xdaniel

Getting back to created characters, I just ended up kinda "semi-remaking" a side character from Medaka Box episode 4, Yatsuhiro, who I - just like the author at RC - wouldn't mind seeing more of ("loveable baka" ftw XD). Not perfect, maybe far from it but impossible to do anyway I'd imagine, but I like her:

Exactly what I was thinking of! That's why playing together with you guys would be great, you know me and you wouldn't ogle those pixels and polygons... I hope!

Oh yeah, a GCN guild does sound nice! Guess that would also mean I can avoid any potential... "idiocy" from strangers regarding my character, because - as you can probably guess from my screenshots - I'll likely be playing a female one

The benchmark didn't go all that well - didn't get too high of a score, need to tweak the options a bit, I guess - so here's just some characters I created. I'll probably keep messing around with this, so who knows what character I'll actually play as (if I do end up playing it, but that's likely) once the game comes out.

Yeah, I think I've seen that one once before, that was a promo loop of some kind by the operators of the Astra satellites, SES. Also, an update of sorts if anyone cares, all that's left on 19.2°E in analogue now that's an actual service as opposed to a test card or something, is Eurosport Germany (to be switched off in a few hours time) and apparently two or three audio carriers with radio stations on ex-ProSieben and ex-HSE24. What I totally forgot about, but also disappeared over the course of this day, is the Astra Digital Radio system (not up-to-date). SWR and MDR apparently were the last to switch off ADR. EDIT: And it's over. According to other forums, the switch-off info cards on ex-HR, ex-RBB and ex-HSE24 (together with the radio station on the latter) were turned off at midnight local time, as well as the other two radios on ex-ProSieben, and Eurosport ceased off at 1:30 AM. Some of the remaining info cards are said to stay until the end of May or so, the other transponders will be converted into digital ones soon. Those that have already been switched off are likely either broadcasting digital already or are pretty much about to.

This doesn't really matter to anyone outside of Europe, I suppose, still I'd like to draw your attention to this for a moment. And I suck at tl;dr, so bear with me here if you're in any way interested in television. Most analogue TV and radio broadcasts via the Astra satellites at 19.2 degrees east - mainly a bunch of German-language free-to-air stations nowadays - ceased during the last night and morning. This ends the rather long history of analogue direct-to-home satellite services at that orbital position, beginning in 1989 after the launch of the first Astra satellite, Astra 1A, in late 1988. In fact, broadcasting began two weeks before my second birthday. Astra 1, as the position was mainly known as before it was officially branded "Astra 19.2°E", was my first encounter with foreign-language television content. Pretty much everything on German TV is dubbed, so - until digital cable came along, and also excluding French TV5 Europe - satellites like Astra and the Eutelsats were the only place to watch television in other languages. And we've only had analogue cable for the most part, besides a few years or so somewhere around 2000. On the other hand, my uncle has had satellite TV since pretty much forever, I guess, which is where - back in around 1997/1998, I guess - I first saw such unusual sights like Cartoon Network, with Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. Only another few years later would those be seen on local TV screens - dubbed into German. CN was encrypted around 2000, then ceased off analogue several years later. Well, to cut this short, even though it's one I didn't have all that much to do with, this is the end of an era. For the last 23 years, you could point your dish at 19.2°E, set the reciever to 11,288 V and watch German station Sat.1, set it to 11,229 V and watch RTL. Those two, along with ProSieben and 3sat appeared there in the sky in 1989 and stayed there until roughly 12 hours ago. It's kinda sad, really. Astra kinda was a window into a different world, from my standpoint back in 1997. I was 10 years old at the time, and all I had seen of the world prior to that, besides Germany, were the dissolving GDR when I was 3 and we visited some relatives after the wall came down, and one of Greece's islands around 1995 or so (where we even had German newspapers, come to think of it, so... yeah). I could hear other languages - mainly English, but there were also one or two stations in Spanish, I think -, I could see things that weren't yet available on TV locally - ex. I remember listening to an episode of Pokemon on encrypted Sky One. Remember, this was still a few years before we had internet, and even then it was initially using a 14.4 kbps modem, so every little image took some time to download. So, yeah... RIP - Analogue services on "Astra 1" / "Astra 19.2°E" February 1989 - April 30th, 2012

It was flea market time today yesterday by now, and I picked up... Game and Watch Gallery 2 (EU, GBC, loose) Sonic Pinball Party + Sonic Battle (EU, GBA, loose) Pokemo- ARGH!! "A wild ZUBAT appeared!"

