Genuinely cool that what could be such an important part of a gaming series was recovered from a phone damaged in a house fire. Of course, I'm concerned about the circumstances around that house fire as there are more important things than just games.
@RetroGames Yeah, regrettably they had Logan Paul promote the Chromatic and the new officially licensed Tetris game, by playing against competitive Tetris players at the Tetris World Championship. This wasn't well received by the community.
@Serpenterror RHDN's downfall was just because the site admin had enough after two decades, and that they couldn't hand over the site to anyone because it shares infrastructure with other commercial sites they apparently maintain.
More sites popping up to pick up the slack is cool, but the Mario hacking scene is strangely fractured with different sites for Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, and now Super Mario Bros.
@Sketcz ROM hacking and "do it yourself" patching can operate cleanly; requiring users to provide their own dumps instead of illegally downloading ROMs unpatched OR pre-patched.
This is why it was necessary for Spike as the operator of CDRomance to step aside from operating a patches-only site. You can't really say the patches-only site is clean under that management, and we need a clean site for the practice of ROM hacking to keep going unabated.
I wonder if they're allowed to call it the Super FX 3? That would be like saying I'm making a Core-i9 15700K; Intel wouldn't be happy about that!
Apparently legal issues with the Super FX 1 and 2 chips from Argonaut are apparently why Star Fox 1 and 2 and other titles using the chips had legal issues being re-released.
It does admittedly look very simple, but I'm still rather charmed by it. It's probably too basic though, like on the level of the earliest Game Boy titles outside of the lovely animations being very nicely detailed.
Reminds me of the old USB Gecko, that too used the GameCube memory card slot as an internet and provided a USB connection to your PC for things like debugging, memory poking, etc.
I'm always conflicted on Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE) runs. On the one hand, the set-up and execution is fascinating where it can become possible to achieve so much and do nearly anything.
On the other, the majority of ACE runs are used to skip to the credits rather than fulfil the game's win condition (in this case; defeat Dracula at the end of the final stage and collect the stage clear orb). Speedruns should be about achieving the game's own win condition, rather than overwriting it with your own.
I actually have a USB drive exactly like this from years ago. It was from an Orthodontic Practice, and it has a 64MB capacity and is used specifically to share X-ray dental scans as jpeg files.
This gives insight into the meaning of cheat codes internally, with their development practices of not removing the cheats in the final ROM used for mass production.
Those cheats are present so that the developers and play testers can get through the game more quickly for greater testing coverage, they weren't viewing them as a means for players to enhance their enjoyment of a game. You can see more evidence of that with later Konami titles where using the then well known Konami Code would sometimes result in a self-destruct instead of anything helpful! You'd have to use a substitute code using the shoulder buttons instead of the horizontal d-pad inputs for the actual desired effect.
The idea of reviews "divulging intellectual property" however? That's absurd as the idea of not being able to talk about the commercially released products with other people.
Watching the gameplay, the way that one of the hazards is joining two preview pieces together and being forced to drop two stuck pieces together is really surprising, I've never seen that in any version of Tetris before!
@wiiware Unfortunately it seems like Ninty Media's PDF versions seem to be exclusive to Kickstarter backers, they don't seem to sell them on their store.
It's phenomenal that such a process exists that you can insert nearly any N64 ROM, and get a playable x86 binary on any desktop PC. It's remarkable that it keeps the N64 output incredibly intact, as it's full of tricks and quirks that make it notoriously difficult to emulate accurately.
It does appear that you need to tweak the output on a game-by-game basis for the best/desired results and error corrections, but it otherwise is just incredible to see, and makes me wonder if Nintendo's NERD division should implement this for NSO now or in the future.
One of the caveats of this process seems to be modding support, more specifically ROM hacks of the original ROM data.
If it's built using Citra's source code, that probably gives Nintendo grounds to issue a takedown, like they did with Suyu being forked from Yuzu. We'll see I guess.
I gave it a shot, but the tutorial was needlessly long and constantly introducing further and further mechanics into what should just be a straight forward kart racer.
