KingMike

"stream animated graphics that were significantly more advanced than the other games on the market"
LaserDisc was a video disc player and this game hardware allowed the game logic to control it.
It also wore out the disc hardware pretty fast, since the disc hardware wasn't designed to be asked to skip around the disc as frequently as these games demanded it.

@slider1983 They'd need a Nintendo license to do that, and no way that is happening.

@JJtheTexan Certainly "Genesis Does" had the most pressure on Sega, to get successfully on the US market before whenever Nintendo finally releases the SNES.
Of course, we recall by the mid '90s, both companies were firmly in the mold of angry American advertising that was far too prevalent in those days. They could both stood to have calmed down just a little bit.

Not long after reading the headline I had already realized, it's not really Square-Enix, is it, but Eidos, or D()MARK?

@DanaTheElf I'm sure there is a difference between a translation made with the IP owner's consent and one made without.
I'm sure by international copyright law, Nintendo legally can take a translation you were never given permission to make (since it's a derivative of their work), though they won't because they don't want to be caught using fan works.

The first Game Gear port actually had a built-in English localization called Puzzlow Kids that could be seen by playing the Japanese cart on a western GG.
Unfortunately Sega scrapped it to release the Dr. Robotnik version as well.

The original is one of the many GBA games I bought when they were new but couldn't devote the time to play through. So many games to play on that and other consoles while still having real life stuff.

@MoriyaMug It's called the Berne Convention. Someone who has made a translation without the consent of the copyright owner does not legally own the rights to their work. The only thing the copyright owner has to worry about is bad PR, and possibly loss of employees paid to translate. A fan surely can try to sue a copyright owner, but they'd get shot down right away.
The first I heard of a company using a fan translation was some My Arcade thing which used a Don Doko Don 2 NES translation. Now Taito probably wasn't personally involved with the creation of the device but regardless they own the game and legally can take the work of the fan who never had Taito's permission in the first place. It's a shame the fan credit was (reportedly) deleted, but that's how laws work.

It's impolite to the work of fan translators, but honestly fan translators don't have a legal right to the work they made without permission of the game copyright owners.
Legally the game copyright owner can use a fan translators' work without owing them anything.

I am very aware of this and I have produced several translation patches.
I'm only upset that none of my work has been used by official work.

@Profchaos The majority of NES mappers merely increased the amount of ROM available to the CPU (something nearly all 8-bit consoles/computers needed. The 32-48 kilobyte ROM max size those CPUs could afford otherwise was pretty limiting even by 1985 standards.) Even the most "powerful" NES mapper, the MMC5, I think at most video-wise allowed every 8x8 pixel tile to have its own palette definition (the NES normally allowed palettes to only be assigned in 16x16 pixel, or 2 tile x 2 tile square, increments). Not a huge stretch.
Adding on a whole other mini-computer (which essentially what an FPGA is) that probably far outclasses the host console is another thing.

I do wonder it would have been like if that Hellraiser "Super Cartridge" for the NES would have been if it had been developed. Then again, Color Dreams didn't have the highest quality standards in the games they did release.

I wonder how this handles the fact that US cards had their ROM data stored with the bits in each byte reversed (with the hardware wired to flip the bits in the correct order by the time they reach the CPU) as a region lockout technique.

If it's "beyond the power of the console", then it's not really a game for the console anymore, is it?

But where does it download the ROMs FROM?
Does it connect to a website hosting the ROMs?
Or does it connect to a user's PC or other device on their home network?
There is a difference and the latter is not any different than loading from a SD card.
If it's the former, I imagine copyright owners will take actions necessary to shut it down.

@Sketcz Throwing out magazine scans? Sounds worse when you know that magazine scans were usually made by tearing them out of the binding.
I mean, it unfortunately had to be done to get higher quality. I scanned my Japanese video game manuals, and I have a couple Famicom games with bound instruction manuals rather than stapled, and since I absolutely didn't want to tear them apart, the scan quality suffered a bit (even though I pushed down on the scanner to get the pages as flattened as possible).

@gingerbeardman Especially on a console most famous for shmups, that doesn't sound like it'd help practically. Definitely without a dedicated button on the controller.
I think even the oldest ZSNES versions that had rewind had like 10 SECONDS of backup.

@Andee Those two guys in the intro haven't actually appeared otherwise in any of the games, have they?

@slider1983 Are people actually buying them though?
Ever since this "sealed" and "graded" scheme began, sellers were asking crazy prizes that hopefully nobody was paying.
Like, this was in the Wii era, and some of the first listings I saw were like Super Mario Galaxy 2 for at least quadruple the price you could've just gone to a store and bought a sealed copy yourself.

