Linda did specifically mention it did more than portable gaming, I think she was referring to the multimedia capabilities of the PSP. It also functioned as a web browser, a VoIP device, a video and audio player, it was doing a number of things that we take for granted in modern smart phones and mobile devices. Earlier handheld systems generally did not do these things, at least not out of the box.
@Martin_H
Good, that's hiring a person that can develop skills and earn a living.
If someone's earned a degree, they've at least gone through a learning and training process.
@QuarterSwede
AI is enabling unskilled workers to produce unskilled works.
The code may run, and appear to give desired results in limited "happy path" use cases, but they aren't aware of problems under the hood that could cause problems later on.
@QuarterSwede
Bad analogy, AI is used as a service as alternative to a skilled worker, to produce a product.
It's more like not trusting the house is safe because the bricks were poorly made; regardless or who or what made them, or how.
AI has an inherant distrust in code reliability because AI programming models are trained on amateur answers scraped from the web, and amateur GIT repositories.
It seems like they were talking about the Wii U in comparison of relative capabilities, since it was on about the level of 360 and PS3, even though the Wii was the system that was available in that generation of gaming.
@tonyhoro I would argue that their methodology was deeply flawed. From what I understand they used an AI draft to help navigate the software and checking their changes for delivering a new script (that part deserves credit), but the AI draft translation was also forming the basis of their understanding of the source material, instead of actually knowing the language and how to translate and localise it properly. As a result, the translated text is inconsistent and gets a lot of things wrong, and does not do the source material justice in the capacity of either an objective translation OR a localisation effort.
Beyond the complicated corporate side of things, another challenge a re-release would face would be what to do regarding Apu's inclusion. Apu is a major playable character in the game and features throughout all parts of the campaign. https://simpsons-hit-and-run.fandom.com/wiki/Apu_Nahasapeemapetilon
Whilst streaming services like Disney+ do show the majority of the original seasons of The Simpsons without altering Apu's inclusions, the character has been retired from episodes produced from 2017 onwards with Hank Azaria refusing to perform the voice since.
A remake or remaster of Hit & Run could be a new product rather than a re-release or re-issue. Whilst you could have an entirely new voice performance for Apu portrayed by a South Asian performer, this only goes part way of addressing the controversy with the character.
It could become an opportunity to re-introduce the character to the show, however, if they ever figure something out.
Dithering being used as it is now works very well for high resolution games, and the best implementations I've seen make use of dynamic densities, where the concentration of dots can increase or decrease as needed to show or hide more of the obstructed object or actor. Particularly, one of the best uses is a dithered silhouette of the player character in front of the objects that obstructs the character itself, such as in Super Mario Odyssey.
People have become conditioned to recognise a very common aesthetic from AI generated artwork; at least the common slop that comes from people using very basic prompts on free online services. This artwork unfortunately somewhat has that aesthetic, but it's coupled with being so professionally done that people looking for human flaws or errors aren't going to find those! It's in the same way that people are getting accused of leaving AI generated comments in discussions, because of their writing style or just trying to give a well written response.
I spend a lot of time looking at rendered images in pretty close detail, both human made and AI generated, and there really aren't any hallmarks of AI in here. Conker's render does look very, very close to a 3D software render, but that could just be superb drawing skill, or maybe a reference was used.
Putting out dissapointing, mediocre, or bad products would be one thing, but nobody is calling Nintendo the worst company for putting out massive letdowns like Metroid Prime 4, or Capcom for putting out the likes of DmC Devil May Cry.
Surely any of the contemporary articles covering EA being voted Worst USA Company, will tell you the actual reasons; and it's not "entitled gamers".
@H_Hog I have the Neo Geo edition of the Super Pocket, and the shoulder buttons are possibly the worst ones ever designed for games that need them. Which as it turns out, is quite a lot when you're playing Evercade cartridges like Good Boy Galaxy. That game runs at 240x160 (given that it's a GBA ROM), so it doesn't look great on the 320x240 display.
I'm surprised that they're still making new models of the Super Pocket, granted that they're pretty cheap. Some games have been exclusive to the built-in storage of the Super Pocket, and are technically not Evercade as a result of that. I'm hopeful that should there be a Rare Collection 2, that Banjo Kazooie is in there as to not make it exclusive to a Super Pocket.
@wizzgamer Evercade introduced 64-bit console emulation in 2024 with Glover, which apparently involved rebuilding the ROM and optimising it for their emulator implementation. https://evercade.co.uk/introducing-64-bit-console-gaming-on-evercade/ There's a good chance that this Banjo Kazooie release also uses an optimized ROM, but it's more likely to be based on the Xbox release as to remove the Nintendo brandings.
@H_Hog They're showing a screenshot of Banjo Kazooie as it appeared on the N64, and list it as "64-bit console". If this were the GBA game it would've been "32-bit handheld console" instead.
@RextheSheep Conker's Pocket Tales was previously released on Evercade cartridge as part of Rare Collection 1, and as I understand that one only plays in GBC mode, so you don't have the option to play the monochrome version which is technically a different game.