It's trying to be the Super Smash Bros. of kart racers and sabotaging the actual racing aspect to accomplish that. Things like you have a ring meter, you can sacrifice rings to temporarily boost speed, but if you're out of rings you are vulnerable to taking hits but you can also charge up a melee attack?
I got fed up of the tutorial and just backed out of it, and didn't feel the need to try playing the game proper if it wants me to learn all THIS just to get started racing. A properly paced game would let you get started with just the basic, and introduce new concepts as you go. This ended up being a frustration exhibition of developer pride.
@Sisilly_G For many people, Dolphin on Android is viable because of the connectivity. You can hook up an Android device to TV sets and displays, connect BlueTooth controllers or USB controllers, and there are many dedicated Android handhelds. A few people are even accustomed to playing GameCube games with touch screen controls, somehow.
I was gonna say that Infidelity works fast... but this ain't him! Very cool to see a second someone doing NES to SNES ports like this, the more the merrier.
A lot of the credit also goes to Kaze Emanuar's extensive SM64 engine refactoring and optimisation work. I doubt that model would perform anywhere near as well in the original retail engine.
This is someone working with decades of hindsight and general expertise, and years of personal time too, luxuries that Nintendo EAD did not have when working on the original title!
Of course, this says nothing about Sunshine's main mechanic of spraying water to clean up paint, mud, goop, etc.
@OldManHermit The Virtual Boy only had a very small library of games, few of which people are keen to play. From a business stand point, it wouldn't have been valuable for them to try developing the necessary emulator just to sell a few little-known Virtual Console titles.
It's a shame too because on paper, the 3DS is a perfect Virtual Boy compatible system. Both have stereoscopic 3D displays, and the 3DS has a 400x240 resolution display whilst the Virtual Boy was 384x224! It's a near-perfect fit with only an 8px thick border.
There was an attempt at a Virtual Boy emulator on 3DS years ago called r3Ddragon, but it never got very far and couldn't emulate at full speed, even with the New 3DS. It's fantastic to see that someone's picked up that old project and continued it, and got Virtual Boy running full speed on original models!
@Serpenterror The Super NES is surprisingly capable of NES emulation, but in this case, Infidelity's NES to SNES ports are in fact ports, not emulation. They're running the same program logic but natively on the SNES instead. I recall Infidelity's process involves using Mesen's debugger to map out the NES assembly instructions and map that out to SNES instructions.
Whilst Infidelity's ports could just be 1:1 to the NES originals, he tends to add in stuff like optional MSU-1 soundtracks and video streaming, quality of life improvements, etc. His Duck Tales ports for example, changes Scrooge's sprite to properly resemble his animated series depiction; wearing a blue suit rather than a red one.
@ArcadianLegend99 I can't imagine it'll be difficult to dump either, I would imagine just putting the disc into a PC and using imgburn to copy the disc contents to an ISO file will work?
I'd be surprised if GamePakRat hasn't already done this and is just riding the wave of views this amazing find has brought his channel.
@Azuris Personally, what I'm expecting is that the Evercade release of Glover might be a custom emulation job that is half-way like Super Mario Galaxy on the Switch (as part of the Super Mario 3D All-Stars release). Which could mean, theoretically, if the data for that N64 ROM were extracted from the Evercade release, it might not function on conventional N64 emulators or on real hardware via a flashcart.
No way to know for certain until the product is out in the wild and tinkerers get their hands on it!
@Kirbyo I wouldn't doubt the savvy of the types of people playing a homebrew demo of such a game. There's a good likelihood that they played the game on a SNES or Analogue Super NT using a flash cart, rather than a software emulator on PC or similar. These sorts of users tend to know of methods of dumping games, and might already dump their own collections as opposed to downloading them illegally.
The guys at the Rockman EXE Zone have done fantastic work modding the Battle Network and Star Force games in the past, and I'm thrilled to see the end result of this fan translation and finally play these "lost" stories in the Battle Network continuity.
Previous great work they've done includes a fan translation for the Japanese exclusive Rockman EXE 4.5, a gameplay modification patch for that same game to make it play like the main entries, a wonderful overhaul and content restoration patch for Star Force 1, and content restoration patches for Battle Network 6.
