Sumez

I guess I don't really understand Nesmaker then. It feels weird to pay for a complete product if you're expected to manually change it? I'll admit I have no firsthand experience with it.

This is the only run I've seen this year, but I had to stay up super late just to catch it live. I'm so happy it played out like it did - there's so much that could have gone wrong. Big props to Gus for finally caving the way for shooters into these events, after all these years of the idea having been tossed around and continuously rejected.

Well, the problem is that if you scale it up to a different resolution, you'll get either unevenly stretched pixels, or blurry sampling. This isn't a thing for old LCD screens, it's a thing for every LCD screen, and it's very obvious with 2D graphics that are supposed to be crisp. You could show a 320x240 image on a 960x720 monitor with no issues, because you just duplicate every pixel 3 times in each direction, but what can you do when the picture doesn't scale cleanly? That's the issue everyone re-releasing old 2D games faces, and some solutions have been better than others.

Considering all of Hollow Knight's qualities are superficial, that's not an unmerited stance. It plays well enough, but it's pretty unoriginal and feels like a ton of other games, but the way it presents itself in terms of world building, style, mood, characters, and so on is really extremely well made. I wouldn't make any preconceptions about it though, you really have to experience it in action.

Yeah sorry. I just stupidly assumed 6502 implied NES programming. On Atari, every byte matters. I'd say cycle count is more central though.

That's an interesting trick, and especially curious to me, because I've honestly never thought of doing optimizations from this "perspective". That said, these kinds of optimizations are probably the last thing I'd consider doing on a project - and at that time saving 2 bytes here and there probably won't make a difference. You'd need to do it all over the place through your entire project for a notable advantage. The downside here, and the reason you probably won't ever see me doing something like this, is that it makes the source code a lot less stable. Let's say you decide to add some more logic in the "branch" for LabelTwo, all of a sudden the LabelOne logic will fail to function as intended, and it's a really easy one to miss when returning to old code a few weeks later. It's the same reason I tend to always include stuff like "unnecessary" CLC/SEC when the state of said flag should already be given due to a previous branch. It might give me a tiny optimization - but it's also creates a risk of a potential hard-to-identify bug in the future.

Yes, exactly. I can't even find any ingame pictures on their site, are you seeing any there? I'm just basing this on what I saw in person when they demonstrated it at PRGE back in october. It could easily have changed since, or like I speculated, it's very likely a setting. But who can tell without trying the thing. EDIT: Found some footage on YouTube, and although the bezel definitely goes all the way around the screen in all of the ones I could dig up, they are at least kept completely black in those same examples, so it's not very obvious. It's probably done to maintain integer scaling of individual pixels, which is honestly commendable. But it kind of sucks that they couldn't find a screen that just fit out of the box - of course that would have been incredibly expensive.

Oh at least to me it doesn't matter if something is "written from scratch". Like you said yourself, nearly any code base will have a bunch of snippets copies wholesale from somewhere else.

Why is it blurry? Either you do some actual NES programming, or you don't.

Yeah, every game has heavy custom bezels also, not just on either side, but around the entire emulation window, which makes it even more obvious that it's an emulation platform, and not an attempt at replicating any kind of arcade experience. I'd assume it can be configured if you own one, but I'm worried how that will affect scaling - again, this is one area where you can absolutely count on the AtGames logo being a bad sign, it's not like the price of the product should tell anything about their ability to handle video filtering. Hilariously, when they were showcasing the system, they had (the famously terrible) Famicom Tetris running on it, but with a bezel made up from Nintendo's NES Tetris. Those games were made by two different companies, and I'm pretty certain there are some copyright licenses that don't really line up well here. I'm not sure what to make of their claim that this is "the world's first connected arcade" either... I guess doing 5 seconds of research was too much, when it risked ruining their slogan XD To add some positivity to this, though - at least the game list is looking really good!

Great to hear! Yeah, a dirty game is never an indication that it shouldn't work. Even if some dirt gets into the cartridge and on the PCB, it's unlikely to cause any damage. Of course with enough dirt/moisture, that could end up causing rust on some connections which would damage the game, but as long as the connector is functional, there's no reason a ROM based game shouldn't work.