@carlos82 SEGA considers Panzer Dragoon to be a legacy IP, and putting any new product on the market is just a way of saying they're maintaining an IP. Even if it's a D-list studio doing a shoddy port or remaster.
@Peteykins It's a slight nuisance if you want to get the Android data to use with the superior decomp-based ports. But let's be real, those APKs are not difficult to find, and all you're doing is extracting the relevant data from them without ever installing them.
@PowerPandaMods
The only way to play it before was the DoJa SDK emulator, which wasn't very good as it had all kinds of performance and sound issues. That, or have a 2000s Japanese flip phone.
This native PC port fixes those performance issues with a stable 15 FPS (what the game is designed to run at), and fixes the audio issues so that sound effects don't cancel out music playback.
Keitai app audio was heavily limited as it was MIDI based and they couldn't do simultaneous music and sound effects, unless you did very specific timing of MIDI sound effects between notes in the music sequence.
This is what the Rockman EXE Keitai games tried to do, and it might be better on real hardware, but in the DoJa SDK emulator had the unfortunate effect of Rockman.EXE's attacks sounding like striking a piano and interrupting the battle music.
The PC port is also far, far easier to play than the DoJa SDK emulator, having straight-forward window scaling options without needing to rely on any secondary applications like ShaderGlass.
Keitai apps at Java applications for said flip phones, and whilst there is an effort to build a dedicated emulator for them, progress has been pretty slow. SquirrelJME is a Java ME 8 Virtual Machine, that already has a Libretro core available for Retroarch, but if things go well and it becomes a mature application could mean being able to play these Keitai apps on various Linux retro handhelds.
I gave this a quick spin, and that's some incredible work.
A quick tip, press F1 to bring up basic settings for remapping controls and changing your window scaling.
If you have save game progress from an earlier DoJa SDK emulator playthrough, that'll carry over when you copy across the .jar and .sp files.
Ultimately, I'm hopeful that this can get a Linux port too, because that could be the basis for playing this on a wide range of retro handhelds like Anbernic stuff. This would be absolutely perfect on an RG34XXSP as the game runs at 240x240, and should cleanly upscale to any 480p display.
@Broosh There's also something to be said about the touch screen experience on DS and 3DS, the software is really designed around the resistive touch screens and how they only respond to a single but precise touch point. You lose a lot of that on modern touch devices that expect you to use your finger.
@Broosh My time spent with the RG35XXSP and the RG34XXSP has really renewed my interest in them too. The former was slightly larger than the GBA SP, whilst the latter is much closer to it in scale and display. The latter model has much better build quality too, though it's slightly small for my hands and makes me want to see a "GBA SP XL" from Anbernic. I've not personally tried any of Miyoo's offerings yet.
This is 100% of the titles I first thought of when RT64 and recompilation hit the scene (among things like Mischief Makers). A real hidden gem that always needed some more love, and maybe a few bug fixes. 100% completion was impossible because one of the collectible trophies had no collision, and therefore couldn't be collected.
@smoreon The Note Saving feature is off by default in the recompilation, but a welcome change to anyone that prefers the Xbox feature, or struggles with the original game. I'd prefer to play with Note Saving turned off so there's an actual challenge in staying alive to collect all 100 notes in one world.
The other major change is you can enable analogue camera controls, for smooth camera control with a right analogue stick. The original camera control used incremental turning with the C-buttons, similar to how Super Mario 64 does it.
One of the major features of Wiseguy's Nintendo 64 recomp tools, is compatibility with the RT64 graphics plugin to bring raytracing to Nintendo 64 games. This is slated as an upcoming feature for the Banjo Kazooie recompilation and I'm looking forward to playing through the game with that enabled.
@Razieluigi I'm reminded of the Japanese release of the Western developed Kid Chameleon. Titled Chameleon Kid, the Japanese cover art is a manga style recreation of the Western cover, and the character details are actually more accurate to the in-game sprites, such as Cyclone being depicted in red and pink, not gold. https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon#Physical_scans
@Matroska Right, but it's come to light that the international all ages releases, did in fact ship with the data in some form. The law isn't concerned with whether or not that data is conventionally accessible, cases like the Tiger Woods EA golf game that included South Park videos on the disc, or the unfinished "Hot Coffee" content in the PS2 version of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, still caused legal headaches.
Huh, so this saucy material is present on every physical copy of this ESRB E / PEGI 3 rated game? The PS Vita may be old news, but that's the sort of thing that's gotten game publishers in trouble before!
I supported the Kickstarter for this one, progress has been a little slow but promising, and I'm looking forward to playing it.
The physical on the other hand, I'm not confident that their original supplier, First Press Games, will deliver on that. That company has been largely radio silent in the past year on fulfilling pre-orders, and are still accepting pre-orders for Good Boy Galaxy, a title that they lost the rights to publish with ongoing legal disputes from the developers.
Seeing gameplay of Acrolyte in action, I have to wonder if this is made by the talent behind the cancelled fan-made Metroid Prime 2D. I'm seeing a ton of similarities in the graphical style, movement, gameplay, and engine.
