Mugi

oh yes, i remember this. you buy a ps3 and it ships with a composite cable.... the same composite cable that ps1 shipped with... and ps2 shipped with  

I have a lifetime reserve of composite cables thanks to sony exclusively heh.

Thank you, that was a fairly interesting read.

I've been working on getting myself a NTSC unit for more comprehensive hardware testing regarding the game but I guess that just became a little more important now. both myself and FIX94 both exclusively own only  PAL hardware so NTSC testing has been pretty much reliant on emulators so far.

I've been giving this a little more attention lately and the menu font (which I love so much) also got a little bit of a makeover for that. Being pretty new to all this I really didn't have a solid starting point as to what makes a graphic function better on a CRT or not, so while Im familiar with the basic idea, it's been quite a rollercoaster of experimenting with it. Really fun in it's own way.

One of the late problems I found from DS was that the main menu font, being 1 pixel wide with large vertical stripes really started blending over to the background, so my new favourite thing is giving outlines to things. This made the menu texts absolutely clean on (atleast my own) CRT which is just amazing heh :P

if you compare it to the screenshot from the first post, there's barely any functional difference on a pixel perfect screenshot, but it's literally like day&night on a CRT.

a lot of people also keep telling me I should familiarize myself with this thing called blarggs NTSC tool, but honestly, after trying it out and comparing it to my own CRT, I find it to to be wildly inaccurate in it's representation of CRT artifacts. Similarly, using NTSC filters on an emulator has been a huge dissappointment for me, they look NOTHING like my own CRT does. I this a PAL thing or is my CRT just weird ? heh. do PAL filters exist ? :P

sounds really interesting.

im especially diggin' the contents of volume 2, as romhacking is more my forte

yeah, VWF was out of the window instantly, we never considered it an option honestly. Like you said, it's a hasttle, and secondly, while our game does have cutscenes with dialog, this is a action oriented platformer, so the amount of actual dialog will be rather tame compared to, say an RPG or adventure game of any kind (we dont have npc's or any of such in-game.)

I totally agree on the fact that the capital font is more readable by a pretty wide margin, however, what tipped us over is the fact that the lower case one is just aesthetically so much more pleasing to look at, while still being readable enough.

Im curious though, has anyone ever done a feature such as this, or know of a game that does it, or did I inavertedly come up with (GASP!) something new ?

from an implementation point of view this was so easy to do too. our font chr is just split in 2 pieces, one upper case and one lower case, and the layouts are identical. screen load simply checks which textload mode is selected and if it's caps only, it will load the capitals chr on both slots.

14 minutes ago, Sumez said:

When making an NES game specifically, it's definitely relevant to consider composite artifacts, at least on text and other central UI elements. Especially due to the "jitter-effect" build into the NES, which gives its composite output a bit of a unique look.
But you also have to be real and realise that most people will play your game on an emulator, and you'd be catering to a niche market, for the sake of authenticity. But hey, that's what homebrew is all about, right? That said, I wouldn't go out of my way to consider composite artifacts for every piece of graphic.
I also wouldn't worry about RF. RF signal is a real shitshow, and anyone willingly subjecting themselves to that is asking for it themselves  Besides, the artifacts introduced from that is similar to composite.

On consoles with a higher fidelity, like the SNES, there is typically less of an issue, as larger color palettes usually makes graphics stand out more clearly. Also, I'd assume a lot people who are hardware-nerdy enough still play SNES games on an original console are probably using better quality cables than composite, as both RGB and S-video are supported out of the box.

As a side note, I think your text actually looks better in caps, even on the emulator screenshot.

My approach is more or less that really. I mean... I am making a nes game, so i do want it to be playable on the actual thing without extra hoops (NESRGB ) but on the other hand yeah, realistically speaking, who's actually using RF nowadays. I mostly made this topic to see how other people actually making content approach it, Do they care and to what extend.

as far as my screenshots go, I personally love the lower case font and from the few people that have seen it so far in use, the feedback has been more or less positive, so i didn't want to change it really. That said, the ALL CAPS is what was originally implemented and so, rolling back to that as a safety option seemed like a logical choice.

good news for you though, now you can pick whichever you want so if you prefer the all caps, it's there heh.

I totally agree with you on the whole fact of "not bothering" to check EVERYTHING for artifacting, and I have a few things in the game too that do get slightly messy on composite but I just decided to not care heh. Overall I've been trying to do stuff in a way it doesn't get TOO bad though.

here's an excerpt from an actual dialog screen with both options. I have to say, looking at them like this, the lowercase does look pretty small, but again, lets be honest, who plays nes games on an emulator with 1x screensize ?