My pipe dream is that they'll be able to use the preserved Phantom and Legend of Network mobile games as the basis for making GBA versions of them, using Battle Network 6 and past entries as the engine and resources.
@themightyant I mean, your initial statement seemed to be very dismissive of these games without understanding the significance of them.
They're an entire market of games that was exclusive to one part of the world, and was inaccessible to the majority of the world that loves the games made in that country.
I'd think it a small tragedy if a catalogue of this many hundreds of games were lost, because they still have significant historical value especially in the mobile gaming sector as we know it today.
There's no denying that the initial motivation for some was "I want to play the lost Battle Network games", and this ended up being something much bigger than that.
@themightyant Don't be so quick to dismiss these Japanese flip-phone games! They were fun and important enough that a significant number of them are being ported to the Switch.
@TransmitHim It's conceivable due to the way that many British home computers like the ZX Spectrum distributed games on audio cassettes, with the program data being encoded as audio.
Distributing program code over radio would be highly unreliable though due to probable distortion.
Amazingly, making use of sound recordings to dump ROMs is not a new concept.
My brother has made use of this to make a dump of the Limited Run Games release of Shantae on GBC, though it's through the use of a homebrew tool booted via flashcart to load something into memory first.
The revelation that the "cartridge yank" audio is actually a memory dump and not just random jarring noise though?? That's amazing!
Nintendo no doubt implemented that for debugging purposes.
This is very cool to see.
Challenges with the N64 analogue stick commonly involve how quickly they wear out with plastic eroding.
The unusually high pivot point also means that it offers a far greater range of movement which resulted in greater control of analogue input. Specifically, it was a lot easier to move the stick slightly for slight movements.
Most modern controllers and emulators of N64 games don't account for this, and it can make some parts on N64 games a bit harder than they should be. Many parts of Super Mario 64 were designed around this careful slow precise movement such as the tiny side of Tiny Huge Island.
Honestly, sounds like snake oil. It sounds like all it'll do is determine what game you're playing, then use an AI service over API to tell you "helpful info" that might have no basis in reality.
The claims about the Switch 2 release date stink of being a marketing stunt too, just to get your attention.
"Nintendo’s proprietary libraries"? I don't understand, if this is Valve's position aren't they arguing that all N64 homebrew is legally impermissible?
I'd understand if they were looking to protect their IP (and historically, they're very supportive of fan works with the Half-Life IP), but this doesn't make sense to me.
Even with the Dolphin emulator on Steam situation, there was some decent reasoning that it wasn't okay because of distributing a key used to decrypt Wii games rather than asking the user to provide that key themselves.
Has James Lambert at any point make clear that he's using proprietary Nintendo SDK, tools, software, etc?
Simply making code that can run on a target platform, should be legally in the clear shouldn't it?
Edit: Looked into it, and yes, the Portal 64 project was in fact using an official SDK called Libultra. https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Libultra
This could shake the whole N64 homebrew scene, depending on how many people are making use of it for their homebrew. Super Mario 64 mods in particular come to mind, even if they're using the cleanroom reverse engineered decompilation the projects made could be at risk if they're using Libultra for re-compilation.
There was also the unused twist of Homer Simpson secretly being Krusty the Klown, but they opted to drop that idea. It's why the two characters have virtually identical physiques, right down to their mouth shapes and facial features.
@Serpenterror That's simply because 255 is the largest number that can be stored in an unsigned 8-bit address. 11111111 is binary for 255, or FF in hexadecimal.
Truthfully, 255 is a number that crops up very commonly in 8-bit games using 8-bit addresses to store a number value, even for things intended to store and display a two-digit value like a lives counter.
It's so aggravating that society is quick to put down a young person's accomplishments like this, from the Sky News presenter's unwelcome comments to Twitch deplatforming him due to his age.
This time, I was successful in placing an order and got the colour I wanted! I went for Indigo, which looks like it sold out in just 6 minutes! The second to sell out was Silver, in about 10 minutes. Remarkably, the six remaining colours are still in stock 18 minutes after they opened orders.