Holy Magic Century, or Quest 64, (or Eltale Monsters in Japan) had the unenviable task of delivering a "next generation JRPG" for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, which ultimately were in short supply especially outside of Japan. Fans of JRPGs from the SNES, were left with later 1998 games like The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time or Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, which were often miscategorised as RPGs at the time.
Since all the big names in JRPGs had jumped ship to the Playstation with its CD-ROM capabilities, it was left to Imagineer, better known for the Medabots (Medarot) series, to produce what might be the single JRPG available internationally on the Nintendo 64, unless you count Paper Mario which is very much its own brand of Mario RPG.
The expectations were impossible to live up to, for what would've been an easily forgotten title were it a SNES game, where JRPGs were prolific.
The decompilation process itself has made some very big strides over time. Systems previously not considered for decompilation efforts have now become commonplace, with many more GameCube and Wii titles being reverse engineered. News of any reverse engineering projects is always exciting, even if it's for games I'm not likely to ever play myself.
I was a Kickstarter backer and just recently did my playthrough of this, it was a sweet time with wonderful music, stage design, and gameplay, but held back by some of the jank that comes with GB Studio like bad frame pacing on the more ambitious levels, and occasional graphical bugs like sprites displaying the wrong tiles.
Despite that, it's a title I'd recommend checking out, and I placed an order for a proper cartridge when I got word of its availability.
The fascinating thing about the keitai preservation process, is that it's a grab-bag of whatever data you happen to be able to pull from old 2000s Japanese flip-phones. In many cases, the contents of the phones is unknown until they try pulling data with processes they had to reverse engineer themselves, so it's less of a targeted effort to retrieve a specific title, and more of a treasure hunt or a card-pack-pull that you hope you find something new.
Last year, Lizardy on YouTube put up a short video about an obscure AlphaDream developed game called "BigBang Block", which is a keitai game that currently still appears to be lost media. https://youtu.be/C0eq4x2lLWI Given that this would've been an obscure and infrequently downloaded game even in Japan whilst it was digitally available, finding an old phone that still has it installed may be very, very difficult.
I was wondering if the 30 FPS rendering was a design choice for the GBA's LCD screen, which has heavy frame blending. Heavy enough that a blinking image (30 on/off frames per second) appears translucent on the original GBA screen, a trick that the F-Zero titles use for their minimap. Meaning the 30 FPS was maybe chosen to deliver a more stable image than 60 FPS would allow, it'd be an interesting test with real hardware.
@eltomo Unlike the Analogue Pocket's OpenFPGA system, the Analogue 3D is designed to be just a Nintendo 64 solution. As such, no custom firmware was ever developed for the Analogue Pocket, but custom jailbreak firmwares were made for Analogue's Super NT and Mega SG systems that allows them to play ROMs for different systems from the SD card.
The Analogue 3D's hardware is definitely capable of many things, and more capable than the Analogue Pocket, so I would not be surprised if a jailbreak happens if they don't provide OpenFPGA in a future update.
Being able to play the Boktai games and the motion sensor games like Wario Ware Twisted, without needing to patch the ROMs with workaround functionality, that's really cool! I might just grab that in the future.
@Zeebor15
This merch line is primarily based on Sonic Mania Plus and Sonic Superstars, and there's a four-issue IDW prequel comic called Fang the Hunter that explains or addresses a few things about Fang's involvement in Superstars. https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog:_Fang_the_Hunter
Specifically things like the "8th chaos emerald" that featured in Sonic the Fighters for some reason, Bark and Bean's absence from Sonic Superstars, and the confusion around Fang's name and title, which is currently "Fang the Hunter", not "Fang the Sniper" or "Nack the Weasel".
He's not even a Weasel! He's a Jerboa, a species of mouse that uses their long springy tail for balance and propping themselves. Fang is known to bounce on his tail like a spring.
It would be nice to see Bark and Bean in the games again proper, rather than having illusion cameos for one boss fight in Sonic Mania.
@jygsaw It's possible, at the time storage media was expensive, and archival or potential re-releases wasn't on their mind. Old projects were frequently wiped away to make room for new projects, which was especially necessary for data-expensive things like all of the pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes.
That said, there's the Playstation 1 port, and the later Nintendo DS Port of Chrono Trigger, so there's a chance they preserved source code that way to make those ports possible and feasible.
I love the effort Keshi Corner puts into these videos for each new set scanned. That "Mysterious Toad" is something else, I have to wonder if the face is influenced by anything specific in Japanese 80s pop culture.
So giving the argument some actual thought, it had to depend on your definition of "finishing a game". Is the goal to see the end credits staff roll, or is it to perform the final feat within gameplay that triggers that staff roll? In Symphony of the Night, the latter would be landing the finishing blow on one of two end bosses under certain conditions. Some games feature an option to play the staff roll from the menu, in addition to the staff roll displayed after beating the game. Many of the modern Kirby games have this. There are also some speedrun categories, usually tool assisted, where the goal is to get to the end credits by any means as quickly as possible, and this usually involves arbitrary code execution ("ACE"). They might not even jump to the starting point of the end credits sequence, one of Ocarina of Time's ACE runs jumps to a mid-point in the sequence!
