When a game is pulled from a service or the service itself is discontinued, a physical copy isn't affected. To some that's a sense of security; to a cynic, paranoia.
Plenty of other things can stand in the way of it running, but that primary issue of actually having it is at least out of the way.
@FauxD Problem #1 here is the 2600 doesn't have sprites. Or a framebuffer. Or a write-enable pin, interrupts, anything like a complex bus... It's not like any other system out there.
If it works the way they're describing, it's like writing Pitfall II to run without a DCP chip.
What makes the 2600 unique is how spartan it is. There's only enough video ram for one line at a time, a 20 byte buffer that can be mirrored or copied. If you don't want horizontal symmetry you need to "chase the beam", updating the buffer between updates and hope you don't break video sync (it's up to the programmer to know when the video is displaying). You get only 76 CPU cycles per scanline.
There are no sprites. You get two "players", an 8 pixel array in one color that can be at a different resolution than the playfield and can be duplicated three times in a row. There are two "missiles", an array of pixels sharing a player's color. There is also a "ball", sharing the foreground color. These are printed at all times, so when you don't want a player to appear on every single row you need to manually clear them using said handful of opcode. Pretty important, because one frill you do get is hardware collision detection.
Part of what's wonkers here is how much is going on per-line, like total colors, non-symmetrical elements (text, the crane, etc.), and how large/complex all the moving parts are. Each line can vary the colors "easily" so the gradients aren't a real surprise. There's probably a bunch of abuses of strobe and hmove at play here, would be well-worth disassembling this game once it comes out.
Mega CD did well enough within Japan. The problem is the point of comparison: PCE CD, which outdid all the other CD addon/based systems until Playstation.
What was a total loss were the Laseractive modules for both MD and PCE. 32X was devastating, not so much because it was an obvious dog but because it undermined the Saturn's release.
Would never guess that was a 2600 game from the screenshots! That's a lot of unique detail per line, no heavy mirroring, (unless it's clipped away) no obvious artifacts caused by the usual ways you circumvent that. Hopefully it runs over 5 fps, trusting it does ;*) Shading per-line is a great idea! Gradients are more interesting and easy to implement that way.
In other articles, they initially had the sparkling idea to replace all the pokémon with baseball players--a sort of gritty River City Ransom vibe or something. From the sounds of it the localization team straight up ignored everything being said and eventually somebody from the East stepped in and put an end to the nonsense.
Problem is NoJ assumed NoA made competent decisions and NoE weren't a bunch of pirates that would sell their devcarts to the highest bidder.
Since it was mentioned a few times before, Sailor Moon is a rather amusing case. We did get the anime in North America, and the outer planetary sailors were "very obviously only close friends". However, there were two separate pitches to localize it that ultimately failed. One was a western-style cartoon where they flew on surfboards(?) but otherwise not radically different storyline, and the other was a half-live action, half-animated(?) concoction pitched by the guy who made Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Blacking out Cardcaptor's magic circles though, that was low (even if it was a little inconsistent).
The fan translation of PCE Ys IV is stellar. Voice acting is pretty dang good too.
Yeah, Ys IV gets left out because each platform has a different version (outsourcing, yay!) and none of them are considered "complete" by the author. Eventually Falcom themselves made "Memories of Celceta" and hope we eventually grow too senile to remember the others.
How was the playfield overdraw in Donkey Kong done then? Pretty sure the lower left corner of the border extended over the displayed GB field (in a slightly annoying way). Ah, but there was a distinction between static tiles and sprites, right?
Honestly they're really neat devices. Most of the more useful SNES<->GB communication with is done indirectly by writing data to video output.
Would also like to add the computers in Europe were running their own local encoding and you couldn't mix & match other languages with it yet (even European languages could have unpredictable results but anything Eastern, hahaha). The Japan-side PCs may or may not have relied on bitmap kanji from its bios. Being Japan we're probably talking NEC or Amiga. It isn't even likely the compiler could parse anything not 7bit ascii. Their encoding is though, and directly tied to the image samples going into the game. Great solution for this!
@moknbyrd Digital control for games like Pong is a disaster. Like seriously, Pong is basically a visualized potentiometer. All gameplay, from paddle speed to position, is literally just that.
Nintendo's Color TV Game 6 & 15--their very first console--used digital controls. There's no paddle speed control, and that means no whipping up or down in a hurry. It completely ruins the gameplay.
Minimum they need analog control for their not-Vectrex and a full-size screen. Otherwise, they might as well slice the guts out and just make it a bookend or something.
An emulated screen sort of misses the point. The vector interface is the whole point of the thing.
There's a few things that completely rely on it. One is the light pen. You could touch the light pen to the screen and it would propagate what you draw or remove it.