Ugh, last time I tried the checkout process was impossible. Stock would sell out instantly and trying to pick another color meant more time in the checkout process.
Ahh, another RK3566 system. A capable CPU that they use in the RG353P, it should be perfect for many arcade games. No idea about Saturn emulation, never tried it but that's the clear appeal.
Does this mean they'll have more stock of the Analogue Pocket at some point? The transparent shells they had a couple weeks ago sold out ludicrously quickly, I couldn't get a look-in.
@MysticX It's entirely possible that they implemented truly random arrangements, play-tested it and didn't like that end result.
They may've modified a working random arrangement function in a way that produced 8 deterministic arrangements on purpose. It may've just been a quick dirty change that they never refactored.
Well, I tried to get myself a Pocket, but they sold out in under 10 minutes. I was in there immediately, and still missed out due to their queue system.
Comments 101
Re: After Surviving A House Fire, This Mobile Phone Has Helped Fully Preserve A Lost Professor Layton Game
Genuinely cool that what could be such an important part of a gaming series was recovered from a phone damaged in a house fire.
Of course, I'm concerned about the circumstances around that house fire as there are more important things than just games.
Re: ModRetro Is "Certainly" Going To Create An FPGA Game Boy Advance
@RetroGames
Yeah, regrettably they had Logan Paul promote the Chromatic and the new officially licensed Tetris game, by playing against competitive Tetris players at the Tetris World Championship. This wasn't well received by the community.
Re: ModRetro Is "Certainly" Going To Create An FPGA Game Boy Advance
@RetroGames
Modretro's Chromatic will be in consumer's hands by December.
Re: ModRetro Is "Certainly" Going To Create An FPGA Game Boy Advance
By all accounts I'm interested, but I need to see them deliver on their FPGA GBC first.
Re: SMB Arena Aims To Be A New Home For Super Mario Bros. ROM Hacking
@Serpenterror
RHDN's downfall was just because the site admin had enough after two decades, and that they couldn't hand over the site to anyone because it shares infrastructure with other commercial sites they apparently maintain.
More sites popping up to pick up the slack is cool, but the Mario hacking scene is strangely fractured with different sites for Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, and now Super Mario Bros.
Re: RHDO Changes Ownership, Rebrands As RomHack Plaza
@Sketcz
ROM hacking and "do it yourself" patching can operate cleanly; requiring users to provide their own dumps instead of illegally downloading ROMs unpatched OR pre-patched.
This is why it was necessary for Spike as the operator of CDRomance to step aside from operating a patches-only site.
You can't really say the patches-only site is clean under that management, and we need a clean site for the practice of ROM hacking to keep going unabated.
Re: Star Fox Will Take Advantage Of The New Super FX 3 Chip, Will Feature Rumble Support
I wonder if they're allowed to call it the Super FX 3?
That would be like saying I'm making a Core-i9 15700K; Intel wouldn't be happy about that!
Apparently legal issues with the Super FX 1 and 2 chips from Argonaut are apparently why Star Fox 1 and 2 and other titles using the chips had legal issues being re-released.
Re: You Can Now Explore Nintendo's Legendary Wuhu Island "In Glorious HD"
Bluntly speaking, doesn't this just repackage and distribute assets from Wii Sports Resort?
This seems like a bad idea.
Also unnecessary, Pilotwings Resort lets you explore Wuhu Island in full relatively "on foot" with the rocket belt (like a jet pack).
Re: ModRetro Exclusive 'Patchy Matchy' Is A New Puzzler Inspired By Tetris & Puzzle League
It does admittedly look very simple, but I'm still rather charmed by it.
It's probably too basic though, like on the level of the earliest Game Boy titles outside of the lovely animations being very nicely detailed.
Re: A Japan-Exclusive 'Bomberman Jetters' GBA Game Has Just Been Fan Translated
Consider me intrigued, I enjoyed Bomberman Tournament way back but never replayed it, and there was an unreleased sorta-sequel based on that anime?
Re: 8BitDo's Anniversary Celebration Includes Gold And Silver Controllers
Huh, it looks like even the analogue sticks are made of metal, that's probably not very comfortable somehow.