Hey guys.

We've been hard at work on Dimension Shift lately and yesterday we ran into something that has been bothering me for a while in the game and we finally did something to the fact.

We implemented a lower case font into the cutscenes a while back which made everything look WAY better than it used to with a typical ALL CAPS font, however, after sitting on it for a while, it just really wasn't readable enough on a CRT, especially on smaller tv's and / or when using RF that nicely smudged it allover the screen... so what do?

our solution was to implement a font selector int othe game's settings menu to toggle between the full font (upper/lowercases) and a CAPS only font (screenshots at the end), which looks a bit silly but its extremely readable even on small tv's and RF, which is always a good thing.

So I started wondering, do people generally pay attention to composite/RF CRT compatifbility in design nowadays or do people just test things on emulators and call it a day ?

share ideas and solutions if you like, Im really curious as to how people approach this issue.

6 minutes ago, Richardhead said:

Not Gonna lie, I'm super jealous. I've always wanted wood paneling in my place. For some stupid reason the woman in my life is against it. Go figure.

it's actually same for me, but for now we're stuck in my old home so I still get to enjoy the panels for the time being xD

3 hours ago, Richardhead said:

That’s some epic wood paneling.

it's an old house :P  

2 hours ago, Memblers said:

And yeah, the IC in the NES controller is the standard CD4021 which is easy to buy. 74HC165 I used isn't pin-compatible but it does the same thing (looks like I'm going to change to 74LV165 though, since it has schmitt-trigger inputs and that will help with button de-bouncing).

Thanks. I think what im gonna do next it draw up a PCB that will sit snuggly into a ps1 pad and have me some more ergonomic nes pads best case scenario im going to try and design this so that it's a drop-in replacement, and to get your ps1 pad back, you just take the new pcb off and put the old one back in. (X/O for B/A respectively)

as far as I know, battle kid has been entirely written from sratch. That said, battle kid, sure, has similarities to megaman (most likely intended) but at the end of the day it differs quite a bit on engine level (no scrolling, entirely different ways to handle powerups, the list goes on.) there are also numerous resource available explaining a little about it's development process. I remember watching stuff on youtube where Sivak played the game and explained some of the design decisions and talked about the challenges in programming them while he encountered them in game.

mlem

1 hour ago, Orab Games said:

That is pretty much the basic design I was asking for but with the buttons replaces with screw down terminals so it can be reused without soldering and desoldering. What Memblers posted is awesome! I would really like it to be compatible with Power Pad games though since I wrote Tailgate Party for the Power Pad.

The goal is to replace the Power Pad with a piece of plywood with a 12 holes. Each hole is rigged in such a way that when a bag enters, a switch is toggled and tells the NES when a target was hit. 

Other ideas include a putting game where you aim for targets to score. Games using NERF guns aiming for targets. Custom arcade stick. The possibilities are endless! It would be fun to take these to Expos for people to try out or just release it on the Internet as a rom and the schematics to build your controller for the game. As @neodolphino stated, it would be more for hobbyists than actual game releases on a cart.

im not big into party games personally, but having proprietary controllers like that for conventions and stuff sounds like a really neat idea. makes the experience more engaging.

hey, i can read that!

Thanks , I'll definitely take a poke at that.

Im not a master of hardware by any strech either, but i've done a few simple pcb designs in the past... something as "simple" as a nes controller pcb shouldn't kill me (propably :P)

something of the sort.

My original idea was really just desolder all the components of a original pad and mount them on a custom form-factor pcb that would sit nicely in a ps1 controller shell, but I never

actually looked into it further. This thread just reminded me of that, so if the entire controller is replicable with off-the-shelf parts, maybe I'll finally look into making one, heh.

i really dont care about turbo buttons or wireless or anything else, just Dpad, start, select and A/B

4 hours ago, gauauu said:

This reminds me of my dream to create an 8-player version of the 4-score.

(of course, then you have to figure out how to get 8 people willing to sit down and play Nintendo at the same time)

i would argue that the latter here is the hardest part of such project.

you make a 8-score and then what? good luck finding 8 people to test it with lol.

I wonder if I've ever seen such a thing happen. maybe at some convention there has been a passing glimpse of a gathering of 8 people who were all interested of the same nintendo :P

speaking of controllers though, this is slightly off the topic, but is it possible to fully replicate a normal controller using off-the-shelf parts ?

i've always wanted to design a custom pcb and make a few to use in alternate controller shells (ps1 controller or so) but i never wanted to destroy real controllers for that.

that old apogee thing called Raptor on DOS (ported to god knows how many things including iphones nowadays)

Im not really huge on the genre either (im just terrible at these games) but raptor is one of those i really REALLY enjoy and keep revisiting from time to time.