Plus...mini? They're pretty small to begin with. At least make it a full-size emubox if you're going to make it at all...
People didn't exactly walk around with these things, not until the pokémon era and then it was majority the smaller GBCs. Couldn't take them to school and you didn't want it to get stolen. It was easier to play on a couch or at least indoors because of light and reflectivity.
To be fair can't imagine anyone playing anything besides Tetris or Pokémon via link cable. Sure there were other games--even 4 player ones--but VG was very much a solo hobby back then. Bash it if you like, but N64 opened up the family/party game market. Didn't create it, but there's a "before" and "after".
It's never good enough that somebody willingly violates the Berne Convention treaty for other's benefit. They're always expected to do so on anon's terms too.
Among some practical reasons to wait for release is to ensure that emulators will be able to run it and document all the quirks an unfinished piece of software has--especially the nasty kind of bugs that can cause hardware damage or trigger epileptic shocks. Even something as mundane as blaring audio too loud during a crash can harm both your speakers and your ears.
Would guess the reason it isn't running on your Analogue is the increased power consumption. Could test for dropoff. More likely they emulate the new chip than ever get it working with the cart.
Same thing is why GB flashcarts with FPGAs don't work in N64 transfer paks but lesser microcontrollers will. The FPGA will probably be drawing as much as the entire rest of the handheld, all on its own.
To be fair he has a bit of a track record when it comes to delays and budget overruns...not to mention questionable sales. More surprising people continue to throw work their way. (Well, they do have a low project cancellation rate at least.)
Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3: took four times longer and hundreds of thousands of dollars more than expected. Poor sales and ratings. Daikatana: delayed for three years; the GB version is quite good, the rest underwhelming. Anachronox: delayed for several years. Pretty decent game but sales were poor. Blackroom: cancelled after three years. Empire of Sin: only a minor delay of a few months; reviews are depressing.
There were successes though. Deus Ex obviously, and his son's Gunman Taco Truck was a pretty fun romp. (Kinda don't want to count Thief, it's more a product of Looking Glass Studios.)
@Darknyht Ditto. Don't remember any commercials for Nintendo's own games on NES, just the in-store demos and ROB and stuff. They might have only run them in certain regions as a cost-saving measure; the midwest seemed devoid of any.
Sounds like a believable excuse for "we don't want to pay another wave of fees to keep products listed when we didn't make enough on them/peaked out sales" or similar such thing. Not wanting to update a license, or certification for newest revision of whatever, or shakedown at latest OS update, etc. is a pretty common story.
Still bad PR. It took the industry a lot longer than expected to get consumers to accept leasing access versus buying substance; doesn't take much to remind them why that was.
The other games are great and all, but have a particular soft spot for PCE's Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys.
So #4 is a bit of a funny situation, because it's roughly the same story told different ways and somewhat partially in conflict with itself. There was some interview about it (likely in Japanese only) discussing how the limits of each platform led to that situation, that each tells a subset of the original plot, and the writer isn't terribly fond of any of them.
They could overcomplicate everything further by making a completely original fourth "definitive" installment, rivaling SFII for number of unique games with the same number in its title. Ah, but then they'd have to make something new. Nobody's too keen on that nowadays.
The irony is if they game didn't have Rockman it probably would have done better. It was a wild deviation from the license at the time. I remember thinking at release, 'kinda weird for a Mega Man game." As a generic 3D adventure though, above average.
Granted, he was right about the license needing to be shaken up. The burnout was obvious. There were a few too many games with "Kitchen Sink Man" or "Derivative Power Man". The X series was a good shot in the arm, but then it started to turn the same way.
Expecting to sell it on the label alone though, yeah, you got what you deserved.
They're more of a "guns for hire" developer that outsources tasks for other companies. Probably find they're tied to more projects than they're actually credited for if you track their employees. They've always been fairly low-staff, not too difficult.
Japan has more than a few companies that specialize in this kind of thing, and there's even places that completely ghostwrite games.
Next it will be an announcement that they're adding Abdelrahman Munif to "SNK vs the American Literary Canon". Bad enough they skipped over Whitman in the base roster...
Tempted to put the phrase "millions of artists being violated before everyone's eyes" into chatGPT just to see if they also looted archives of hentai...
Then there's that whole aspect that when you finally find a mempak with actual data on it it's really only half the story, because many of these had soundlink audio that, if you're exceedingly lucky, somebody may have recorded on VHS.
In the case of BS F-Zero these were basically commentary and training iirc while you watched a ghost show you how to run the course. Incredibly interesting take on gaming--what makes BS unique really--long before "let's plays" and the like.
