Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Boy, if I would have had to guess which of your reviews would have the most views, I never would have guessed Insmouse no Yakata. I wonder why it has so many views over the rest?

Probably because there aren’t any other good videos showing it. And it’s a good review too, as it explains all about the game. I showed it to two people who never heard of the game before as a general introduction to the game (they don’t have Virtual Boys, but at the time I was actively reverse engineering the game).

[HorvatM]

I understand that the lowest bit is always zero, but if you look at GP’s SRAM, you will see that, for example, the player names are stored as consecutive ASCII characters, and it uses all 8K of the SRAM. So how does it access the odd bytes? Does the SRAM support 16-bit I/O or what?

• This reply was modified 13 years, 8 months ago by HorvatM.

Well, I looked at the SRAM file of your test program produced by Reality Boy with a hex editor and only every other byte was nonzero. But eg. Galactic Pinball can use every byte. Since the FlashBoy Plus is compatible with all commercial games, how does it do that?

[HorvatM]

So all 8K can be used, but the position has to be multiplied by two?

EDIT:
But you are declaring SAVERAMX as a pointer to u16, but your functions only read and write bytes, so does the actual position have to be multiplied by four? So is the actual address 0x06000000 + (position << 2)? EDIT 2: But the VB is big endian, so the actual address that the byte gets written to/read from is 0x06000003 + (position << 2)? I am very confused by this.

• This reply was modified 13 years, 8 months ago by HorvatM.

thunderstruck wrote:
Did you check out the second Level? The fish moves faster there. I will figure the perfect speed out when the levels are done.

Yes, it felt like it was moving faster, but I convinced myself that there was no reason for it to move at different speeds in different levels. Or is each level going to be at a different speed?

Wow, it’s nice to see (hear?) my engine used.

I found one bug: if you die, the game over screen is shown, but after that, dying just returns you to the level selection screen.

Otherwise, the game is of very high quality. The controls are responsive and the graphics are great.

The player fish could be a bit faster and the inside of its mouth should change to black when you eat a fish – it would look better, because the sprite of the dying fish is behind the player.

The game actually reminds me of the SU games without shooting. Maybe there could be a scoring formula based on how quickly you eat the incoming fish and a randomized game mode – if you don’t mind it becoming even more similar to the SU games. Are there plans for any more features to make the gameplay more interesting?

The other developers will disagree with me, but you can just use gccVB 1.0, which is precompiled for Windows. It’s a bit outdated, but it’s been good enough for me so far.

Or you can try VBDE: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4537&forum=2

Are there any guidelines for what tags should be given to topics?

How does this work with forum sections? For example, shouldn’t all topics in the development section be given the “Homebrew” tag? Are tags going to replace sections completely?

morintari wrote:
BTW Horvat what does 央 mean anyway? if It doesn’t mean anything too bad it may be the winner;).

According to http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict –

兄: elder brother
央: center, conclude, run out; beg

兄, 央.

Of course, the actual meanings are completely different.

Probably because “Nintendo” is a trademark of, well, Nintendo. Though if my stand ever breaks I’d appreciate it if the reproduction was a perfect copy of the original, so it would look more authentic.

It’s immersive like no other system and it has great games, like Red Alarm, Galactic Pinball, and Insmouse No Yakata, which take advantage of the immersiveness. It’s also easy to write games for it, so it has a great homebrew community.

Some typos: “week” should be “weak”, and I think it’s “medallion”, not “medaillon”.

These sprites are really good. (But they’d need a hammer and sickle to be used as player sprites.) I’m not planning to change any graphics, but maybe they could be used in a SU2012?

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Just how many levels are in the story mode anyway?

Five. They’re the same for all mode and difficulty combinations.

Protoman85 wrote:
With the last version, there was plenty of graphical glitches.

1.2 fixes only some parallax bugs. I’m aware that turning the VB off and on again too soon can cause glitches, and the title screen can appear scrambled. But other than that, I don’t know what you mean, as I myself used a FlashBoy Plus for testing. I’ve just played through the whole game and it seemed fine.

Version 1.2 is out. This release primarily adds new music and sound effects. It also fixes some minor bugs.

– There is now a demo mode. If you leave the game on the title screen for five seconds, you will see the game play itself.

– There is now music on the title screen.

– The automatic pause feature now works correctly.

– Player death is now accompanied by a sound effect.

– There are now sound effects in the menu screens.

– Cannon ships now produce only one sound and not one for each projectile when shooting.

– Satellites no longer mysteriously reappear after being killed.

– Fixed background parallax effects.

Attachments:

1. su11v1-2-1.zip

I like Insect Combat more. It means pretty much the same thing as Bug Battles, but sounds better to me.

That wouldn’t make sense. Maybe we just have to read/write 16 bits at a time and use masking to access odd-numbered bytes. Like this (untested):

void PokeSRAM (u16 Index, u8 Value)
{
  if(Index & 1)
  {
    Index >>= 1;
    ((u16*)SAVERAM)[Index] = (((u16*)SAVERAM)[Index] & 0xFF00) | Value;
  }
  else
    SAVERAM[Index] = Value;
}

u8 PeekSRAM (u16 Index)
{
  if(Index & 1)
    return ((u16*)SAVERAM)[Index >> 1] & 0x00FF;
  else
    return SAVERAM[Index];
}

“Englisch” typos on the Space Squash and Gundam PDF links, and in the title.