These lovely looking controllers look like display pieces anyway, but very nice.
Re: GCNET Is A GameCube Network Adapter That Fits In Your Console's Memory Card Slot
Reminds me of the old USB Gecko, that too used the GameCube memory card slot as an internet and provided a USB connection to your PC for things like debugging, memory poking, etc.
Re: "We Passed A Somewhat-Obscure Game About A Plumber" - Terraria Overtakes Super Mario Bros.
For an added layer of irony, the developer started out by making a pretty good Mario fan game engine called Super Mario Bros X.
Good on Redigit!
Re: Castlevania's "Ultimate Glitch" Has Been Discovered
I'm always conflicted on Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE) runs.
On the one hand, the set-up and execution is fascinating where it can become possible to achieve so much and do nearly anything.
On the other, the majority of ACE runs are used to skip to the credits rather than fulfil the game's win condition (in this case; defeat Dracula at the end of the final stage and collect the stage clear orb).
Speedruns should be about achieving the game's own win condition, rather than overwriting it with your own.
Re: Limited Run's New "PC Micro Edition" Hasn't Gone Down Well With Some Fans
I actually have a USB drive exactly like this from years ago.
It was from an Orthodontic Practice, and it has a 64MB capacity and is used specifically to share X-ray dental scans as jpeg files.
Re: Once Upon A Time, Konami And Namco Didn't Want People To Share Reviews Or Cheat Codes
This gives insight into the meaning of cheat codes internally, with their development practices of not removing the cheats in the final ROM used for mass production.
Those cheats are present so that the developers and play testers can get through the game more quickly for greater testing coverage, they weren't viewing them as a means for players to enhance their enjoyment of a game.
You can see more evidence of that with later Konami titles where using the then well known Konami Code would sometimes result in a self-destruct instead of anything helpful! You'd have to use a substitute code using the shoulder buttons instead of the horizontal d-pad inputs for the actual desired effect.
The idea of reviews "divulging intellectual property" however? That's absurd as the idea of not being able to talk about the commercially released products with other people.
Re: Dreamcast Exclusive Sega Tetris Is Back Online, Thanks To Fans
Watching the gameplay, the way that one of the hazards is joining two preview pieces together and being forced to drop two stuck pieces together is really surprising, I've never seen that in any version of Tetris before!
Re: Hands On: GameBook Color - A Celebration Of Nintendo's First Colour Handheld
@wiiware
Unfortunately it seems like Ninty Media's PDF versions seem to be exclusive to Kickstarter backers, they don't seem to sell them on their store.
Re: New Tool Allows N64 Games To Be Played With Ray Tracing, Uncapped Frame Rates And Ultrawide Support
It's phenomenal that such a process exists that you can insert nearly any N64 ROM, and get a playable x86 binary on any desktop PC.
It's remarkable that it keeps the N64 output incredibly intact, as it's full of tricks and quirks that make it notoriously difficult to emulate accurately.
It does appear that you need to tweak the output on a game-by-game basis for the best/desired results and error corrections, but it otherwise is just incredible to see, and makes me wonder if Nintendo's NERD division should implement this for NSO now or in the future.
One of the caveats of this process seems to be modding support, more specifically ROM hacks of the original ROM data.
Re: Looks Like The iPhone Is Getting A 3DS Emulator Soon
If it's built using Citra's source code, that probably gives Nintendo grounds to issue a takedown, like they did with Suyu being forked from Yuzu.
We'll see I guess.
Re: Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers Is A New Sonic Kart Racer Built Using Doom Legacy
I gave it a shot, but the tutorial was needlessly long and constantly introducing further and further mechanics into what should just be a straight forward kart racer.
It's trying to be the Super Smash Bros. of kart racers and sabotaging the actual racing aspect to accomplish that.
Things like you have a ring meter, you can sacrifice rings to temporarily boost speed, but if you're out of rings you are vulnerable to taking hits but you can also charge up a melee attack?
I got fed up of the tutorial and just backed out of it, and didn't feel the need to try playing the game proper if it wants me to learn all THIS just to get started racing.