ACE runs typically redefine the win condition for the game, but calling upon a hidden function in code to display the staff roll doesn't redefine a win condition, so much as it doesn't even engage gameplay by bypassing the starting parameters entirely.
Extremely poor taste, if you're buying an art book for a work, you expect to see the source materials, the final renders, etc. This is post-processing that destroys such things and is unacceptable, it's not even to a good standard.
AI upscalers and older upscaling methods in general don't have an answer for pixel art (outside of drastically fabricating details), where human interpration to the carefully placed pixels is key to enjoying the artwork.
Marc Robledo's done fantastic work with Game Boy colorisation and translation patches, especially the Mega Man World titles (3 through 5). I'm keen to check this one out later today.
I would understand if they could add a disclaimer to the game that it's a relic of its time, but I don't see why they can't modify the graphics with the help of someone who has the expertise to do so.
I'm very interested, but the ergonomics look off. The d-pad and face buttons look a bit too close to the hinge, and risk bumping your thumb tip into it when you're really getting into a game, especially if you prefer to use the joint of your thumb over the d-pad's pivot.
Even before opening the article, I sussed it would've been "primary and secondary", but not the whole CAD thing, where X and Y are used for axis co-ordinates in 2D space (or 3D if you include Z).
@N00BiSH Nintendo seems to have a big focus on celebrating their history at the moment, particular with the Nintendo Museum based in Kyoto, which they keep featuring in Nintendo Direct presentations.
@Moroboshi876 Like the article mentions, simply run the Universal Updater homebrew app and it can take care of installing or updating Red Viper for you. The app when launched will take care of the 50hz switching automatically, there's nothing extra you need to do.
@N00BiSH I guess the only way it made business sense was if they could sell some expensive plastic on top of needing to pay a subscription fee.
Comments 227
Re: Random: "Blink Twice If You Need Help" - The Internet Dunks On Ex-WWE CEO For Claiming PSP Was "The Beginning Of Life On The Go"
Linda did specifically mention it did more than portable gaming, I think she was referring to the multimedia capabilities of the PSP.
It also functioned as a web browser, a VoIP device, a video and audio player, it was doing a number of things that we take for granted in modern smart phones and mobile devices.
Earlier handheld systems generally did not do these things, at least not out of the box.
Re: "Let's See How This Goes" - Mega Man 2 Could Soon Be Getting The Proper SNES Upgrade We've All Been Waiting For
Redrawn with assets taken from Mega Man 7, you say?
Re: "AI-Coded Slop, No Thanks" - Animal Crossing's Native PC Port Was Made Using Claude Code
@Martin_H
Good, that's hiring a person that can develop skills and earn a living.
If someone's earned a degree, they've at least gone through a learning and training process.
Re: "AI-Coded Slop, No Thanks" - Animal Crossing's Native PC Port Was Made Using Claude Code
@QuarterSwede
AI is enabling unskilled workers to produce unskilled works.
The code may run, and appear to give desired results in limited "happy path" use cases, but they aren't aware of problems under the hood that could cause problems later on.
Re: "AI-Coded Slop, No Thanks" - Animal Crossing's Native PC Port Was Made Using Claude Code
@OldManLav
The decompilation process did not use AI, this port is based on the decompilation effort and used AI to build it.
Re: "AI-Coded Slop, No Thanks" - Animal Crossing's Native PC Port Was Made Using Claude Code
@QuarterSwede
Bad analogy, AI is used as a service as alternative to a skilled worker, to produce a product.
It's more like not trusting the house is safe because the bricks were poorly made; regardless or who or what made them, or how.
AI has an inherant distrust in code reliability because AI programming models are trained on amateur answers scraped from the web, and amateur GIT repositories.
Re: "AI-Coded Slop, No Thanks" - Animal Crossing's Native PC Port Was Made Using Claude Code
@BulkSlash
Open source doesn't necessarily mean free to grab and modify, most GIT repositories declare licenses that control how the code is allowed for usage, modification, or distribution.
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/licensing-a-repository
Further, licensing is adapting to explicitly deny AI training.
https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses
Re: Xbox 360, PS3 And Nintendo Wii U Are "Officially Retro", Says GameStop
It seems like they were talking about the Wii U in comparison of relative capabilities, since it was on about the level of 360 and PS3, even though the Wii was the system that was available in that generation of gaming.
Re: "It Does Not Save Time Or Offer Anything Of Value" - Translator Hilltop Isn't A Fan Of AI
@tonyhoro
I would argue that their methodology was deeply flawed.
From what I understand they used an AI draft to help navigate the software and checking their changes for delivering a new script (that part deserves credit), but the AI draft translation was also forming the basis of their understanding of the source material, instead of actually knowing the language and how to translate and localise it properly.
As a result, the translated text is inconsistent and gets a lot of things wrong, and does not do the source material justice in the capacity of either an objective translation OR a localisation effort.
