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There's a rumor that Color Dreams planned a Hellraiser game with a z80 co-processor. The only "evidence" of it I feel right linking to is this blog post with magazine ads for the game. It figures a company like that would put out ads for a game barely even in development. https://littlebitsofgaming....

EAD's first SFC project was porting SMB3 so it's likely that game at least is mostly the same.

Thus, we all agree this demo will, unintentionally, always show "YOU ARE USING AN EMULATOR" even on both NTSC and PAL hardware, both flash cart and EEPROM, right ? It's an NROM program that has 8K of chr-rom in the iNES header (yet still writes to chr-memory and reads it back) and clears all ram on...

OK, it checks out. I just resorted to forcing $AA into PPU addr $1 and it passes the test. It's still a mystery what kind of cart this was supposed to work on and it leaves an unsightly bunch of pixels in that tile.

I forgot T is copied into V only on the 2nd write, though just learned for the first time RMW instructions write both the original and modified value (meaning the INC $2006 already sets vram to $0001 which totally went over my head). Though the dummy PPU_DATA read still increments the vram address s...

Here's the intended emulator-detection code from the RTC.nes demo. Even after reading about open-bus behavior on the wiki, I'm stumped here. In both FCEUX and Mesen it writes #$AA to vram address $0001 and the cmp reads from $0002 [Edit: It's actually reading the value in $1 on the read buffer - the...

Since the detection code in that demo involves reading from PPU_ADDRESS, it would probably get defeated in about 15 minutes, a little longer if they try to protect it with Earthbound-style checkpoints.

I have tried it myself, but have not been successful. And also I can't understand the use of tools like da65 well. Disassemblers aren't that useful in reverse engineering a program. If you want to document the battle system for ex. look at the vram addresses where the party members' stats are print...

dougeff wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 30, 2020 8:26 am

I believe Alp said that he lost the source code when his computer died. And they weren't finished.

Who even loses everything because of a HD crash anymore? It takes no time at all to archive a whole folder and drop it in Google Drive.

One difficulty with programming for the Game Boy isn't Z80 as much as that the CPU isn't quite a Z80. Though sequential access to memory on 8080 family is more convenient in ways than on 6502 family, random access suffers. I guess it's been said here before but whereas in a 6502 program it's most e...

FF4 has a "we made this as a NES game, but the NES market was dead so we did a SNES port halfway through development and didn't have the time or money to upgrade our computers and tools" look to it. FFV doesn't look that much better to be honest. Really? FF5 seems like a pretty drastic improvement ...

And in 1994 Nintendo released a US-only action RPG, Startropics but on the SNES 1995 was too late for some developers to localize their game? Nintendo was trying to move a few top-loader NES units with some late releases on the way out. And there's no way Startropics 2 had as much text as an averag...

From what I know about programming gaming consoles, GBA is probably the easiest - more tools to aid in asset creation, devkitPro abstracts away all the start-up code you'd have to write (though I made a simple text demo all in Arm from scratch) and it's basically a much more streamlined SNES with mo...

Darn right it has! It came out in a time when everyone (including myself) was blinded by Donkey Kong Country, and pre-rendered CG graphics was all the rage. IMO Earthbound and Yoshi's Island were the original "indie" games - deliberately ignoring what was high-tech in favor of stylized retro graphi...

Here's an example of pea from Zombies Ate My Neighbors. call nmi routines: $80/83E0 A5 0C LDA $0C [$00:000C] A:C349 X:002C Y:0100 P:eNvmxdIzc $80/83E2 F0 33 BEQ $33 [$8417] A:C349 X:002C Y:0100 P:eNvmxdIzc $80/83E4 85 10 STA $10 [$00:0010] A:C349 X:002C Y:0100 P:eNvmxdIzc $80/83E6 A2 38 00 LDX #$003...