A properly paced game would let you get started with just the basic, and introduce new concepts as you go. This ended up being a frustration exhibition of developer pride.
Re: Don't Hold Your Breath For Wii And GameCube Emulation On The iPhone App Store
@Sisilly_G
For many people, Dolphin on Android is viable because of the connectivity.
You can hook up an Android device to TV sets and displays, connect BlueTooth controllers or USB controllers, and there are many dedicated Android handhelds. A few people are even accustomed to playing GameCube games with touch screen controls, somehow.
With iOS? I don't see this being as viable.
Re: Have We Been Wrong About Ultimate Play The Game's Name All This Time?
Thinking about it, it's like EA Games' slogan "Challenge Everything".
Re: Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers Gets Fanmade SNES Port
I was gonna say that Infidelity works fast... but this ain't him!
Very cool to see a second someone doing NES to SNES ports like this, the more the merrier.
Re: This $500 Game Boy-Style Handheld Is All About Bitcoin
So it's a massive profit on cheap hardware designed to trick suckers, got it.
Re: Super Mario Sunshine On N64 Looks Better Than You Might Expect
A lot of the credit also goes to Kaze Emanuar's extensive SM64 engine refactoring and optimisation work. I doubt that model would perform anywhere near as well in the original retail engine.
This is someone working with decades of hindsight and general expertise, and years of personal time too, luxuries that Nintendo EAD did not have when working on the original title!
Of course, this says nothing about Sunshine's main mechanic of spraying water to clean up paint, mud, goop, etc.
Re: 3DS Virtual Boy Emulation Gives You 3D Without The Headaches
@OldManHermit
The Virtual Boy only had a very small library of games, few of which people are keen to play. From a business stand point, it wouldn't have been valuable for them to try developing the necessary emulator just to sell a few little-known Virtual Console titles.
It's a shame too because on paper, the 3DS is a perfect Virtual Boy compatible system.
Both have stereoscopic 3D displays, and the 3DS has a 400x240 resolution display whilst the Virtual Boy was 384x224! It's a near-perfect fit with only an 8px thick border.
Re: 3DS Virtual Boy Emulation Gives You 3D Without The Headaches
Wow, it finally happened!
There was an attempt at a Virtual Boy emulator on 3DS years ago called r3Ddragon, but it never got very far and couldn't emulate at full speed, even with the New 3DS.
It's fantastic to see that someone's picked up that old project and continued it, and got Virtual Boy running full speed on original models!
Re: Punch-Out!! Is Getting A Fanmade SNES Port
@Serpenterror
The Super NES is surprisingly capable of NES emulation, but in this case, Infidelity's NES to SNES ports are in fact ports, not emulation. They're running the same program logic but natively on the SNES instead.
I recall Infidelity's process involves using Mesen's debugger to map out the NES assembly instructions and map that out to SNES instructions.
Whilst Infidelity's ports could just be 1:1 to the NES originals, he tends to add in stuff like optional MSU-1 soundtracks and video streaming, quality of life improvements, etc.
His Duck Tales ports for example, changes Scrooge's sprite to properly resemble his animated series depiction; wearing a blue suit rather than a red one.
Re: Collector Finds Rare Philips CD-i Hotel Mario Prototype In Goodwill
@ArcadianLegend99
I can't imagine it'll be difficult to dump either, I would imagine just putting the disc into a PC and using imgburn to copy the disc contents to an ISO file will work?
I'd be surprised if GamePakRat hasn't already done this and is just riding the wave of views this amazing find has brought his channel.
Re: N64 Emulation Comes To Evercade Via Piko Interactive Collection 4
@Azuris
Personally, what I'm expecting is that the Evercade release of Glover might be a custom emulation job that is half-way like Super Mario Galaxy on the Switch (as part of the Super Mario 3D All-Stars release).
Which could mean, theoretically, if the data for that N64 ROM were extracted from the Evercade release, it might not function on conventional N64 emulators or on real hardware via a flashcart.
No way to know for certain until the product is out in the wild and tinkerers get their hands on it!