Re: "We Know People Love It. We Know They Want It" - The Simpsons Showrunner Doesn't Rule Out 'Hit & Run' Remake
Beyond the complicated corporate side of things, another challenge a re-release would face would be what to do regarding Apu's inclusion. Apu is a major playable character in the game and features throughout all parts of the campaign.
https://simpsons-hit-and-run.fandom.com/wiki/Apu_Nahasapeemapetilon
Whilst streaming services like Disney+ do show the majority of the original seasons of The Simpsons without altering Apu's inclusions, the character has been retired from episodes produced from 2017 onwards with Hank Azaria refusing to perform the voice since.
A remake or remaster of Hit & Run could be a new product rather than a re-release or re-issue. Whilst you could have an entirely new voice performance for Apu portrayed by a South Asian performer, this only goes part way of addressing the controversy with the character.
It could become an opportunity to re-introduce the character to the show, however, if they ever figure something out.
Re: "The Sega Saturn Was Truly Ahead Of Its Time" - Here's Why Modern Games Use 'Dithering' Instead Of Transparency
Dithering being used as it is now works very well for high resolution games, and the best implementations I've seen make use of dynamic densities, where the concentration of dots can increase or decrease as needed to show or hide more of the obstructed object or actor.
Particularly, one of the best uses is a dithered silhouette of the player character in front of the objects that obstructs the character itself, such as in Super Mario Odyssey.
Re: "Definitely Not Created By AI" - How An Innocent Conker Celebration Drew Rare Into A GenAI Debate
People have become conditioned to recognise a very common aesthetic from AI generated artwork; at least the common slop that comes from people using very basic prompts on free online services.
This artwork unfortunately somewhat has that aesthetic, but it's coupled with being so professionally done that people looking for human flaws or errors aren't going to find those!
It's in the same way that people are getting accused of leaving AI generated comments in discussions, because of their writing style or just trying to give a well written response.
I spend a lot of time looking at rendered images in pretty close detail, both human made and AI generated, and there really aren't any hallmarks of AI in here.
Conker's render does look very, very close to a 3D software render, but that could just be superb drawing skill, or maybe a reference was used.
Re: "At EA, We Were Voted The Worst Company In America Because Of The End Of Mass Effect"
Putting out dissapointing, mediocre, or bad products would be one thing, but nobody is calling Nintendo the worst company for putting out massive letdowns like Metroid Prime 4, or Capcom for putting out the likes of DmC Devil May Cry.
Surely any of the contemporary articles covering EA being voted Worst USA Company, will tell you the actual reasons; and it's not "entitled gamers".
Re: Evercade Range Expands With Two New Carts And A Banjo-Kazooie-Packing Super Pocket
@H_Hog
I have the Neo Geo edition of the Super Pocket, and the shoulder buttons are possibly the worst ones ever designed for games that need them.
Which as it turns out, is quite a lot when you're playing Evercade cartridges like Good Boy Galaxy. That game runs at 240x160 (given that it's a GBA ROM), so it doesn't look great on the 320x240 display.
I'm surprised that they're still making new models of the Super Pocket, granted that they're pretty cheap.
Some games have been exclusive to the built-in storage of the Super Pocket, and are technically not Evercade as a result of that.
I'm hopeful that should there be a Rare Collection 2, that Banjo Kazooie is in there as to not make it exclusive to a Super Pocket.
Re: Evercade Range Expands With Two New Carts And A Banjo-Kazooie-Packing Super Pocket
@wizzgamer
Evercade introduced 64-bit console emulation in 2024 with Glover, which apparently involved rebuilding the ROM and optimising it for their emulator implementation.
https://evercade.co.uk/introducing-64-bit-console-gaming-on-evercade/
There's a good chance that this Banjo Kazooie release also uses an optimized ROM, but it's more likely to be based on the Xbox release as to remove the Nintendo brandings.
@H_Hog
They're showing a screenshot of Banjo Kazooie as it appeared on the N64, and list it as "64-bit console".
If this were the GBA game it would've been "32-bit handheld console" instead.
@RextheSheep
Conker's Pocket Tales was previously released on Evercade cartridge as part of Rare Collection 1, and as I understand that one only plays in GBC mode, so you don't have the option to play the monochrome version which is technically a different game.
Re: "What In The F*ck Have They Done" - Panzer Dragoon Zwei Remake's Steam Demo Has Upset Some Fans
@carlos82
SEGA considers Panzer Dragoon to be a legacy IP, and putting any new product on the market is just a way of saying they're maintaining an IP.
Even if it's a D-list studio doing a shoddy port or remaster.
Re: Another Set Of Sega Classics Are Being Discontinued On Mobile
@Peteykins
It's a slight nuisance if you want to get the Android data to use with the superior decomp-based ports.
But let's be real, those APKs are not difficult to find, and all you're doing is extracting the relevant data from them without ever installing them.
Re: Rockman.EXE Phantom Of Network Has Just Got An Unofficial PC Port, Finally Making It Playable Without An Emulator
@PowerPandaMods
The only way to play it before was the DoJa SDK emulator, which wasn't very good as it had all kinds of performance and sound issues. That, or have a 2000s Japanese flip phone.
This native PC port fixes those performance issues with a stable 15 FPS (what the game is designed to run at), and fixes the audio issues so that sound effects don't cancel out music playback.
