[[The DSIware version's] been done for a few weeks now; we’re testing it now.]

There's this interview with Tyrone that is making the rounds:

The DSiWare version of Cave Story does have some of the new features introduced with the WiiWare version. We’ll announce the feature set pretty soon... we kept it relatively lean in comparison mainly because this is more a perfect port of the original game. We did include a few things from the WiiWare version but not all of them...

The touch screen is used for player inventory, the Map System, and dialogue boxes. For the most part the dialogue doesn’t usually obstruct the on-screen characters, but we found that moving it down to the bottom screen was a bit more pleasing. You could concentrate on what’s going [on] — especially given the differences in resolution. We didn’t implement actual touch for the Inventory or Map System — it didn’t feel “right” on a 2D game...

[The DSIware version's] been done for a few weeks now; we’re testing it now. We really do read most of the feedback from fans, good and bad — we’re big boys and if there’s something that either needs fixing or players want, we’d be stupid not to address it. Oh yeaaah!! The other thing we learned is that audio is almost more important to Cave Story fans than artwork. For those ready to bitch about the audio, it’s perfect this time around, the first time around.... Date? Still to be determined, but I would love to have this out before Halloween. I’d be surprised if it isn’t released before the end of the year...

I did want to thank fans for all the post-release feedback to the WiiWare version of Cave Story... Players have a lot of passion for their games and even when they’re mad at us, I can see that they’re trying to communicate something. We try to take it all in a very positive way and a lot of it has helped the upcoming update for Cave Story — it’ll address a game-breaking bug and a ton of other fan-requested fixes.

Do I understand the last bit correctly that the Wii version is getting a patch? That is fantastic news if so. I hope that they were able to address the problems with the "original audio" in addition to the new audio.

GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF

Does this do what you want?

Erm... I have no idea. Does it?

It looks like it's a tool for writing files to Amiga file systems. Which I suppose might be part of some sequence of steps leading to a solution. Maybe?

It writes files to .adf files, which it claims are disk image files for Amiga systems. What I think you want to do is take your windows folder full of files and copy all those files to a disk image file; your emulator can't read files from the windows filesystem, but it should be able to load the disk image file as if you'd entered it into the virtual "disk drive".

I'm saying this based on past experience with emulators in general however, I haven't any knowledge with Amiga emulators in specific so I don't know if this is actually the correct thing to tell you, sorry...

EDIT: What happens if instead of putting in the workbench disk in the emulator's virtual disk drive, you put in a kickstart disk and then put in the disk you want to boot from? Note: I do not know if any of the things I just said are actually words.

I am working on a tracker for FF4 Audio and Canvas, something targeted specifically towards chiptunes - sample-based stuff may come later. Progress is being made but it's all still way early and experimental. Firefox's audio extensions work well, and the typed arrays introduced for WebGL make compute performance bearable, but the graphics situation is really terrible right now since Canvas currently seems to have an incredibly large API call overhead, making high-level operations using vectors or text faster than blit-heavy architectures. All I really need is a character-mapped graphics system at ~640x480 resolution, but I can't get it in the browser at more than about 5 FPS. (DOM/CSS seems to be even slower for the colored monospace text I'm using. Not an expert at those APIs though, I may be missing some magic optimization.)

Oh, this is interesting. Are you implementing the tracker itself within js/html5?

Actually, due to the way my monitors are arranged, it's a currently playing youtube video of an acoustic guitar cover of "Iz-Us" by Aphex Twin

For my two game projects so far, I have handled this problem by just pathologically assuming people are going to flake, and structuring the design such that I never create a situation where I become dependent on another person. I chose an intentionally minimalist presentation, so that if I couldn't find artists-- or if I found artists and they disappeared-- the project could just go on and be released without them. I chose a game design that minimized the art resources needed; where I did use art resources I set things up so that the artists were more or less interchangeable, that is the art was created in a style where half the art could be done by one person and half by another and no one would notice a clash in styles, in case someone dropped out mid-project. On my current project I have places where I'm using somewhat elaborate art, but I have a fallback for those parts where I can replace the art with plain polygons and it will look like I did it that way on purpose, so that if the artist flakes (as it looks may happen) their contribution wasn't technically essential anyway. I simplify the project rather than build a dependency on another person into it.

I realize this is extraordinarily unhelpful advice!

Aside from this, there actually is a way to get people to deliver content with at least reasonable probability, and that is to pay them. I realize this is not helpful either for many projects, still, if it absolutely has to get done, then the option exists.

Failing these options, if all you need is music then Kaizen/Sinclair/Bento give good advice. Even besides the decent-sized body of public domain / creative commons music you may alos have success just browsing sites where people are creating music and asking them if you can reuse some of their posted works. They can't flake on you if the pieces you're using are already finished...

The problem with HTML5 as I see it is a lack of tools. There are a couple of programming libraries for games, but there's no content creation tools I'm aware of analogous to the Flash application that target Canvas drawing or the HTML5 timeline. I'd be curious if this is likely to change at any point.

I checked Google for "create amiga disk image" and several websites mentioned something called "ADF Opus". Does this do what you want?

Hm, it's interesting, but is it actually quantum or just probabilistic? That is does it actually make use of complex probabilities and the 2-norm, or I dunno entanglement?

Awhile back I tried trying to come up with a little quantum system I could model and visualize the behavior of, based on Conway's life ...