Martin Korth is the "no$" emulators guy, who seemingly has made emulator development is primary job. Aside from thoughts about charging for emulators, he has been researching obscure hardware such as this in the process and providing documentation to the community freely on his website.

@-wc- I just checked and no, the SNES port doesn't have a 2P mode.
Another fun thing: ZSNES, that old and outdated emulator some people claim is perfect and doesn't need replacing... add Super Buster Bros. to the list of games it has major graphics problems with. The HUD just glitches out, and even the startup menus sometimes partly glitch out. I had previously known Maka-maka and an obscure maze game called Gangan Gan-chan, I think.
I only keep it around for certain debug/ROM hack aspects, or when I want to boot up to check something quick and don't want to hook up my gamepad I have configured for some serious gaming time.

I grew up with landline phones and have never seen that right column of keys.
Is that photo from somewhere else than the US? (When # was known as a "pound" symbol, though in reference to phones, before social media made the symbol commonly known as "hashtag".) Not a square symbol.

Too bad Square-Enix didn't port it to anything.
I know at least one Front Mission game and I think a Kingdom Hearts game made for Japanese phones got ported to DS.
FM 2089 and I think KH:Coded were designed as mobile games.

And of course, a few ports of FF4: The After Years. I do recall Clyde Mandelin stream FF4TAS years ago and was disappointed, as a huge FF4 fan, but I suppose it's good that it is at least available.

@JackGYarwood The game was originally planned to be published by Nichibutsu in Japan in 1995. It got a single mention in Nintendo Power.
That is why old bootleg copies from Japanese sellers had the Nichibutsu logo on their cover art. I guess someone maybe did their research because the artist assigned it catalog #17 (the actual 17th game Nichibutsu published on the SFC was Puzzle'n Desu, published April 1995, which fits the timing at least).

@BulkSlash I'm not experienced in the field, but I'm told appropriate voltage ROM chips aren't produced anymore by chip fabricators.
I'm guessing is that what the voltage regulators are supposed to address?

I bought a reprint copy of the Japanese Battletoads but I've avoided playing that on my official Famicom for that reason. I guess I'll have to wait and obtain a clone console at some point before playing.

Tazz-Mania, huh?
I'm guessing that extra 'z' in the title would save them from Warner responding about the '90s cartoon that had a few licensed games in its day.

@BulkSlash The holes in the bottom of the disk, below the label, are the copy-protection-defeating method (an original disk had the word "NINTENDO" with certain parts of the lettering deeper).
Well, that and there was also some software-level protection to deter unlicensed third-party developers, along the lines of the Genesis TMSS and the Game Boy boot screen. But I'm sure some developers found some way around that, as there were a number of NSFW games released in its original lifespan. Either that or Nintendo didn't bother to sue them, which was they main thing about that sort of protection.

I've only heard of it through collecting SNES RPGs.
Haven't played it yet so I'm not sure if it's the same game, but it was one of the many RPGs to only be released in Japan.

@themightyant I feel glad to have picked up a complete Japanese copy (admittedly not in great condition) back when I could get it for like $10, though I imagine even that version is considerably more valuable these days.
Still hoping my Japanese skills will improve to finally enjoy it sooner than later, 20 years on. When it was then a choice for playing on an American console, to play it easily with a language problem, or go through expensive trouble trying to get a PAL copy running.

That's the 28th anniversary of the Europe/Australia release, still over a year after the Japanese version, which will be 30 in October.

Even if the ROM were dumped, it would need the custom chip or whatever they used emulated.
Which at this point, maybe they should officially do and release as a PC port so people can actually play the game.

There is a novelty in playing on a Genesis, but if that chip is more powerful than the original console (the stats they released sure sounded like more than a stock Genesis could handle), are we really playing a Genesis game anymore?

I had dumped the SRAM from my SNES carts at the same time I dumped the ROMs.
However, I suspect a number of those SRAM dumps may be useless, as it turns out that different games have different memory mappings for the SRAM and I have doubts if such the old tool I was using was aware of that.

Also, it's Twitter, it'll survive, person! No need to attack people to defend A WEBSITE!

@RetroGames I asked you to stop and you didn't.

Sega did market this game with a magazine ad with some injured guys in a waiting room.
So this person wasn't the only person involved with this game with a bit of a bad sense of humor.

