Zoinkity

So long as Commodore International doesn't market any men's underwear they should be in the clear.

It has nothing to do with the previous game, except for all the things included from the previous game.

Being a shorter game, tentative title is "Daiwakizashi".

Wouldn't blame them for stealing samples from a re-release. Be brave and port the Lylat voice line as well ;*)

Outside the normal audio banks--a fairly straightforward MML--there's some outliers like the backstory monologue. That's this super-low-hertz thing with is own specialized compression. For as dense as it is it sounds remarkably good.

Gray? More like clear blue or mint.

So yes, you can run flashcarts...and here's video of GoldenEye's 640i mod running in A3D's unleashed mode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1lFn2rqn1w

@KingMike As a proud owner of all the GB/C Pocket Puyo games, can't help but agree ;*)

Doing God's work.
Excellent news!

Most problems with Everdrives are solved with Summercarts.

Nice too that Summercarts can effectively emulate a 64DD (not those blasted hacks). The only native way to hook a drive to an A3D would be running a cable using an adapter. Pretty sure you'd have to externally supply it 12v, maybe not though.

So their idea was to make an economy model competing with an existing product? Unless it ran the existing games as well yeah, hard to sell it even in an untapped market. Since these games weren't designed for grayscale who knows what they'd actually look like.

The pitch itself doesn't really understand you play different kinds of games on handhelds. Mario wasn't GB's breadwinner, Tetris was. There's also motion and screen size issues to consider, and admittedly not every GB game thought that through.

GG was the closest thing to real competition for the GB series until WonderSwan. Not a dig; being second-best to a behemoth is no small feat. Lynx and TurboExpress were both quite fancy, way the heck too expensive. GG games are very similar to develop as Master System titles, no lack of developers. It would have been more worthwhile to work on a cost-reduced version of GG, not unlike the GB Pocket, once 3v components became available.

Still though, talk about a pie-in-the-sky pitch.
People still make brand new GB games. People still buy these new games. Frankly, wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo actually started manufacturing handhelds and reopened publisher services again. Unlikely, but not surprising.

Ironically, DQ had the edge in the West by having its games released. It wasn't until 6 (oh sorry, 3) that they started spitting out FF consistently.

Really enjoyed the PSX fan translation, looking forward to this one as well!

Here's a patch for English cutscenes:
https://mega.nz/file/wmgTnAaD#NVxSCI8VdRFlqcHPEXLXyojZpevOhORy6WpYhXd6tqM

Doesn't affect the Zork series so much, but the "commercial packaging or marketing materials" bit would shoot a fair number of other Z-Machine and (unrelated) floppy games in the foot. A major antipiracy trick was to insert some prompt or puzzle into the game that required an answer from the manual.

Incidentally, if you want to make your own IF there's a rather neat compiler for them that uses natural language.
https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/

Wonder if this was originally intended as "iQue mode". Playback rate is pretty similar to the x2 CPU & RCP seen in those, though haha, the saved game situation for PD would be a hassle on it and wow, the HDMI looks so much cleaner. Has some implications too, like more code processed per thread before handoff.

Would be interesting to see how the 640i GoldenEye patch runs on it in comparison to iQue (seen here: https://youtu.be/5g-b9bW4Ivg).

Goes to show how few N64 titles set a maximum framerate cap.

@murty Reading even further between the lines, the list of suspects will look an awful lot like a list of prior clients.

Would be remiss not to link this interview with the fellow who made the models for the CD-i original.
http://www.nintendoplayer.com/interview/zeldas-adventure-jason-bakutis/

Those models are up there with the monsters from Linda Cubed...or the original manual? Honestly find the problematic controls and bugs of the demake on-par with the jankiness of the CD-i version, and in both cases an engine overhaul would result in a very, very good game. (Not unlike the E.T. overhaul.)

Best feature? The snow.
Gotta love that snow effect.

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.

Unlike Bubsy, this looks like it could be both fun and successful.

Here's hoping he nicked a copy of Mire Mare on the way out the door ;*)

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.

@Tom_Gamer Yeah, seriously.
This is some top-tier quick dev interview clips and they go completely unmentioned.

In before the $250 woodgrain special edition.

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).

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.

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.

Same author also released a colorization for Kwirk alongside these FF patches...which kinda says something about preferences.

https://github.com/gameboycolorizations/kwirk-color

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...

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".

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.

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.

What kind of tuner needs to be attached to pick up Satellaview transmissions? Total deal breaker right there.

It would be stranger still if there was a Rare title that didn't have beta pics on its box or manual.

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.

Considering the names, it's more like they're writing their memoirs...

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.

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.