KingMike

@MontyCircus My knowledge of Little Samson in 1992/1993 was only because Nintendo Power covered it.
I didn't have a NES at the time so I couldn't actually play it, I could only look at the magazine article and wonder what I was missing.

@-wc- Oops. I mathed bad. 160x144 is a 10:9 ratio, I believe. I put those numbers together wrong.

From what I remember, what we had of Mega Drive Mr. Nutz 2 online was an incomplete source code.

It does surprise me that this game was one that someone decided needed to be released on every iteration of the Game Boy line.
But they weren't Nutz enough to make DS, 3DS and Switch versions. (though it wouldn't surprise me if someone said there was a DSi version. I mean, someone decided that the Amiga and SNES platformer Oscar needed to be split into a separate game for each level and released on DSiWare.)

@JackGYarwood Would be nice to see the English version that Namco had prepared for a USA release in 1994, renamed Star Quest.
But as you might imagine, the 1990 Mega Drive game was probably suddenly looking a bit dated with the PlayStation half a year from Japanese launch. I imagine that's probably why its release was shelved, even though EGM reviewed a supposedly completed preview copy.

Well, Analogue is the company that got its start selling us a $500 NES.
(I don't know if I can even say clone, I've heard some say that first Analogue unit was basically a really fancy AV Famicom PCB mod at its core.)

Risk damaging a rare and valuable console when picking up a spare could do the job.

Though I can remember I'm not the only one that felt a little upset many years ago when Ben Heck took one apart to turn it into a Sega CD-only machine, as I recall. (I think those were the days he was largely known as the guy who portablizes all the home consoles.)

@-wc- 16:10 is the aspect ratio the GB/GBC and GG used. I don't know what other systems used that.
I haven't kept track of Evercade releases to know which games from those systems, if any, made it to the console.

@Lanmanna Well, the NES version Super Spike V'Ball did get promoted in Nintendo Power when Nintendo launched their 4-player adapters and they made a dual-cart with Nintendo World Cup that I think might have been a pack-in with the adapters or maybe even the console itself so the NES version isn't a very obscure game.

@MarkyVigoroth I feel like it's lesser known they did actually port the first DKC to the GBC in addition to the GBA.

I've seen videos of this game and there's only one thing I can think about: It has flip-screen scrolling. On the PLAYSTATION TWO.
Every version on far less powerful computers has proper scrolling. What the jank, Taito?

@Johnny_Arthur From what I've seen and heard, it wasn't a "bad" game to be "fixed" but it was a British-made game, at least from a time period, where I would get the impression they really liked absurdly difficult games. Seen by watching streamers play ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games, it's a rare sight to see games with fairness in the game design.

Love-de-lic, the people who made Moon: RPG Remix Adventure previously on A 32-Bit Home Console.

LGR Clint remembers POD and thus has made us all aware of it.

I seem to recall that when someone wrote a tool to automatically "colorize" Game Boy games so many years ago it broke games because what do you know, turns out porting even GB to GBC was something needing human effort to deal with.

SML is 64KB. Considering how much of that is probably graphics and sound and level data, that can't leave that much code left to disassemble and rewrite.
Can't be that much more than some of the NES code I've hand disassembled and analyzed for translations.
You might be able to rewrite the graphics and level data and such but I'm fairly certain chip sound is something you can't just expect a robot to rewrite for a different chip and it not sound like ****.

If Game Boy games are "so simple" then you don't need AI to write something "so simple" for you.

Or did the author need AI to write their post for them too because writing a post on the Internet seems like something "so simple" as well, but I don't know, I don't know anymore just how lazy the human race is to see how far down the "simple" rabbithole it goes that people need a robot to do things for them.

Now that I look closer at the Game Boy screens, I wonder how difficult it would be to see those on an actual OG (DMG-001) screen.

@Damo The game actually was originally designed for a battery-backup save feature. There is a pre-Costner prototype ROM online. It is, as mentioned, a pretty rough game (I'm not sure if there's even a way to restore health).
Other odd things about it is that the final game had a password feature which itself was hidden as a cheat code.
The game also had a Sega Master System version that was in development at one point but never finished. I do recall there is at least video footage online, surely from an old promotional video or TV show.

@Guru_Larry "male Samus" Someone got their lore solely from the NES instruction manual where "he" pronouns was their way of keeping it secret Samus was female (which only makes sense in the context of the era the original game out when games didn't often promote female human protagonists).
Though even the Japanese manual apparently called Samus "he" one or more times despite that you could much more easily hide the character gender in Japanese without resorting to very awkward-sounding writing like you would in English.