@RetroGames Twitter has been dying. You're the one accusing me of being racism by saying trending happens solely because of "the algorithm" tracking me, and I'd appreciate you stop doing that. You have no idea what I've been posting or been reading. Please just don't post a reply then if that is the only direction your thoughts on this matter are going.
If you think a website that has been known to deter many good people in its recent years, is that defensible that you need to make such accusations, well then those are thoughts you should keep to yourself. Or discuss over there. I don't care since I won't see it.

I wonder if it's good or not. I just know that they put out SEVEN of those games on the PC-98, and that at least the fan translator found those games easy enough that they felt the need to bake a difficulty mod into the translations.

@RetroGames No, sorry, there is no possible way I have said or done anything to suggest I have any interest in racists.
Twitter is just that dead.
Social media can insert whatever it wants into "recommendations". I know youtube had inserted its own recommendations into my Watch Later (or save for later or whatever it's called) category because I sure have never clicked the button for that on a video in my life. If I ever need to "watch later", there's already a history. And whatever junk youtube suggested is surely not something I would have clicked on.

"This eventually led to Nishitani making a partnership with Atlus and Nihon Telenet instead."
Was Atlus a company yet in 1987? Maybe they were solely as a developer, but I don't think they published anything until like 1989 or 1990 at the earliest. Recalling that the two Famicom games were developed by Atlus but published by Namco (even the SFC compilation remake of the two FC games retained a Namco copyright even thought Atlus published it).

@RetroGames The last time I signed into Twitter, the recommended/"trending" topics were all racists. For years I had normal suggestions, then suddenly that.

Also, how many Super Pinballs was KAZe working on? I know it did get at least a second SNES game exclusive to Japan (and that first game itself had a publisher transition in North America, seeming to set to be published by American Technos then usurped by Nintendo at the last moment). But did it also get that Saturn game they wanted?

This game's soundtrack is the only time I have ever actually wondered if the composer was drunk while writing it.
It just had that certain jank to it where they were going for something good but it just had a certain "off" quality that gave me a headache after awhile. Like the brain wanted to correct it. That is my memory of playing that game.

@JackGYarwood Nintendo Power reviewed the game and said something like "What would happen if you combined F-Zero with the Care Bears? Well, you'd probably get arrested, but what you'd get on the screen might resemble Freeway Flyboys." The publisher's name is Seika (spelled incorrect in the article) and I do know that for most of their run they were affiliated with Kemco (most of their games published as "Kemco*Seika").

@ChromaticDracula I made an effort to play Super Mario 64 DS with the D-pad as much as possible (because the way they simulated analog on the touch screen was so bad. I can't believe people when it was released thought it was a hardware fault when it was pretty obvious it was software design. )

I've struggled to play Pole Position.
I was a dumb small child when I last saw a real cabinet, so I had no idea how to play.
Then when I got to play digital versions (going back to the Microsoft Return of Arcade version on Windows 95. I probably had that box sitting on the shelf for a year or more before mom upgraded the family PC from Windows 3.1 to 95 and I could actually play the game). but they seemed to always suffer from questionable analog control. It's hard to imagine the real cabinet was that sensitive.

I get a feeling My Arcade devices aren't likely to change that opinion.

A device which only plays Snake?
Sounds like the kind of content Ashens became famous for (the PopStation and Neo Double Games reviews in the early days of Youtube).

"I'm not fine at all."

Do not take a conman's word when they talk about going to the hospital. You don't know if they're real or if it is just another part of the act.

Now someone will find a way to do it just in spite.

@BulkSlash Well, one of the most powerful expansion CPUs used in a SNES cart was for a Shogi game. So, Koei wasn't alone in thinking that. Said game was priced at about $150 when it launched, and it was a good thing the game was worth literally pennies on the second-hand market when a few sacrificial carts were sent off to a dumper to get the embedded ROMs dumped for proper emulation.
(the Seta ST018, I think it was. Seta had made two prior chips, one in the above game's predecessor and the other in a racing game Exhaust Heat/F1 ROC II.)

A Koei console without Nobunaga or Romance of the Three Kingdoms games? Was this thing legal?!

@sixrings The basketball game? As I understand, when they ported it to console, they wanted the NBA license and the NBA told them they needed to retitle their game.

I like FFMQ.
Though my first game was FF4, MQ was still good for a repeated fun, breezy rental back in the day.
It might've been a very easy game to finish, but it still had its charms.

Plug-ins weren't an issue of power, it was a concept of emulator authors splitting the workload like "oh, I'll work on the CPU and someone else can work on the graphics, and we can just slam our work together. Easy, right?"