1 hour ago, MachineCode said:

Nice. I’ll have to check out the forked version.

If you intend to mess with the illegal opcodes with it, it's worth a note to look into the version FIX94 forked from the compiler, that fixes a couple of previously unusable illegal ops with it, that were breaking our game so something had to be done to the matter.

current versions of dimension shift are compiled with this assembler and it still works on hardware, so far so good

the fork can be found from here: https://github.com/FIX94/asm6f

(this makes  "LAX (IND),Y", "ISC ABS,X" and "ISC ABS,Y" usable in asm6f.)

we couldn't afford to wait for it to be merged to the master so we decided to fork it instead. At the time of writing, it hasn't been merged yet.

1 minute ago, MachineCode said:

Storing the Y register to the number 4, eh? That’s actually pretty funny that it doesn’t freak out about that.

Also, if you want to vote for ASM6 it’s cool. I only put favorite vs “what do you use” to avoid messing up people who use more than one.

sure thing. I cast my vote.

And yeah, especially earlier on when I was less comfortable with the instuction set, I did more times than I dare to admit. ASM6 seems to generally be fairly robust about throwing compile errors and this is the one exception with it i've found so far.

As an Additional note, our development moved over to a fork called ASM6f recently, so that's my current go-to assembler, although it doesn't really differ much from the vanilla one. Adds unofficial opcode support and some minor little things.

I didnt vote on this because only having used asm6, I can't really favor it over the other options not having ever used them.

however, after using asm6 for a year or so now, literally the only complaint I have on it thus far, is the sole fact that it compiles "STY #$04" instead of complaining that I suck. (yes I did this more than once )

On 10/22/2019 at 7:28 PM, gauauu said:

I'll pile on with the question -- are development blogs interesting to people? I used to keep more of a development blog where I'd talk about progress, but I never knew if anyone was reading it, and it was a bit of work to maintain, so I mostly stopped. Is there value in that sort of thing to people?

 

I have to say i throughoutly enjoyed reading the article you wrote regarding your scrolling glitch. As someone constantly battling with "that one bug that is impossible to reproduce" I definitely feel you there... too many times have we sat down with the "now it's perfect" look on our faces, only to find an incorrect tileload on the next playthrough. It's definitely an insight to read into what went into finding and fixing it on your end.

the game engine reuse is an interesting question, which leads to another.

as far as i know, several homebrews have to an extend, available source code (am i wrong that lizard's source code for example is atleast partially publicly available?)

regardless, lets play along and hypothetically think that it is.

now if someone takes that and makes a game using it, will that be then also somehow labeled upon its release as somehow different than a "pure made from scratch homebrew game" ?

the reason im asking is because nesmaker's engine is also written from scratch in assembly, and is in-fact freely available for anyone to use.

when you purchase a nesmaker licence, you are infact purchasing a licence to access the UI tool, and whatever tools come with it, such as the screen painter, CHR conversion tools, and whatnots. HOWEVER. nesmaker can be downloaded free of charge from their website, and does indeed come with a assembly source code for the full game engine. The executable is there and will ask you for a licence code, but nothing forces you to use the UI. the game engine is just assembly code, just as is any other piece of assembly code that is available from, say nesdev wiki or our hypothetically available lizard's source code.

is there a particular reason why code written by Joe has to be classified differently than code written and made available by anyone else ? is so, then how about if we put it in the nesdev wiki? will it still be have to separately be stated that it is nesmaker code if used? or is this about the tool only and not the actual assembly code? if so, then why is nesmaker the only tool that requires a label instead of labeling shiru's screen tool or eclipse or asm6 or any other tool ?

edit: to continue from above, if the answer to both above is no, then why does using both in conjunction require a label either ?

edit2: what then if i take our hypothetical lizard source code and load it up into nesmaker, does it then become a nesmaker game ?

or if i write my own game engine so that it is compatible with nesmaker's UI ? Is it then a nesmaker game ?

i guess you could always rewrite the post in plain text, although thats a whole lot of work heh.

32 minutes ago, Orab Games said:

. I will be one of the first with money in hand to support Mugi.

honestly though, while i can't really put into words how much this sort of faith means to me as a starting hobbyist, if i would want to print money by making a game, NES game would be the last type of game I would make. I really just wanted to make a game.... Which has a stage select, Like Shatterhand.

that is literally THE reason I wanted to make a NES game.

Yes copies of DS will be put into cartridges and sold for those who are capable of getting past the fact that NESmaker was used and wish to purchase a copy, but honestly, money is the absolutely last thing that drives us forward in making this game.