up don't really do it justice and I'm the most modest person you'll meet.
2) Yes, I'm currently developing on Netopia but I also have a Famicom(AV) and PowerPak cart that I test on every couple of days. I've not tested any other emulators much but I have ran it on Nintendulator and nothing obvious reared up.
3) Composition Vs Live: I thought about this a lot and tried to make it somewhere in between the two. It's honestly easier to compose in than you might imagine. The Achilles Heel is obviously no keyboard-style input. I just use NLog (software synth) on my iPhone to work tunes out Hopefully I can get some Famicom keyboard support in (when I actually get my hands on one). The Billie Jean tune took me hardly any time at all to knock up and that's before I have the extra play features such as "Loop Single Song Step" which will aid composition (so you can repeat the same section and tweak it until it's right). It does lend itself to live play though, very much. To enhance this I'm going to put in a "Live Jam" mode where you'll be able to "take over" one of the channels and play it with the joypad. That's a little way off though.
4) DPCM. This is the least-developed area of NTRQ at the moment but I've been experimenting and have a few ideas to implement. I'm going to give you enough tools to be able to build your own bank of samples but I also want to compile a useful default sample set for people that don't want to build ROMs. Ideas very welcome!
5) I need some breakfast.
Neil
This sounds very interesting indeed!
Have you considered some sort of sync feature? I know this would require extra hardware, but still...
midisync would be
I would love to but I (currently) wouldn't know where to even start.
A mad idea I was thinking of (and I don't even know if such a thing exists or is possible) would be an optical CV-to-MIDI gadget that you could point at a particular area of the screen and I would flash a small white square on screen in time with the refresh rate of the song. Then these pulses could be turned into MIDI clock (with some smoothing) and so NTRQ would be MIDI master clock to your slave devices.
That's probably insane I know 