Re: N64 Emulation Comes To Evercade Via Piko Interactive Collection 4
This Evercade release likely does not make use of N64 emulation, but is more likely to be built using source code based on the N64 version like the Steam release in 2022.
https://twitter.com/Pikointeractive/status/1500858813632720904
Glover was announced to be coming to current gen consoles (Switch, PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X) back in October 2022, but that doesn't seem to have materialised yet.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/10/the-nintendo-64-platformer-glover-is-coming-soon-to-switch
This announcement of its inclusion in Piko Collection 4 suggests that might be materialising soon this year.
Edit: I had my doubts, and it is apparently in fact a newly built N64 ROM, and does actually use emulation.
A company called ByteSwap was involved with rebuilding the ROM.
https://www.gamespress.com/en-US/64-bit-emulation-comes-to-Evercade-devices-with-cult-classic-Glover-an
Re: SNES Dev Explains Why He Spent 600 Hours And $2370 Just To Give His Game Away For Free
@Kirbyo
I wouldn't doubt the savvy of the types of people playing a homebrew demo of such a game.
There's a good likelihood that they played the game on a SNES or Analogue Super NT using a flash cart, rather than a software emulator on PC or similar. These sorts of users tend to know of methods of dumping games, and might already dump their own collections as opposed to downloading them illegally.
Re: Two Incredibly Rare Mega Man Battle Network Games Are Getting A Fan Translation
The guys at the Rockman EXE Zone have done fantastic work modding the Battle Network and Star Force games in the past, and I'm thrilled to see the end result of this fan translation and finally play these "lost" stories in the Battle Network continuity.
Previous great work they've done includes a fan translation for the Japanese exclusive Rockman EXE 4.5, a gameplay modification patch for that same game to make it play like the main entries, a wonderful overhaul and content restoration patch for Star Force 1, and content restoration patches for Battle Network 6.
My pipe dream is that they'll be able to use the preserved Phantom and Legend of Network mobile games as the basis for making GBA versions of them, using Battle Network 6 and past entries as the engine and resources.
Re: The Quest To Preserve Japanese Feature Phone Games
@themightyant
I mean, your initial statement seemed to be very dismissive of these games without understanding the significance of them.
They're an entire market of games that was exclusive to one part of the world, and was inaccessible to the majority of the world that loves the games made in that country.
I'd think it a small tragedy if a catalogue of this many hundreds of games were lost, because they still have significant historical value especially in the mobile gaming sector as we know it today.
There's no denying that the initial motivation for some was "I want to play the lost Battle Network games", and this ended up being something much bigger than that.
Myself, I'm looking forward to a fan translation being made for these two preserved Rockman EXE games.
https://twitter.com/Prof9/status/1750328705048867231
Re: The Quest To Preserve Japanese Feature Phone Games
@themightyant
Don't be so quick to dismiss these Japanese flip-phone games! They were fun and important enough that a significant number of them are being ported to the Switch.
https://www.nintendolife.com/features/japans-g-mode-archives-the-retrogame-series-youve-never-heard-of
Re: You Can Dump A Game Boy Advance ROM By Crashing It And Recording The Audio
@TransmitHim
It's conceivable due to the way that many British home computers like the ZX Spectrum distributed games on audio cassettes, with the program data being encoded as audio.
Distributing program code over radio would be highly unreliable though due to probable distortion.
Re: You Can Dump A Game Boy Advance ROM By Crashing It And Recording The Audio
Amazingly, making use of sound recordings to dump ROMs is not a new concept.
My brother has made use of this to make a dump of the Limited Run Games release of Shantae on GBC, though it's through the use of a homebrew tool booted via flashcart to load something into memory first.
The revelation that the "cartridge yank" audio is actually a memory dump and not just random jarring noise though?? That's amazing!
Nintendo no doubt implemented that for debugging purposes.
Re: New Project Aims To Replicate N64 Stick "As Close As Possible"
This is very cool to see.
Challenges with the N64 analogue stick commonly involve how quickly they wear out with plastic eroding.
The unusually high pivot point also means that it offers a far greater range of movement which resulted in greater control of analogue input. Specifically, it was a lot easier to move the stick slightly for slight movements.