As it's long divorced from the original distro, here's the readme for the TWINE SED bugfix and what the password does: https://pastebin.com/Q2FJbywe
@KingMike TWINE protos are quite different internally (as in code), but assets are only additive. SED's big difference is more color depth and polys. Later protos & retail reduced poly counts and replaced ci8 images with ci4. Noticeably worse, probably unnecessary, but there you have it.
This late proto is from PAL localization, but the NTSC pre-release demo not included here had a couple different characters including a bikini Electra. Otherwise, near identical. Still cooking up a way to get the root debug menu going...
SED differences were discussed a bit on the now-defunct AssemblerGames forums. Labyrinth had a gazebo, the sub pen was incomplete, can't remember much else.
Doesn't appear to be a natural way to trigger the debug menu (0C or 30). Might be missing a button code trigger though; those are a bugger to find in this game and they sometimes use combos impossible on a retail controller (like all + pad directions at once).
Can replace the added soundtest item in "cheats" to redirect there though:
80121058 0xE0828 5005 -> 5000 (Just a string.)
8012106F 0xE083F 11 -> 0C (Debug menu; 30 works as well.)
-then recalc the checksum.
Actually, there was a different dedicated emu for KI/KI2 ages ago. That the games were playable on a Pentium 2 should be a good metric, especially since MAME on the same computer stuttered along the intro unplayably when it didn't outright crash. Would be neat to see a modern iteration of it.
Pretty sure the same project released some tools for extracting images, maybe other data from the files as well.
If it were a reprint of the 2001 game that would be a different story. That was pretty low run and didn't sell terribly well at the time, but it's a really great conversion and fun to play. Absolutely treasure my own copy.
It wouldn't be surprising when the VG industry finally runs out of heads to lop for Nintendo to start licensing & producing the GB line again, taking advantage of the growing homebrew scene. Not likely, but also not surprising.
@TransmitHim The company they licensed the title from may not have sourcecode anymore or it may not be buildable. A lot of reasons for that. Not everything was done in-house, old DATs are tricky to recover, missing parts of the build environment, they might not have archived the project, etc.
In those cases you need to hack the existing binary or decompile it. Decompilations often take months and are overkill for simple translations. Effectively, you're documenting every blasted bit of code and resource in a game. A programmer would need to work from a decompilation but frankly, it's rare that's ever necessary.
Programmers don't necessarily know how to hack. It's a fairly different skillset requiring lower-level knowledge specific to your target. How many actually look at the code their compiler outputs?
Won't fault them on that front. They are in a position where they can't identify plagiarism on their own though. and... You are dead-on the second point: a second translator who reviews/tlcs the final product would have caught 1) the mention in the credits and 2) any lack of original script dumps. Might not be possible though on budget. These are low run for a small audience. Doesn't seem there's a debugging team that tests gameplay either.
@LuigiBlood If they're being honest about the explanation at all and haha, there's no blasted way that's true. Anyone lazily copying a translation wouldn't be beyond a copypasta rant from 20 years ago.
To be fair, pointers were a solved problem 25 years ago too. You only mess with them directly if you're doing something "not sane" like overlaying multiple memory ranges. Even if they were using DOS (there was an ancient Word for DOS, but lol) why not just use qbasic to calc them for you? Or there was that fad with using excel formulas to straight up build ROMs. Any sane person nowadays would java or python a list of strings & locations, have it spit out pointers with a warning if you roll over bounds.
Basically, they were caught with their pants down. The proper response is : "Well, s***. I had deadlines and didn't think anyone would notice. Sorry about that."
So, let's get cynical! Sometimes you want to cause a lawsuit. Doesn't seem Anbernic is willing to do that yet, but guarantee somebody will--and fail.
There's a long history of companies that do pirate distribution to effectively settle the suit with the copyright holders by becoming their legitimate distribution service. The single best known case internationally is by all accounts the first: Napster.
It won't work in the VG marketplace, not realistically. You'd be seen as inferior competition to existing services targeting off-brand products and a direct distribution license competitor. Remember that Nintendo, Sony, M$, etc. still need to obtain distribution licenses themselves. As an example, all Speccy ZX stuff is publicly-available except Ultimate Play the Game titles who refused to release their licenses.
The viable way to get the ball rolling would be to aggressively seek to manage licenses for defunct studios, then push for public domain when those entities no longer exists. Build a competing portfolio to make a competing distro service tied not only to your products but available at a cost to the big names that would sue you when you take it too far...intentionally,.
Krokodyl did a great job on the RE and comparison work here. Thanks! Translation work is an iceberg. The text you see at the top hides the other 80% of work involved to store and print it. There's no one solution to that, or even an optimal solution. When you're rewriting code, writing a codec, doing original image work, reworking existing resources, choices on reshuffling and reorganizing, your choices are very much your own. Implementation is rarely repeatable. It's almost a personal signature. I'm glad to see someone use that as the metric for comparison.