Keitai app audio was heavily limited as it was MIDI based and they couldn't do simultaneous music and sound effects, unless you did very specific timing of MIDI sound effects between notes in the music sequence.
This is what the Rockman EXE Keitai games tried to do, and it might be better on real hardware, but in the DoJa SDK emulator had the unfortunate effect of Rockman.EXE's attacks sounding like striking a piano and interrupting the battle music.
The PC port is also far, far easier to play than the DoJa SDK emulator, having straight-forward window scaling options without needing to rely on any secondary applications like ShaderGlass.
Keitai apps at Java applications for said flip phones, and whilst there is an effort to build a dedicated emulator for them, progress has been pretty slow. SquirrelJME is a Java ME 8 Virtual Machine, that already has a Libretro core available for Retroarch, but if things go well and it becomes a mature application could mean being able to play these Keitai apps on various Linux retro handhelds.
Re: Rockman.EXE Phantom Of Network Has Just Got An Unofficial PC Port, Finally Making It Playable Without An Emulator
I gave this a quick spin, and that's some incredible work.
A quick tip, press F1 to bring up basic settings for remapping controls and changing your window scaling.
If you have save game progress from an earlier DoJa SDK emulator playthrough, that'll carry over when you copy across the .jar and .sp files.
Ultimately, I'm hopeful that this can get a Linux port too, because that could be the basis for playing this on a wide range of retro handhelds like Anbernic stuff. This would be absolutely perfect on an RG34XXSP as the game runs at 240x240, and should cleanly upscale to any 480p display.
Re: Review: Miyoo Mini Flip - Seriously Pocket-Friendly
@Broosh
There's also something to be said about the touch screen experience on DS and 3DS, the software is really designed around the resistive touch screens and how they only respond to a single but precise touch point. You lose a lot of that on modern touch devices that expect you to use your finger.
Re: Review: Miyoo Mini Flip - Seriously Pocket-Friendly
@Broosh
My time spent with the RG35XXSP and the RG34XXSP has really renewed my interest in them too.
The former was slightly larger than the GBA SP, whilst the latter is much closer to it in scale and display. The latter model has much better build quality too, though it's slightly small for my hands and makes me want to see a "GBA SP XL" from Anbernic.
I've not personally tried any of Miyoo's offerings yet.
Re: This N64 Classic From The Developers Of GTA Has Gotten A Native PC Port
This is 100% of the titles I first thought of when RT64 and recompilation hit the scene (among things like Mischief Makers).
A real hidden gem that always needed some more love, and maybe a few bug fixes.
100% completion was impossible because one of the collectible trophies had no collision, and therefore couldn't be collected.
Re: Banjo: Recompiled Adds Better Frame Rates, Widescreen Support And More To Rare's N64 Classic - And You Can Play It On Steam Deck
@Sindayl
Yes it's already possible, it just takes considerable effort to complete a recompilation.
Majora's mask recompiled already has raytracing!
Re: Banjo: Recompiled Adds Better Frame Rates, Widescreen Support And More To Rare's N64 Classic - And You Can Play It On Steam Deck
@smoreon
The Note Saving feature is off by default in the recompilation, but a welcome change to anyone that prefers the Xbox feature, or struggles with the original game. I'd prefer to play with Note Saving turned off so there's an actual challenge in staying alive to collect all 100 notes in one world.
The other major change is you can enable analogue camera controls, for smooth camera control with a right analogue stick.
The original camera control used incremental turning with the C-buttons, similar to how Super Mario 64 does it.
One of the major features of Wiseguy's Nintendo 64 recomp tools, is compatibility with the RT64 graphics plugin to bring raytracing to Nintendo 64 games. This is slated as an upcoming feature for the Banjo Kazooie recompilation and I'm looking forward to playing through the game with that enabled.
Re: Huge Eyes? Big Head? Lara Croft Almost Looked Very Different For Her Japanese Debut
@Razieluigi
I'm reminded of the Japanese release of the Western developed Kid Chameleon.
Titled Chameleon Kid, the Japanese cover art is a manga style recreation of the Western cover, and the character details are actually more accurate to the in-game sprites, such as Cyclone being depicted in red and pink, not gold.
https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon#Physical_scans
Re: Huge Eyes? Big Head? Lara Croft Almost Looked Very Different For Her Japanese Debut
Who knew that Lara Croft moonlighted as Tifa Lockhart in Japan?
Re: Hallelujah! The Dubious Quest To Find Monkey Ball's Lost "Adult" Levels Is Complete
@JayJ
Sonic the Hedgehog had a cross promotion with Hooters in Japan, to promote Sonic Forces for some reason.
Maybe it's someone higher up at SEGA?
Re: Hallelujah! The Dubious Quest To Find Monkey Ball's Lost "Adult" Levels Is Complete
@Matroska
Right, but it's come to light that the international all ages releases, did in fact ship with the data in some form.
The law isn't concerned with whether or not that data is conventionally accessible, cases like the Tiger Woods EA golf game that included South Park videos on the disc, or the unfinished "Hot Coffee" content in the PS2 version of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, still caused legal headaches.