...by the time I was done I was mostly just very confused, but I came to the conclusion that nothing I'd done had actually been quantum, just probabilistic, because all I did was combine probabilities in the conventional way, whereas what as far as I can tell makes quantum stuff "special" in the first place (that is, that gives BQP its additional power over BPP) relies on things like phase cancellation of complex probabilities. In the Quantum Chess paper they do actually draw out a quantum circuit for some of the chess variants they introduce toward the end of the paper, so it's probable those variants actually do have quantum properties... on the other hand I assume you could model classical-systems-with-indeterminacy using a quantum circuit also, so I'm not sure. I'd have to think about what they're doing some more (ideally when it's not 2:30 AM...)

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet or not, but it's a shame that Ufouria's music is all messed up on the Wii.  With NES games, composers often used a different process for creating the percussion than they did for the melodic instruments... but apparently with Ufouria the bassline was created separately from the rest of the tracks, resulting in a pitch shift for all the melodic instruments except for the bassline.  The cacophony is pretty bad, but we're still trying to play it because it seems like an awesome game.

I think there may just be something weird about the way sound is implemented in Ufouria? Because the Wii version sounds about the same as any emulated version I've ever seen.

If you think the Wii version is cacophonous you should have heard the absolutely amazing thing that early versions of iNES did to the entire Ufouria soundtrack! Though, okay, I have to admit that this was one of the things that originally made me fall in love with the game...

Wow, that's incredible. Thanks :D

Okay awesome, if this is in Mountain View I may have no excuse * not * to go.

Stupid questions:

- What exactly is the format of these things? I've never been to one.

- I'm gonna be busy a few evenings that weekend-- if I couple a few of the evenings am I ruining the experience for myself?

So when I look at the wikipedia pages for, say, white noise, pink noise, brown noise etc. they have all these really pretty spectrum graphs showing sorta what the frequency response or spectrum density of the different noise types are. So for example white noise will always kinda look like:



Or pink noise will always kinda look like:



So what I'm thinking is: I know a trick for generating white noise, and I know a trick for generating brown noise. But it would be really cool if I could just, say, define an arbitrary spectral curve and generate a running stream of noise fitting that curve. (And what would be REALLY cool is if I could have that curve change over time, so say I could generate a block of 20,000 samples that start out as pink noise and end as white noise, but if I can generate noise at all I can always just do two streams and fade between them so whatever). Basically I want to start with one of the graphs above and go from there to a sound. Is there a good way to do this?

Note: To be clear, I'm working with an audio library of the type where every few ms a callback of mine is called and I return a few ms worth of raw pcm sample data.

Pretty.

I wonder-- As I remember Mondrian was obsessed with the golden ratio and had the different areas in his paintings relate to each other via golden ratios as often as possible. If you had your program enforce golden ratios, would the images look more Mondriany?

[3D Dot Game Heroes has been dropped to $30]

If the forum will indulge a necropost, you may be interested to learn that 3D Dot Game Heroes has been dropped to $30

I'm actually still playing this! I think I've basically sunk more time in it than all my other PS3 games combined.

Re: DBZ hair and shrinking, this was a powerup in Clash at Demonhead. There's a good chance this might be the game you're imagining.

OMG this is exactly what I was thinking of.

Like literally this is the exact screenshot I had in my head.

Hm, this looks familiar



Chrysalis was soooo gooood but I'm not sure I'd call it obscure? I remember it being sort of a big deal at the time, I think. Definitely underrated, though. And about the GBC Chrysalis: Didn't they add an extra dungeon? That would seem to justify whatever other bits they messed up.

If technically-not-obscure-just-sorta-overlooked games count, I'd push M.C. Kids:



It's easy to overlook because it's a McDonalds-themed platforming game (??!), but it's actually surprisingly technically advanced for an NES game-- ripping off Super Mario Bros. 3 in all the right ways and adding some really creative ideas on top of that. And it gets incredibly hard toward the end.

Actually, as long as we're getting off topic a bit-- there's a game I very clearly remember seeing in an early issue of Nintendo Power, but have been unable to remember for years what the name was. It was some kind of sci fi futuristic thing, and I think it was a sidescrolling platformer, I think it was specifically set in "20XX" or something, I kinda remember the main character having DBZ hair, and the one thing I remember clearest is something about a power-up that shrank you really tiny so you could get to hidden areas. Does anybody have any idea what I might be thinking of?

This really needs to be a general Sunsoft thread.

I'm OK with this!

Sunsoft's 8 bit stuff gets a lot of love but they had some amazing output for the Super Nintendo as well. Road Runner: Death Valley Rally and Taz-Mania for the SNES are as good as licensed video games get.



One of the better uses ever of mode 7 to attempt an actual gameplay mechanic





This game ended every single level with a totally viable Wile E. Coyote gag, and the platforming is legitimately deep and challenging, AND there is a "meep meep" button!

Why doesn't every game have a "meep meep" button

I stole the top two images here from consoleclassix.com

Obscure Sunsoft game avatar fight! 

Are you asking for a challeeeeeeeenge?!

[Ufouria]

Okay so if you like pixel art metroidvanias-- and OBVIOUSLY you like pixel art metroidvanias because WHY ELSE WOULD YOU BE ON THIS FORUM, then I have for you the most important news possibly of your entire life: Ufouria, the long-lost NES platformer, has just been released for Wii Virtual Console.







Ufouria is basically the horribly deformed child of Metroid and Hello Kitty, and is one of the finest platformers ever created for the NES-- if you ask me the best one released without "Mario" in the name. It was originally released under the name "Hebereke" in Japan with slightly different character designs at the end of the NES lifespan, then was localized and released in Europe, but has never been released for sale in America until today. The version now on U.S. virtual console is the PAL version unchanged, with unbelievably loopy translation fully intact.

Non-obvious advice: Hold down to stomp, hit "select" for character select.