It's funny where simple games like Pang get bundled up. One place is the first Bomberman Land PSX game and its counterpart Bomberman64 on the N64, both Japanese exclusives.
@smoreon Oh no, this game eats memory more than most. The intro alone is ~6MB. These animations are largely full-screen keyframes, crossfaded, with some additional elements on top of those.
The trick is TLB entries don't have to point ram to ram and multiple virtual things can be mapped to a physical range. That's only on N64 though. These are all extra hardware on an Aleck64.
@guy-man The "original" Japanese .n64 is also a conversion... Didn't have a problem with the Mayjinsen3 translation though?
Anyway, it works via USB so the culprit is in the menus. The original conversions only ran because the intentional fault in IPL3 was ignored, so guessing there's an extra bit of code making that happen. They'll surely sort it out sometime in the future.
@guy-man The menu probably doesn't recognize the 5101 CIC yet, so use the command line thing via USB: sc64deployer.exe upload -t eeprom4k -s eep.bin --cic-seed 0xAC srmvs.n64
@smoreon E92 boards have 8MB of rdram plus 4MB of sdram (slower, limited access, kinda like GameCube) so you fraud that using TLB entries, like all the other fun hardware it supports. The whole thing is a magic act, honestly. All the conversions work this way.
Comments 48
Re: Nintendo's Ex-Vice President Of Sales Reveals The NES Game They "Couldn't Give Away"
Height of edutainment was Number Munchers but, sadly, Big N never got a port of it.
Frankly, DK Jr. Math is still more fun than Donkey Kong 3. That game stunk.
Re: "We Live In An Age Where Even Bubsy Can Make A Comeback" - Meet The Developers Trying To Resurrect The Barcode Battler
Unlike Bubsy, this looks like it could be both fun and successful.
Re: "Thanks To Everyone Who Played" - Donkey Kong Country And Banjo-Kazooie Designer Gregg Mayles Leaves Rare After 36 Years
Here's hoping he nicked a copy of Mire Mare on the way out the door ;*)
Re: "People Talk About Physical Being Dead... But We Have A Loyal Community" - Broken Sword Boss On "Defining Your Tribe"
When a game is pulled from a service or the service itself is discontinued, a physical copy isn't affected. To some that's a sense of security; to a cynic, paranoia.
Plenty of other things can stand in the way of it running, but that primary issue of actually having it is at least out of the way.
Re: Creator Of Pitfall! Returns To The Atari 2600 With Rescue From Poseidon's Gate
@FauxD Problem #1 here is the 2600 doesn't have sprites. Or a framebuffer. Or a write-enable pin, interrupts, anything like a complex bus... It's not like any other system out there.
If it works the way they're describing, it's like writing Pitfall II to run without a DCP chip.
What makes the 2600 unique is how spartan it is. There's only enough video ram for one line at a time, a 20 byte buffer that can be mirrored or copied. If you don't want horizontal symmetry you need to "chase the beam", updating the buffer between updates and hope you don't break video sync (it's up to the programmer to know when the video is displaying). You get only 76 CPU cycles per scanline.
There are no sprites. You get two "players", an 8 pixel array in one color that can be at a different resolution than the playfield and can be duplicated three times in a row. There are two "missiles", an array of pixels sharing a player's color. There is also a "ball", sharing the foreground color. These are printed at all times, so when you don't want a player to appear on every single row you need to manually clear them using said handful of opcode. Pretty important, because one frill you do get is hardware collision detection.
Part of what's wonkers here is how much is going on per-line, like total colors, non-symmetrical elements (text, the crane, etc.), and how large/complex all the moving parts are. Each line can vary the colors "easily" so the gradients aren't a real surprise. There's probably a bunch of abuses of strobe and hmove at play here, would be well-worth disassembling this game once it comes out.
Re: It Was "Helpful" That Nintendo Killed The SNES PlayStation - Otherwise Sony Would Have Been "Stuck", Says Shuhei Yoshida
Mega CD did well enough within Japan. The problem is the point of comparison: PCE CD, which outdid all the other CD addon/based systems until Playstation.
What was a total loss were the Laseractive modules for both MD and PCE. 32X was devastating, not so much because it was an obvious dog but because it undermined the Saturn's release.
Re: Creator Of Pitfall! Returns To The Atari 2600 With Rescue From Poseidon's Gate
Would never guess that was a 2600 game from the screenshots! That's a lot of unique detail per line, no heavy mirroring, (unless it's clipped away) no obvious artifacts caused by the usual ways you circumvent that. Hopefully it runs over 5 fps, trusting it does ;*)
Shading per-line is a great idea! Gradients are more interesting and easy to implement that way.