Man, Not Okay (and for the record, I do find this funny)

Dis Ein't Funny

I... don't know. As in, I don't know if I'll add vertex color editing or .x file support. SO is a mess and difficult to work with - from a design standpoint alone already, basically meaning that I keep thinking "this is still group-based, but I want it material-based, this sucks" etc. -, SO's rewrite is stalled and I started it the wrong way (with the GUI as opposed to just getting it to work), so... no idea. I did think about it earlier (maybe try and add en-/disabling of lighting on a per-group basis, maybe add a list of all vertices in the room that can be edited, but that would in turn mean having to store the vertices in the scene XML as .obj doesn't support vertex colors, etc., etc), but didn't come to a working, relatively simple to implement conclusion. I feel like I'd need to throw out most of SO and SO's current rewrite, and start over a third time, this time planning far, far ahead so as to not repeat the mistakes I've made so far... EDIT: Hell, screw this, I'm gonna start planning for a 3rd rewrite tomorrow. Emphasis on planning - I'll read up on 3D graphics, lighting, the .obj format, probably the .x format as well, then make a sort of design doc with everything from the basic idea behind importing, creating N64 Display Lists, etc. down to class definitions. All this'll probably take a hell of a long time, especially once I get to the point where I have to start coding all this stuff, but it's worth it.

Hrm, "the beta" is way too broad of an outline for any kind of video game, really. Without getting into all those descriptions of "alpha", "beta", "prototype", "prerelease" and such, in terms of OoT, there's just too many semi-known states of development... I mean, the first question when trying to attempt something like this would be, "which period of OoT's development do I want to recreate?" There's - borrowing some of MN's old categorizations from ZSO - A+B Only, A+C Only (...I think?), A+B Reversed... something else I've forgotten I think, etc. Even if you've decided to ex. try and recreate A+B Reversed (so relatively late in the development, the era with ex. the spiral staircase in Zora's Domain), there's only so much you actually can recreate until you get into "hm, there's no footage or screenshots of <insert area here>... how might it have been...?", at which point it's less of a reconstruction and more of a regular hack. In short, there's too many periods in the development we know about, but at the same time too little verified information about them to accurately recreate them in the final game, unless we do someday get a prototype ROM of OoT from whatever period. And then we'd have the true state of development from... who knows, April 26th 1997 or whatever, so that we wouldn't need a reconstruction for that specific period anymore. Not wanting to discourage you or anything, it's just way too difficult in my opinion, less from the technical standpoint, but from the artistic and design standpoint so to speak.

Alright, the "Family Game" arrived! And please excuse the relative mess around the system. Anyway, the thing works perfectly fine and it actually is an old-style Famiclone with cloned FC board, chips and all, and if I've read the data on those chips right, they've been manufactured in mid to late 1992. That should place this clone somewhere in 1993, I suppose. There's, however, two problems with it: First, I'm not 100% sure if the sound is correct on this unit. My Tristar 64, which contains a standard modern NOAC, seems to have wrong sound effects and such in ex. Super Mario Bros., but I can't really tell if that's also the case on this clone here... I have several different SMB cartridges, or carts containing it (one standalone PAL SMB, one official PAL SMB/Tetris/Nintendo World Cup multicart, two different XX-in-1 pirate multicarts), but they all sound a bit off from an emulator running the US ROM in NTSC and also (if I recall correctly) my actual PAL NES. One thing that's off is the speed, which might tie into the second problem... ...which is the fact that this machine is a PAL-N system - that's a PAL signal that uses NTSC's color subcarrier frequency and channel width and is only used in - get this - Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, according to Wikipedia! And if you don't understand this, don't worry, I only get half of all that either. But anyway, running this machine with a TV that doesn't support PAL-N thus results in... ...ugh! And that happens no matter if I use composite or RF - in fact, RF is even worse because there I get a weird moving rainbow pattern across the whole screen! Now I need to figure out how to fix this, preferably without buying a new TV that might support PAL-N...

Yeah, that's most likely it, the correct object(s) is/are loaded. And Sayaka doesn't actually support changing which ones are loaded, because I never finished coding the header editors... Open Sayaka, get the physical start offset of the room you're modifying - "Scene" tab, then hover over the room file in the lower list, file number and virtual and physical offsets appear in the tooltip -, open the ROM in a hex editor and go to the offset, then look for the 0x0B command in the room header there, then just follow the documentation at the Wiki - http://wiki.spinout182.com/index.php?title=Maps_and_Scenes - to find and modify the object list.

Multi-texturing is rather limited and all done inside SO, one reason being that (as far as I know) the Wavefront .obj format doesn't support any kind of multi-texturing. There's a post about how it works somewhere in the SharpOcarina thread, currently somewhere near the end I assume, and the Readme should have some notes about it as well. Also - which cannot be done using SO, but I'll mention it for completeness sake - color tinting and such may also be done using vertex colors. That's especially common in dungeons in the original game, but isn't supported in SO because 1) .obj files do not support vertex colors and 2) manually editing each vertex in SO would be a pain to code support for and to actually use.