Though I've read the 1993 Mario movie writers called the blond princess "Daisy" because they pulled it out of the NES Open Tournament Golf manual because that was the only "Mario" game they played where, because of palette limits of the NES, "Daisy" (as Luigi's caddy canonically) was a dress-color swap of "Peach/Toadstool" (Mario's caddy).

It seems like the toploader NES was released in 1994 in both Japan and North America.
Japan got The Legend of Zelda cartridge version and the Final Fantasy I+II combo cart as launch games and for North America, we got Mega Man VI and Zoda's Revenge.

@-wc- The date, is the strangest thing. Why was Nintendo still printing SMBDH carts in 1993?

It will be hilarious to see how much the graders think they can get for these copies of a game that, reportedly, you could once buy for a dime apiece at GameStop. (Though by the time I was collecting NES games, my copy was up to 89 cents.)

I recall Doraemon was notable for a demo mode where even the demo player is bored or confused about how to play the game.

Interesting goal, but the effort to port just one stage isn't quite the same as porting an entire game.

I do remember the devs of the unfinished SNES Steven Segal game remarked on another dev working on a Genesis "game" and I do recall saying the Genesis project they've seen wasn't an actual game yet I think it was a still shot or something and were saying its easy to create an image or something that looks great if you're using all the hardware capability to generate it. Reportedly they hadn't yet seen an actual game element in that rival development.

So, will this Final Fight port developer make his "one stage" ported the factory stage that was cut? Looking at the arcade, that surely would've been the trickiest to "faithfully" port.
Nevermind, I see. It's as expected, just the first stage. Not the most demanding one.
I wouldn't want to criticize another's work, but they're the ones calling the original devs and I don't know if the limitations they had were being considered.

@Damo Disabled copy-paste command? I'd have probably screenshotted or even taken a photo, printed it, then OCR'd if I cared enough to demonstrate on them. But that sounds like work, maybe more than them.

Those who just want a device that plays all the games without caring if its AI or human research, you know China is putting out so many other devices that can do that for you, right?

@Atariboy I bought Seasons when it was new. I only picked one because I was expecting some kind of Pokemon thing that would've been disappointed me if I had bought both.
I didn't get Ages until I learned it was worth it to buy both and I had to pick up a used cart.

@MeloMan Strange, I would've thought the Game Boy Player WAS a GBA, as far as GBC compatibility was concerned.
(I'm sure you could tilt 'n tumble your GC to play a certain Kirby game, even though Nintendo probably wouldn't like it.)

@TitanSix There's almost certainly rarer games than Shantae. Just nobody talks about them. I can still feel regrets I didn't buy the game when I could've easily walked into GameStop or EB Games in like 2004 and bought a "new" copy.
But GBC had so many young childrens' licensed games like Dragon Tales or Bob the Builder, how was a young adult gamer to know this wasn't one of them?

@AussieMcBucket That's the sad thing. Nintendo would just need an option to swap a single byte in RAM to support it on digital releases.
The only way for GBC games to even detect if they're running on a GBC or a GBA is to keep a signature byte of data sent to it by the boot ROM within the CPU (which hides itself once its done its job and passes code execution to the cartridge ROM).
Which RAM location that data is stored to is is different per game, but since it's one of the first things done by the game, it shouldn't take more than a few seconds of reading the first few instructions of code executed by the game for a dev to deduce.

As to PS1 "performance stutters", don't games usually load the game data before running the gameplay?
So I would expect as worse longer load times?
I guess maybe it would have to do with games that use the CD audio capabilities rather than chip music, since CD-DA would now need to be emulated rather than run native.

Surely with a Blu-Ray drive in my PC, I can play all my real PS3 discs should my real PS3 go kaput?
I would prefer to ISO my discs for preservation (as I had done up to PS2) but I suppose with the size of BD-ROMs, I think that's not as feasible without getting another HDD. In this economy.

MAME has emulated them for quite some time.
The thing is, I'm told the process to dumping an LCD game is destructive. (as you have not just ROMs or whatever is in the device, but also the screen artwork and such)
So I've been told by a streamer who said they'd love to play the Beavis & Butthead Tiger LCD game but it's an extremely expensive collectable, which would obviously deter preservationists if they have to buy an expensive game in order to carefully break it.

I do remember reading the 1983 Famicoms were reportedly of poor build quality, enough that Nintendo had to recall and replacing them (making those surviving 1983 "square button" consoles a collector's item).
The RROD of 1983?

@romanista I think Arm Wrestling is the last arcade-original game Nintendo made, in 1985. Though they distributed the original R-Type in 1987, so they hadn't completely left the business.
Indeed they did sell the NES-based PlayChoice-10 and VS. machines through the '80s (with PlayChoice-10 still getting "new" games through at least 1990).

DOOM got blamed for the Columbine shooting because it's much easier for the NBC News writers to package that as a story and wring two weeks of ratings (and with it, ad revenue) out of it.