Re: "I Still Think The Virtual Boy Was Probably Just Too Ahead Of Its Time" - Japanese Developers On Nintendo's Most Infamous Flop
@Tom_Gamer Yeah, seriously.
This is some top-tier quick dev interview clips and they go completely unmentioned.
Re: The Atari Gamestation Go Launches Next Month, Costs $180 - And You Can Pre-Order It Now
In before the $250 woodgrain special edition.
Re: Nintendo Of America Didn't Think Pokémon "Was Going To Take Off In The US", And It Wasn't Alone
In other articles, they initially had the sparkling idea to replace all the pokémon with baseball players--a sort of gritty River City Ransom vibe or something. From the sounds of it the localization team straight up ignored everything being said and eventually somebody from the East stepped in and put an end to the nonsense.
Problem is NoJ assumed NoA made competent decisions and NoE weren't a bunch of pirates that would sell their devcarts to the highest bidder.
Since it was mentioned a few times before, Sailor Moon is a rather amusing case. We did get the anime in North America, and the outer planetary sailors were "very obviously only close friends". However, there were two separate pitches to localize it that ultimately failed. One was a western-style cartoon where they flew on surfboards(?) but otherwise not radically different storyline, and the other was a half-live action, half-animated(?) concoction pitched by the guy who made Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Blacking out Cardcaptor's magic circles though, that was low (even if it was a little inconsistent).
Re: Anbernic Is Taking On The AYANEO Pocket Air Mini With The RG476H
Is there any blasted thing it would be emulating that actually requires a 120Hz screen?
Half the specs on these devices are nothing but tech p*rn. Do you need an i9 to run a GameBoy? I hope not.
Re: Falcom's PC Engine CD RPGs, Including 'Ys' And 'Legend Of Heroes', Are Getting Re-Releases On Modern Systems
The fan translation of PCE Ys IV is stellar. Voice acting is pretty dang good too.
Yeah, Ys IV gets left out because each platform has a different version (outsourcing, yay!) and none of them are considered "complete" by the author. Eventually Falcom themselves made "Memories of Celceta" and hope we eventually grow too senile to remember the others.
Re: Four Classic Final Fantasy Games Have Just Got The "DX" Treatment For Game Boy Color
Same author also released a colorization for Kwirk alongside these FF patches...which kinda says something about preferences.
https://github.com/gameboycolorizations/kwirk-color
Re: Homebrew Coder Breaks Nintendo's Rules To Create The First Super Game Boy "Exclusive"
How was the playfield overdraw in Donkey Kong done then? Pretty sure the lower left corner of the border extended over the displayed GB field (in a slightly annoying way). Ah, but there was a distinction between static tiles and sprites, right?
Honestly they're really neat devices. Most of the more useful SNES<->GB communication with is done indirectly by writing data to video output.
Re: Random: "It Feels Like We Were In The Stone Age" - Ecco The Dolphin's Japanese Localization Process Sounds Like A Nightmare
Would also like to add the computers in Europe were running their own local encoding and you couldn't mix & match other languages with it yet (even European languages could have unpredictable results but anything Eastern, hahaha). The Japan-side PCs may or may not have relied on bitmap kanji from its bios. Being Japan we're probably talking NEC or Amiga. It isn't even likely the compiler could parse anything not 7bit ascii. Their encoding is though, and directly tied to the image samples going into the game. Great solution for this!
Re: Vectrex Mini Is The Next Micro Console You'll Need To Own
@moknbyrd Digital control for games like Pong is a disaster.
Like seriously, Pong is basically a visualized potentiometer. All gameplay, from paddle speed to position, is literally just that.
Nintendo's Color TV Game 6 & 15--their very first console--used digital controls. There's no paddle speed control, and that means no whipping up or down in a hurry. It completely ruins the gameplay.
Minimum they need analog control for their not-Vectrex and a full-size screen. Otherwise, they might as well slice the guts out and just make it a bookend or something.
Re: Vectrex Mini Is The Next Micro Console You'll Need To Own
An emulated screen sort of misses the point. The vector interface is the whole point of the thing.
There's a few things that completely rely on it. One is the light pen. You could touch the light pen to the screen and it would propagate what you draw or remove it.
Plus...mini? They're pretty small to begin with. At least make it a full-size emubox if you're going to make it at all...
Re: ModRetro Version Of Tetris Gets Updated With Battle Mode It Really Should Have Shipped With
Did so once. Only once. (Won by a landslide too.)
People didn't exactly walk around with these things, not until the pokémon era and then it was majority the smaller GBCs. Couldn't take them to school and you didn't want it to get stolen. It was easier to play on a couch or at least indoors because of light and reflectivity.
To be fair can't imagine anyone playing anything besides Tetris or Pokémon via link cable.