Most modern controllers and emulators of N64 games don't account for this, and it can make some parts on N64 games a bit harder than they should be. Many parts of Super Mario 64 were designed around this careful slow precise movement such as the tiny side of Tiny Huge Island.
Re: GameShark Is Back From The Dead, But As AI
Honestly, sounds like snake oil.
It sounds like all it'll do is determine what game you're playing, then use an AI service over API to tell you "helpful info" that might have no basis in reality.
The claims about the Switch 2 release date stink of being a marketing stunt too, just to get your attention.
Re: Portal 64 Fan Project Shut Down After Contact From Valve
"Nintendo’s proprietary libraries"? I don't understand, if this is Valve's position aren't they arguing that all N64 homebrew is legally impermissible?
I'd understand if they were looking to protect their IP (and historically, they're very supportive of fan works with the Half-Life IP), but this doesn't make sense to me.
Even with the Dolphin emulator on Steam situation, there was some decent reasoning that it wasn't okay because of distributing a key used to decrypt Wii games rather than asking the user to provide that key themselves.
Has James Lambert at any point make clear that he's using proprietary Nintendo SDK, tools, software, etc?
Simply making code that can run on a target platform, should be legally in the clear shouldn't it?
Edit: Looked into it, and yes, the Portal 64 project was in fact using an official SDK called Libultra.
https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Libultra
This could shake the whole N64 homebrew scene, depending on how many people are making use of it for their homebrew. Super Mario 64 mods in particular come to mind, even if they're using the cleanroom reverse engineered decompilation the projects made could be at risk if they're using Libultra for re-compilation.
Re: Did You Know That Konami's Simpsons Coin-Op References A Scrapped 'Rabbit Ears' Plotline?
There was also the unused twist of Homer Simpson secretly being Krusty the Klown, but they opted to drop that idea.
It's why the two characters have virtually identical physiques, right down to their mouth shapes and facial features.
Re: Two More People Have Beaten NES Tetris
@Serpenterror
That's simply because 255 is the largest number that can be stored in an unsigned 8-bit address.
11111111 is binary for 255, or FF in hexadecimal.
Truthfully, 255 is a number that crops up very commonly in 8-bit games using 8-bit addresses to store a number value, even for things intended to store and display a two-digit value like a lives counter.
Re: Teen Who "Beat" Tetris Dedicates Feat To Late Father Who Passed Away Just Weeks Ago
It's so aggravating that society is quick to put down a young person's accomplishments like this, from the Sky News presenter's unwelcome comments to Twitch deplatforming him due to his age.
Re: Yep, More Analogue Pocket Limited Editions Are On The Way
This time, I was successful in placing an order and got the colour I wanted!
I went for Indigo, which looks like it sold out in just 6 minutes!
The second to sell out was Silver, in about 10 minutes.
Remarkably, the six remaining colours are still in stock 18 minutes after they opened orders.
Re: Yep, More Analogue Pocket Limited Editions Are On The Way
Ugh, last time I tried the checkout process was impossible.
Stock would sell out instantly and trying to pick another color meant more time in the checkout process.
Re: Anbernic's RG ARC Handheld Looks Like A Sega Saturn Pad
Ahh, another RK3566 system. A capable CPU that they use in the RG353P, it should be perfect for many arcade games.
No idea about Saturn emulation, never tried it but that's the clear appeal.
Re: Analogue Pocket OS 2.0 Adds A Much-Requested Feature
Does this mean they'll have more stock of the Analogue Pocket at some point?
The transparent shells they had a couple weeks ago sold out ludicrously quickly, I couldn't get a look-in.
Re: Random: The Super Marios Bros. 3 Roulette Game Was Rigged After All
@MysticX
It's entirely possible that they implemented truly random arrangements, play-tested it and didn't like that end result.
They may've modified a working random arrangement function in a way that produced 8 deterministic arrangements on purpose. It may've just been a quick dirty change that they never refactored.
Re: Transparent Analogue Pockets Are On The Way, But You'll Need To Be Fast
Well, I tried to get myself a Pocket, but they sold out in under 10 minutes.
I was in there immediately, and still missed out due to their queue system.