I know Kenji Ino was shocked when he learned someone uploaded his canceled (and never officially announced) Superman Famicom game to the Internet (initially found as its license-removed version Sunman) and that was probably the most "normal" video game he made, I'd guess.
Time Zone and Panic Restaurant were only a little strange, and then he went off from there.

@metaphysician I don't know what you are talking about because I don't know where you got the idea that was my message.
You said "Suggests you feel entitled that other people act in support of your pursuit of acclaim, rather than for their own entirely-legitimate ends."
Where did I say anything in support that? I think you're trying to force an argument here be telling me I said something I didn't. I want to know where I said I had a "pursuit of acclaim". Was it because I said I'm not fixing a robot's translation? Because I'm not. There's no point to when if I knew how to fix it, it would make as much sense to just write it myself. If you are taking that as a "pursuit of acclaim", then you are putting words in my mouth.

@AlienX I looked at GBA ROM hacking once and I was immediately confused. What's up with that "ARM" and "THUMB" instruction sets? It leaves me more confused than the more straightforward CPUs of the 8/16-bit era.
I looked at PlayStation once, and that R3000 instruction set. It might be a more "simplified" set but that made the code more work to follow what it was doing, since it would sometimes have to write complex instructions to replace something simpler on 6502/Z80/68000.

@PKDuckman Only the DS game, and even that I recall getting discounted pretty quickly.

I swear I saw a Syvalion cab once as a kid, though I can't recall where.
It's definitely a game you don't forgot once you see it.
Then later I learned, at least the English version, is one of the scarcest arcade machines. Even MAME didn't have it documented until someone ripped the ROMs from the PS2 compilation.

Though being scarce in English also applies to the SNES version. I've heard that and Whirlo are among the rarest PAL games, reportedly the localizations were only released in Spain.
Aside from that I've heard the piracy rate was a bit higher there, it does sound odd to localize games to English and then only released them there, and I could understand those factors making them rare.

@slider1983 I haven't played them close to compare the differences but I heard Mega Bomberman, Bomberman '94 and Super Bomberman 3 were very closely related.

I'm a human, I'm not fixing a robot's translation.

@Thad People interested in making translations should work on what they want to work on. Working on something just because "it hasn't already been done" isn't going to result in a good translation if their heart's not in it. Being expected to make something they don't care about and make it good is what paid developers are expected.

@JackGYarwood Panic Bomber W actually uses a SA-1 enhancement chip in the cartridge and the reason I can think of why it might need it is is because it is one of, if not the only, SNES puzzle game to have four player capability with computer opponents. I assume the hardware boost was needed for the AI, which was pretty taxing on 16-bit hardware. (****, even the GameCube Nintendo Puzzle Collection apparently struggles managing multiple CPU opponents in Panel de Pon).
Super Tetris 3 does have a four-player capability but it seems you need human competition to play that one.

Panic Bomber was also on NeoGeo and Virtual Boy. The latter probably more famous for its Angry Video Game Nerd review ("Why is this is on Virtual Boy?! It should be on Game Boy!")

I want to enjoy Trinea. But one thing that quickly put me off was a pretty jank camera. I recall it only moved when you were uncomfortably close to the edge of the screen.
Song Master uses a tactical encounter system (I would immediately think of RoboTrek or the Genesis RPG Sorcerer's Kingdom as examples).

@JackGYarwood EGM reported back in the day that Max Entertainment had relations with Climax (aka Sonic! Software Planning and then Camelot).
So FEDA very much felt like a Shining Force for Super Famicom.
Except I'm told this game has a morality mechanic. So reportedly to receive the titular notation you have to avoid the RPG instinct to murder for EXP as much as possible.

@romanista I'd agree. Data limits can surely force devs to optimize their code/cut fluff.

@GameManAdvance I suppose if you don't watch what cereal you eat, there could be an explosion in your stomach.

@-wc- Among those games was Sword Maniac. Until Activision decided to it was better to have, whoever Psychosonik was, replace it, whatever was in X-Kaliber 2097 for the SNES.

I bought a cart of the former years ago to add to my backlog, at longer wait and more expense than the latter, but I expect it a better experience when I do get to it.

@Ruka Nestle? Big Food buys out so many products it's hard to keep track.

@Guht781 I don't think Bases Loaded got an arcade release.

The closest I know was a planned PlayChoice-10 version that didn't come out. I just know because it was saved from the same machine that one preservationist bought to preserve a Virus (Dr. Mario) prototype spotted inside.

@PKDuckman Well, as said, Hudson had a close business relation with Nintendo while id did not. That was probably the major thing.

The page scrolling was so jarring that I recall I struggled at even level 1-3. It just throws off your timing when it occurs during a needed run and jump.