Sure there were other games--even 4 player ones--but VG was very much a solo hobby back then. Bash it if you like, but N64 opened up the family/party game market. Didn't create it, but there's a "before" and "after".
Re: Sega Laserdisc Emulation Has Just Taken A Major Leap Forward
Just like the PCE LD titles they interleave digital data with the analog RF signals. That's why dumping them has taken years of research.
Arcade LDs are basically just videos and can be ripped like any other LD. The game itself is controlled by external logic.
Re: 30 Years After The Virtual Boy's Failure, Fans Have Tracked Down Another One Of Its Cancelled Games
It's never good enough that somebody willingly violates the Berne Convention treaty for other's benefit. They're always expected to do so on anon's terms too.
Among some practical reasons to wait for release is to ensure that emulators will be able to run it and document all the quirks an unfinished piece of software has--especially the nasty kind of bugs that can cause hardware damage or trigger epileptic shocks. Even something as mundane as blaring audio too loud during a crash can harm both your speakers and your ears.
Re: The 'αSNES' Could Be The Final Form Of Nintendo's Legendary 16-Bit Console
What kind of tuner needs to be attached to pick up Satellaview transmissions? Total deal breaker right there.
Re: Almost 35 Years On, A Battletoads Mystery Appears To Have Been Solved
It would be stranger still if there was a Rare title that didn't have beta pics on its box or manual.
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
Would guess the reason it isn't running on your Analogue is the increased power consumption. Could test for dropoff. More likely they emulate the new chip than ever get it working with the cart.
Same thing is why GB flashcarts with FPGAs don't work in N64 transfer paks but lesser microcontrollers will. The FPGA will probably be drawing as much as the entire rest of the handheld, all on its own.
Re: "We Have Some Difficult News To Share" - Microsoft Kills Off John Romero's Upcoming FPS Title
To be fair he has a bit of a track record when it comes to delays and budget overruns...not to mention questionable sales. More surprising people continue to throw work their way.
(Well, they do have a low project cancellation rate at least.)
Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3: took four times longer and hundreds of thousands of dollars more than expected. Poor sales and ratings.
Daikatana: delayed for three years; the GB version is quite good, the rest underwhelming.
Anachronox: delayed for several years. Pretty decent game but sales were poor.
Blackroom: cancelled after three years.
Empire of Sin: only a minor delay of a few months; reviews are depressing.
There were successes though. Deus Ex obviously, and his son's Gunman Taco Truck was a pretty fun romp.
(Kinda don't want to count Thief, it's more a product of Looking Glass Studios.)
Re: This "Lost" Zelda Commercial Is A Million Times Better Than The Ones Nintendo Gave Us
@Darknyht Ditto. Don't remember any commercials for Nintendo's own games on NES, just the in-store demos and ROB and stuff. They might have only run them in certain regions as a cost-saving measure; the midwest seemed devoid of any.
Re: SNK Just Delisted A Bunch Of Its Games From The Google Play Store
Sounds like a believable excuse for "we don't want to pay another wave of fees to keep products listed when we didn't make enough on them/peaked out sales" or similar such thing. Not wanting to update a license, or certification for newest revision of whatever, or shakedown at latest OS update, etc. is a pretty common story.
Still bad PR. It took the industry a lot longer than expected to get consumers to accept leasing access versus buying substance; doesn't take much to remind them why that was.
Re: A New Compilation Celebrating The 'Ys' Series Is Being Released In Japan Next Year
The other games are great and all, but have a particular soft spot for PCE's Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys.
So #4 is a bit of a funny situation, because it's roughly the same story told different ways and somewhat partially in conflict with itself. There was some interview about it (likely in Japanese only) discussing how the limits of each platform led to that situation, that each tells a subset of the original plot, and the writer isn't terribly fond of any of them.
They could overcomplicate everything further by making a completely original fourth "definitive" installment, rivaling SFII for number of unique games with the same number in its title. Ah, but then they'd have to make something new. Nobody's too keen on that nowadays.
Re: Random: Keiji Inafune Believed "Arrogance" & Overconfidence Led To Mega Man Legends' Poor Sales
The irony is if they game didn't have Rockman it probably would have done better. It was a wild deviation from the license at the time. I remember thinking at release, 'kinda weird for a Mega Man game." As a generic 3D adventure though, above average.
Granted, he was right about the license needing to be shaken up. The burnout was obvious. There were a few too many games with "Kitchen Sink Man" or "Derivative Power Man". The X series was a good shot in the arm, but then it started to turn the same way.
Expecting to sell it on the label alone though, yeah, you got what you deserved.
Re: Square, Capcom, Taito, & Sega Are All Making Promising Steps To Preserve Their Past
Considering the names, it's more like they're writing their memoirs...