Re: Hallelujah! The Dubious Quest To Find Monkey Ball's Lost "Adult" Levels Is Complete
Huh, so this saucy material is present on every physical copy of this ESRB E / PEGI 3 rated game?
The PS Vita may be old news, but that's the sort of thing that's gotten game publishers in trouble before!
Re: 'Last Crown Warriors' Is An Upcoming "Action-Tactics" Game For The Game Boy Color, Inspired By Zelda & The Mana Series
I supported the Kickstarter for this one, progress has been a little slow but promising, and I'm looking forward to playing it.
The physical on the other hand, I'm not confident that their original supplier, First Press Games, will deliver on that. That company has been largely radio silent in the past year on fulfilling pre-orders, and are still accepting pre-orders for Good Boy Galaxy, a title that they lost the rights to publish with ongoing legal disputes from the developers.
Re: This Promising New Action-Platfomer Is Built From The Ashes Of A "Massive" Unreleased ROM Hack For An SNES Classic
Seeing gameplay of Acrolyte in action, I have to wonder if this is made by the talent behind the cancelled fan-made Metroid Prime 2D. I'm seeing a ton of similarities in the graphical style, movement, gameplay, and engine.
Re: Holy Magic Century, Batman! The Infamous Quest 64 Is Being Recompiled For PC
Holy Magic Century, or Quest 64, (or Eltale Monsters in Japan) had the unenviable task of delivering a "next generation JRPG" for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, which ultimately were in short supply especially outside of Japan.
Fans of JRPGs from the SNES, were left with later 1998 games like The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time or Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, which were often miscategorised as RPGs at the time.
Since all the big names in JRPGs had jumped ship to the Playstation with its CD-ROM capabilities, it was left to Imagineer, better known for the Medabots (Medarot) series, to produce what might be the single JRPG available internationally on the Nintendo 64, unless you count Paper Mario which is very much its own brand of Mario RPG.
The expectations were impossible to live up to, for what would've been an easily forgotten title were it a SNES game, where JRPGs were prolific.
Re: A Decompilation Project Is Currently In The Works For Jet Set Radio Future
The decompilation process itself has made some very big strides over time.
Systems previously not considered for decompilation efforts have now become commonplace, with many more GameCube and Wii titles being reverse engineered.
News of any reverse engineering projects is always exciting, even if it's for games I'm not likely to ever play myself.
Re: One Of The Year's Most Adorable Game Boy Color Games Is Getting A Physical Release
I was a Kickstarter backer and just recently did my playthrough of this, it was a sweet time with wonderful music, stage design, and gameplay, but held back by some of the jank that comes with GB Studio like bad frame pacing on the more ambitious levels, and occasional graphical bugs like sprites displaying the wrong tiles.
Despite that, it's a title I'd recommend checking out, and I placed an order for a proper cartridge when I got word of its availability.
Re: More Old Capcom Mobile Games Have Been Saved From Digital Oblivion, Including A Breath Of Fire IV Card Game
The fascinating thing about the keitai preservation process, is that it's a grab-bag of whatever data you happen to be able to pull from old 2000s Japanese flip-phones.
In many cases, the contents of the phones is unknown until they try pulling data with processes they had to reverse engineer themselves, so it's less of a targeted effort to retrieve a specific title, and more of a treasure hunt or a card-pack-pull that you hope you find something new.
Last year, Lizardy on YouTube put up a short video about an obscure AlphaDream developed game called "BigBang Block", which is a keitai game that currently still appears to be lost media.
https://youtu.be/C0eq4x2lLWI
Given that this would've been an obscure and infrequently downloaded game even in Japan whilst it was digitally available, finding an old phone that still has it installed may be very, very difficult.
Re: 24 Years After It Launched, Fans Have Finally "Fixed" Mario Kart: Super Circuit
I was wondering if the 30 FPS rendering was a design choice for the GBA's LCD screen, which has heavy frame blending.
Heavy enough that a blinking image (30 on/off frames per second) appears translucent on the original GBA screen, a trick that the F-Zero titles use for their minimap.
Meaning the 30 FPS was maybe chosen to deliver a more stable image than 60 FPS would allow, it'd be an interesting test with real hardware.
Re: Review: Analogue 3D - The Ultimate Way To Play Nintendo 64?
@eltomo
Unlike the Analogue Pocket's OpenFPGA system, the Analogue 3D is designed to be just a Nintendo 64 solution.
As such, no custom firmware was ever developed for the Analogue Pocket, but custom jailbreak firmwares were made for Analogue's Super NT and Mega SG systems that allows them to play ROMs for different systems from the SD card.
The Analogue 3D's hardware is definitely capable of many things, and more capable than the Analogue Pocket, so I would not be surprised if a jailbreak happens if they don't provide OpenFPGA in a future update.
Re: The Best GBA Flash Cart's New Feature Makes A Hideo Kojima Classic Playable
Being able to play the Boktai games and the motion sensor games like Wario Ware Twisted, without needing to patch the ROMs with workaround functionality, that's really cool!
I might just grab that in the future.