Uhm. I think I have some bad news for you. XD

I'd assume the AtGames logo should say it all Btw, I saw this as it was demonstrated at PRGE last year, and I can't really speak for the stuff that actually matters, like build quality, input lag, etc. - but at least superficially, everything about it was a big red flag. It was like the people who made it had no idea what they were even making.

So it's an open source K&P then In terms of "homebrewing" I think there's a big distinction between making heavy edits in Nesmaker's engine code, or just using the editor.

Yeah, I don't really see the rubberbanding being such a big deal. It's in almost every arcade style racing game (and even some simulations), and there are way worse examples out there than Mario Kart. I'd get it if it meant winning a race was much more arbitrary, but in my practical experience, the person who played the best will almost always win, outside of certain really unfortunate scenarios which could often have been prevented anyway. If you're doing a series of races, it would take really bad luck to not get the place you "deserved". I actually really like the dynamic of switching to defensive mode when you're trying to keep the lead, while people who lag behind are given ways to increase their chances of fighting back. Sonic Racing All-Stars Transformed is in many ways a better kart racer than Mario Kart, but I don't really enjoy the defensive game as much in that one - being in the lead is kinda boring.

I haven't followed the debate here, and I'm not sure exactly what people are even trying to decide on, but as a homebrewer, and a partial response to the last post by @TylerBarnes, here's my take. In most branches of video game development, using premade engines, libraries etc. has always been a part of development. There are many, many different layers of abstraction, and in PC games using assembly code hasn't been a thing for decades now. But there's still a big difference between using something like Klik & Play and its sequels which strips away everything tech'y, and isolates game making to the creative process - and Unity, which makes a lot of tools readily available, but also allows you to manually edit almost everything, and pretty much requires programming to get anything genuinely good out of it. As far as I'm aware Nesmaker falls in the former category, but in the end it doesn't really matter - it's the output that counts, right? Making a game isn't necessarily a programming exercise. For someone like me who's a programmer at heart, it is - but if someone already invented the wheel there's no real reason to do it again. Doesn't mean you're not a genuine game developer. The only distinction I'd make, is whether Nesmaker games qualify as "homebrew". I personally think they fall on the other side of the threshold simply due to them not encompassing any of what defines NES homebrew to me - basically, understanding how the NES works and lerning to create a product that's able to interface with it. Nesmaker itself is of course homebrew, and its existence allows hobbyists to make games for the NES without getting into homebrew, which is a quality in and of itself. You could argue that a Nesmaker game is still a "homebrew product", because the nesmaker engine is included, but the act of creating a Nesmaker game is a Nesmaker-specific thing, it's clearly not homebrewing.

I always considered Little Nemo quite a popular game - I guess being Capcom, smooth controlling, and good looking goes a long way. The game itself I feel is quite overrated though.

I don't think laminating manually gets the best result (your labels will be very glossy!), but it's a decent cheap DIY approach. You don't need actual lamination equipment, I did mine on an ironing board. Having better equipment for cutting would definitely have helped a lot with the appearance though.

Well, the link doesn't work. It's just a big "Error 1020" page. Maybe it requires you to be logged in? I don't think it would be hard to include an image in your post. Either way, it sounds like you at least shouldn't even try to plug in this cartridge until you've already tried cleaning it thoroughly. Don't want the dirt spreading to your console.

Get a banana ASAP, and hold down the item button, so that you carry it behind you, it will act as a shield for turtle shells. There are a lot of ways to play defensive when you're in first. I'm not a fan of the rubber banding either, but it's a thing in a surprisingly large amount of racing games. At the end of the day the best player still seems to win quite consistently. At least it's not as bad as in Daytona. On the first course of the game you want to be in last place going into the final lap in order to win the game.

Wasn't that game made by the same people that did Skyblazer?

Stage: Skull Man Robot: Master: Ring Man Song: Spark Man Weapon: Top spin

I think it's probably better if I don't know

The link doesn't work, so I can't see what's actually wrong with the cart.... But I hope it works for you, it's really an excellent game!