Re: The Sega Classic OutRun Is Coming To The Big Screen, With Michael Bay Attached To Direct
Yes, will it be like "Tetris", the biographical thriller or "Tetris", the ill-fated sci-fi trilogy.
With how bonkers this year has been wouldn't be surprised if Disney suddenly announced a "Shadows of the Empire" movie too.
Re: Japanese Developer Behind Nintendo's Super Robot Wars Titles Has Gone Bust
They're more of a "guns for hire" developer that outsources tasks for other companies. Probably find they're tied to more projects than they're actually credited for if you track their employees. They've always been fairly low-staff, not too difficult.
Japan has more than a few companies that specialize in this kind of thing, and there's even places that completely ghostwrite games.
Re: "Free SNK From The Saudi Royal Family" - Fans Aren't Pleased About Fatal Fury's Celebrity Fighters
Next it will be an announcement that they're adding Abdelrahman Munif to "SNK vs the American Literary Canon". Bad enough they skipped over Whitman in the base roster...
Re: "The Biggest Art Heist In History" - Castlevania Director Takes Aim At AI
Tempted to put the phrase "millions of artists being violated before everyone's eyes" into chatGPT just to see if they also looted archives of hentai...
Re: Lost F-Zero Tracks Found After $2,500 Was Offered For Their Preservation
Then there's that whole aspect that when you finally find a mempak with actual data on it it's really only half the story, because many of these had soundlink audio that, if you're exceedingly lucky, somebody may have recorded on VHS.
In the case of BS F-Zero these were basically commentary and training iirc while you watched a ghost show you how to run the course. Incredibly interesting take on gaming--what makes BS unique really--long before "let's plays" and the like.
Re: Two Early N64 Prototypes Of 'The World Is Not Enough' Appear Online
As it's long divorced from the original distro, here's the readme for the TWINE SED bugfix and what the password does:
https://pastebin.com/Q2FJbywe
@KingMike TWINE protos are quite different internally (as in code), but assets are only additive. SED's big difference is more color depth and polys. Later protos & retail reduced poly counts and replaced ci8 images with ci4. Noticeably worse, probably unnecessary, but there you have it.
This late proto is from PAL localization, but the NTSC pre-release demo not included here had a couple different characters including a bikini Electra. Otherwise, near identical. Still cooking up a way to get the root debug menu going...
SED differences were discussed a bit on the now-defunct AssemblerGames forums. Labyrinth had a gazebo, the sub pen was incomplete, can't remember much else.
Doesn't appear to be a natural way to trigger the debug menu (0C or 30). Might be missing a button code trigger though; those are a bugger to find in this game and they sometimes use combos impossible on a retail controller (like all + pad directions at once).
Can replace the added soundtest item in "cheats" to redirect there though:
80121058 0xE0828 5005 -> 5000 (Just a string.)
8012106F 0xE083F 11 -> 0C (Debug menu; 30 works as well.)
-then recalc the checksum.
Re: Funding For The Most Advanced Killer Instinct Emulator Ever Made Has Been Pulled
Actually, there was a different dedicated emu for KI/KI2 ages ago. That the games were playable on a Pentium 2 should be a good metric, especially since MAME on the same computer stuttered along the intro unplayably when it didn't outright crash. Would be neat to see a modern iteration of it.
Pretty sure the same project released some tools for extracting images, maybe other data from the files as well.
Re: Dragon's Lair: The Legend For The Original Game Boy Is Getting A Rerelease
If it were a reprint of the 2001 game that would be a different story. That was pretty low run and didn't sell terribly well at the time, but it's a really great conversion and fun to play. Absolutely treasure my own copy.
It wouldn't be surprising when the VG industry finally runs out of heads to lop for Nintendo to start licensing & producing the GB line again, taking advantage of the growing homebrew scene. Not likely, but also not surprising.
Re: Review: Game Kiddy Bubble - The Game Gear Tribute Act We've All Been Waiting For
Until a TV tuner mod is made sticking to an original GG thank you very much.
Re: Ratalaika Dismisses Claim That Retro-Bit Had Permission To Use Its Translations
What's more, in this particular case it was plagiarism.
Re: The Making Of: Dragon’s Lair’s "Impossible" Game Boy Color Port
I was one of your few sales back then!
Absolutely great game, still have and play it. All the work really was worth the effort.
Re: "These Short Games Mean Nothing To Me" - Retro-Bit Translator Denies Wrongdoing In "Baffling" Rant
@TransmitHim The company they licensed the title from may not have sourcecode anymore or it may not be buildable. A lot of reasons for that. Not everything was done in-house, old DATs are tricky to recover, missing parts of the build environment, they might not have archived the project, etc.