Re: "A Very Emotional Project" - Fang The Sniper Creator Reunites With Sega To Create New Sonic The Hedgehog Merch
@Zeebor15
This merch line is primarily based on Sonic Mania Plus and Sonic Superstars, and there's a four-issue IDW prequel comic called Fang the Hunter that explains or addresses a few things about Fang's involvement in Superstars.
https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog:_Fang_the_Hunter
Specifically things like the "8th chaos emerald" that featured in Sonic the Fighters for some reason, Bark and Bean's absence from Sonic Superstars, and the confusion around Fang's name and title, which is currently "Fang the Hunter", not "Fang the Sniper" or "Nack the Weasel".
He's not even a Weasel! He's a Jerboa, a species of mouse that uses their long springy tail for balance and propping themselves. Fang is known to bounce on his tail like a spring.
It would be nice to see Bark and Bean in the games again proper, rather than having illusion cameos for one boss fight in Sonic Mania.
Re: James Pond Is Getting His Own Collection On PC, PS5, Xbox And Switch 2
I would admittedly be interested in the collection, but considering who's handling it, probably not actually.
Re: "There's Basically Nothing" - Final Fantasy VII Remake's Director Reveals "Almost No Documentation" Exists For The Original
@jygsaw
It's possible, at the time storage media was expensive, and archival or potential re-releases wasn't on their mind.
Old projects were frequently wiped away to make room for new projects, which was especially necessary for data-expensive things like all of the pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes.
That said, there's the Playstation 1 port, and the later Nintendo DS Port of Chrono Trigger, so there's a chance they preserved source code that way to make those ports possible and feasible.
Re: Random: These Ghoulish Super Mario Bros. Figures Show A Different Side To The Mushroom Kingdom
I love the effort Keshi Corner puts into these videos for each new set scanned.
That "Mysterious Toad" is something else, I have to wonder if the face is influenced by anything specific in Japanese 80s pop culture.
Re: Random: 27 Years Later, A Secret Code For Saturn's Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night Has "Broken" Speedruns
So giving the argument some actual thought, it had to depend on your definition of "finishing a game".
Is the goal to see the end credits staff roll, or is it to perform the final feat within gameplay that triggers that staff roll?
In Symphony of the Night, the latter would be landing the finishing blow on one of two end bosses under certain conditions.
Some games feature an option to play the staff roll from the menu, in addition to the staff roll displayed after beating the game. Many of the modern Kirby games have this.
There are also some speedrun categories, usually tool assisted, where the goal is to get to the end credits by any means as quickly as possible, and this usually involves arbitrary code execution ("ACE"). They might not even jump to the starting point of the end credits sequence, one of Ocarina of Time's ACE runs jumps to a mid-point in the sequence!
ACE runs typically redefine the win condition for the game, but calling upon a hidden function in code to display the staff roll doesn't redefine a win condition, so much as it doesn't even engage gameplay by bypassing the starting parameters entirely.
Re: "You Wouldn't See Street Fighter Or Tekken Putting This Garbage Out" - Mortal Kombat Art Book Accused Of Using AI Upscaling
Extremely poor taste, if you're buying an art book for a work, you expect to see the source materials, the final renders, etc.
This is post-processing that destroys such things and is unacceptable, it's not even to a good standard.
AI upscalers and older upscaling methods in general don't have an answer for pixel art (outside of drastically fabricating details), where human interpration to the carefully placed pixels is key to enjoying the artwork.
Re: Miyamoto's "Forgotten" Game Boy Masterpiece Mole Mania Gets The Unofficial 'DX' Treatment
Marc Robledo's done fantastic work with Game Boy colorisation and translation patches, especially the Mega Man World titles (3 through 5).
I'm keen to check this one out later today.
Re: "Nintendo Has Made Serious Objections" - Last Ninja Collection Delayed On Consoles
I would understand if they could add a disclaimer to the game that it's a relic of its time, but I don't see why they can't modify the graphics with the help of someone who has the expertise to do so.
Re: It Looks Like Anbernic Is Going All-In On Its Nintendo DS Clone
I'm very interested, but the ergonomics look off.
The d-pad and face buttons look a bit too close to the hinge, and risk bumping your thumb tip into it when you're really getting into a game, especially if you prefer to use the joint of your thumb over the d-pad's pivot.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
Even before opening the article, I sussed it would've been "primary and secondary", but not the whole CAD thing, where X and Y are used for axis co-ordinates in 2D space (or 3D if you include Z).
Still, better than having O U Y A buttons, right?
Re: Forget Nintendo Switch, You Probably Own A Great Way To Play Virtual Boy Games Already
@N00BiSH
Nintendo seems to have a big focus on celebrating their history at the moment, particular with the Nintendo Museum based in Kyoto, which they keep featuring in Nintendo Direct presentations.
https://museum.nintendo.com/en/index.html
Re: Forget Nintendo Switch, You Probably Own A Great Way To Play Virtual Boy Games Already
@Moroboshi876
Like the article mentions, simply run the Universal Updater homebrew app and it can take care of installing or updating Red Viper for you.
The app when launched will take care of the 50hz switching automatically, there's nothing extra you need to do.
@N00BiSH
I guess the only way it made business sense was if they could sell some expensive plastic on top of needing to pay a subscription fee.