Work done over the last month: not too much. First off, a simple disassembler/tracer is implemented. No single step, breakpoints, etc. yet, I'll see about that. Also showcasing a tiny fix regarding GBC palette writes in Lego Racers, which previously had some wrong colors in the sky. Hope this isn't going to become "edge case hell", but looking at VBA-M's source... ugh. Next (and last, actually) is Glocal Hexcite, which didn't have working input whatsoever - input only "worked", if you can even call it that, on the title screen, where any button press sorta paused code execution and corrupted the tilemap. Or that's what it looked like, I don't remember the specifics right now. Anyway, it's fully playable now, after some changes to the input-related I/O register code. So yeah, that's about it. Still some stuff left to do before I'll release the next build - and first one with the whole GUI rewrite and such - but it's getting there, I guess.

Well, last thing I heard about that is this: ...plus I don't think we ever found surefire fix for this or I couldn't get anything like that implemented, so... well, I dunno.

Plans, yes, since spinout released the extension hack in fact, but I haven't implemented it so far. Also, development on most if not all of my projects has more or less stalled over the last few months, so I have no idea when I'll properly get back to SO or anything else. SO's source is out there tho, so if anyone wants to dive in and improve upon it, feel free to do so.

SharpOcarina ignores most material settings because of my shitty planning (for example, I didn't realize .obj materials support ex. translucency). Make your water a separate group, then apply alpha of around 130 to it in SO, as Sanguinetti said.

If you can't find known tags like "Yaz0", "MIO0" and the like, see if you can find, say, level textures or the title screen in your ROM using Tile Molester or whatever else. The more you can find, the higher the chance the ROM is not compressed. Alternatively, try looking through the ROM for ASCII text, be it debugging stuff, actual in-game text or whatever. If you can find at least fragments of it, interspersed with what looks like junk, the text (and in turn probably other data) might be compressed. First things that come to mind, tho maybe not all that efficient.

*borrows images from auction* Just bought a Famiclone on eBay, and (to me anyway) all signs point to it being an old-style clone that actually contains a cloned Famicom mainboard, CPU and PPU! Modern clones, like those Super Fun Joy III Whatevers, are based around those crappy "NES-on-a-Chip" one-chip designs. And if it really is such an old-style system (and if the chips are socketed like on the one I linked to...) I'll try to get some original FC chips to turn this into a 100% 99% FC-compatible system that even does Disk System and Castlevania III, and also has Composite AV out (...99% because the clone's second controller doesn't appear to have a microphone.)

No Bannerbomb? Or did you already have System Menu 4.3 installed or something? Pretty sure that's what I had used, uh... whenever I installed HBC on my Wii about a year back, give or take a month or two.

No problem. Also, that's looking pretty nice! Although, sadly, this is one of the cases where the N64's small texture cache really shows, because the tree backdrop surrounding the area looks pretty awful in that low resolution/color depth... not much that can be done about it, tho, without ex. editing the model and breaking the texture up into two (one for the upper leaves, one for the trunk and grass)

Uhm, that's not the alpha forest...? A_mori is the forest at Outset Island, if I'm not totally mistaken, while A_R00 is the unused one, complete with its ancient Maya file or whatever it was, that can't even be read by BMDview2.

If there's one thing I'm really disappointed about regarding Nintendo recently over the last eight bloody years, it's the complete and utter lack of a new F-Zero! F-Zero Climax for the GBA - which wasn't even released in the West - came out in October 2004 in Japan, a month before the DS did! And the Virtual Console releases of the original and X in the meantime, Captain Falcon appearing in Smash Bros. and the like don't count. Hell, we're in Metroid territory here - Super to Prime was 8 years too, 1994 to 2002! Every E3 since I started following them (so 2004, although that year we Japan got Climax), I've been secretly hoping for a new F-Zero to be announced, and every E3 so far, I have been disappointed. I mean, what's not to like in those games? A great sense of speed (especially in X), vehicle control where you actually have to drive them as well as you possibly can (as opposed to "it's okay to drive into walls sometimes", although some may think that's just faulty, over-sensitive controls), one kickass soundtrack in most of the games (GX is still good, but "not F-Zero enough" if that makes sense). Thinking about it, F-Zero X would probably end up pretty high on my personal "best games of all time" list if I ever made one, which I probably won't. It's no great looker - GX is much better in that regard - but I think the constant 60 FPS are a tad more important than eye-popping graphics. Ugh, I dunno what else to write here, or why I even started writing this... I guess I just want to spread awareness on the series' possible fate (*cough*Kid Icarus*cough*) and hear your opinions on it. What's your favorite F-Zero title and why, you favorite vehicle or track - Twin Noritta and X's Big Blue 1 and Silence 1 ftw! -, or alternatively why do you not like the series, stuff like that.

May I be pedantic for a second? The Japanese title of Quest 64 is Eltale Monsters and it was, interestingly enough, apparently first released in the US, then Europe (as Holy Magic Century) and then in Japan. But leaving that aside, welcome to The GCN! Wish I could write as well as you can, my writings/stories/fanfics always end up on the, uh, not all that great side, or that's at least what I think