In those cases you need to hack the existing binary or decompile it. Decompilations often take months and are overkill for simple translations. Effectively, you're documenting every blasted bit of code and resource in a game. A programmer would need to work from a decompilation but frankly, it's rare that's ever necessary.
Programmers don't necessarily know how to hack. It's a fairly different skillset requiring lower-level knowledge specific to your target. How many actually look at the code their compiler outputs?
Won't fault them on that front. They are in a position where they can't identify plagiarism on their own though. and...
You are dead-on the second point: a second translator who reviews/tlcs the final product would have caught 1) the mention in the credits and 2) any lack of original script dumps. Might not be possible though on budget. These are low run for a small audience. Doesn't seem there's a debugging team that tests gameplay either.
Re: "These Short Games Mean Nothing To Me" - Retro-Bit Translator Denies Wrongdoing In "Baffling" Rant
@LuigiBlood If they're being honest about the explanation at all and haha, there's no blasted way that's true. Anyone lazily copying a translation wouldn't be beyond a copypasta rant from 20 years ago.
To be fair, pointers were a solved problem 25 years ago too. You only mess with them directly if you're doing something "not sane" like overlaying multiple memory ranges.
Even if they were using DOS (there was an ancient Word for DOS, but lol) why not just use qbasic to calc them for you? Or there was that fad with using excel formulas to straight up build ROMs. Any sane person nowadays would java or python a list of strings & locations, have it spit out pointers with a warning if you roll over bounds.
Basically, they were caught with their pants down. The proper response is : "Well, s***. I had deadlines and didn't think anyone would notice. Sorry about that."
Re: Anbernic's New Firmware Has Opened A Can Of Worms That Could Damage The Handheld Emulation Market
So, let's get cynical!
Sometimes you want to cause a lawsuit. Doesn't seem Anbernic is willing to do that yet, but guarantee somebody will--and fail.
There's a long history of companies that do pirate distribution to effectively settle the suit with the copyright holders by becoming their legitimate distribution service. The single best known case internationally is by all accounts the first: Napster.
It won't work in the VG marketplace, not realistically. You'd be seen as inferior competition to existing services targeting off-brand products and a direct distribution license competitor. Remember that Nintendo, Sony, M$, etc. still need to obtain distribution licenses themselves. As an example, all Speccy ZX stuff is publicly-available except Ultimate Play the Game titles who refused to release their licenses.
The viable way to get the ball rolling would be to aggressively seek to manage licenses for defunct studios, then push for public domain when those entities no longer exists. Build a competing portfolio to make a competing distro service tied not only to your products but available at a cost to the big names that would sue you when you take it too far...intentionally,.
Re: Retro-Bit Apologises For Using Fan-Translations Without Permission
Krokodyl did a great job on the RE and comparison work here. Thanks!
Translation work is an iceberg. The text you see at the top hides the other 80% of work involved to store and print it. There's no one solution to that, or even an optimal solution. When you're rewriting code, writing a codec, doing original image work, reworking existing resources, choices on reshuffling and reorganizing, your choices are very much your own. Implementation is rarely repeatable. It's almost a personal signature. I'm glad to see someone use that as the metric for comparison.
Re: Capcom's SNES Shooter 'Super Pang' Is Getting An Unofficial Mega Drive Port
It's funny where simple games like Pang get bundled up. One place is the first Bomberman Land PSX game and its counterpart Bomberman64 on the N64, both Japanese exclusives.
Re: Lewd N64-Powered 'Super Real Mahjong VS' Gets English-Language Patch
@smoreon Oh no, this game eats memory more than most. The intro alone is ~6MB. These animations are largely full-screen keyframes, crossfaded, with some additional elements on top of those.
The trick is TLB entries don't have to point ram to ram and multiple virtual things can be mapped to a physical range. That's only on N64 though. These are all extra hardware on an Aleck64.
Re: Lewd N64-Powered 'Super Real Mahjong VS' Gets English-Language Patch
@guy-man The "original" Japanese .n64 is also a conversion...
Didn't have a problem with the Mayjinsen3 translation though?
Anyway, it works via USB so the culprit is in the menus.
The original conversions only ran because the intentional fault in IPL3 was ignored, so guessing there's an extra bit of code making that happen. They'll surely sort it out sometime in the future.
Re: Lewd N64-Powered 'Super Real Mahjong VS' Gets English-Language Patch
@guy-man
The menu probably doesn't recognize the 5101 CIC yet, so use the command line thing via USB:
sc64deployer.exe upload -t eeprom4k -s eep.bin --cic-seed 0xAC srmvs.n64
@smoreon
E92 boards have 8MB of rdram plus 4MB of sdram (slower, limited access, kinda like GameCube) so you fraud that using TLB entries, like all the other fun hardware it supports. The whole thing is a magic act, honestly. All the conversions work this way.