What’s the problem? It doesn’t seem like Vectrexer is trying to scam anyone or the like. He actually seems to be a very nice person judging from his post.

I think posting it here is much better then asking for a ridiculous high price on ebay. That way another hardcore vb fan can get his hands on one of the few existing copies.

The cursive alphabet is used for the credits.

HoMenace wrote:
I’ve never played Snatcher before, is this how the whole game plays or is there more action of sorts to come?

I only “played” the Original up to the point where my demo ends. But from what I’ve seen online the only action parts are the shooting sections. They get harder later on though. The 3rd act is supposed to be less action oriented from what I’ve heard.

HoMenace wrote:
The only issues that Ive encountered is low sound and audio track transitioning.

Yeah, the music bothers me a bit as well. I polished it allot already but it’s far from perfect. One issue is that I have to convert the source files to 5555 Hz for most of the music loops. Otherwise my music code notably slows down the game. I should rewrite the music code in asm I guess, but the decompression code got kind of complex. The music takes up allot of space as well so not using higher frequencies helps a bit. The code also doesn’t do pitch shift.

adler_0 wrote:
Same here, I have never played snatcher before this and I can’t wait for the next demo!

I actually took a break from VB programming so the current demo is the latest state. I have another vb project in the making which I plan to make public before going back to Snatcher. That hopefully doesn’t take that much time.

I had a case once were a dust cover got stuck inside the cartridge slot. It should look like this:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=31367#forumpost31367

when theres a game in it. If you don’t hear the mirrors humming you most likely have a different problem though.

If you have the equipment to open the VB and do some voltage measuring I can guide you to some post where problems like this have been discussed before.

Ok…

Anyone played the demo all the way to the end?
Anyone found any bugs or glitches?
What’s about missing features?

bigmak wrote:
Thunder doesn’t program a game..he programs a program to make a game.

-Eric

Heh… yeah, that’s the way that works best for me. I learned that with GameHero already. As soon as things somehow work it is hard to motivate yourself as filling a game with content isn’t that interesting.

Programming a game like Snatcher is actually not that hard. Most of the vb code has been written in very short time. The real challenge is to get all of the content out of the original game. Also porting a 100mb game to just a few mb is tricky as well.

About the tools:

Surprisingly, the dialog engine got quite some interest. It is the hardest to make available though. I will keep in mind to make it more generic whenever I add something.

The 2D to 3D converter also seems to be of interest to some. That one should be rather easy to release. Maybe within the next month or so.

The music engine should be easy to release as well, but I want to build a proper converter for it first. So that might take a while.

I’m on top of a different project right now. So if you really really need anything of these for making a game right now send me a PM and I will see what I can do.

jumpman wrote:

Try and find an CD image, and run it through emulation, as it really is one of the best games ever made.

That’s what I do to create the VirtualBoy port. I really would like to sit down with the game and play it but it is too expensive. The emulator is ok but it is screwing up the music and voice over sometimes.

3Dhardcore wrote:
While I’ve been holding off playing Snatcher on my Sega CD until I finally get around to finishing Rise of the Dragon, I have seen enough to be glad you are going more like Sega CD than the Saturn version.

I wish I had a sega cd and Snatcher so that I could play it myself. I do have a sega saturn but don’t speak Japanese.

adler_0 wrote:
How does this demo end? I got to the factory and couldn’t advance. I probably was missing something but I looked at and checked everything I could.

The behavior of the game is close to the one of the original.
Basically, you need to investigate specific things (sometimes multiple times). Sometimes you can only investigate things if you looked at other things first. After investigating items you have to look at them so that metal stores them. After that, most of them show up in the inventory (press SELECT). Later in the demo you have to use items from the inventory as well.

If you get stuck you can sent me a PM and I will tell you what you need to do.

The demo will shows credits when you reached the end.

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6060

Snatcher Demo

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6009

Virtual Fall Rom

Just for the archives: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6060

jrronimo wrote:
There’s also a mention on the Retronauts post at USGamer.net, without any links, though.

Missed that one, thanks. Good podcast indeed.

jrronimo wrote:
I’m one of those with an original FlashBoy, rather than Plus, so I assume that’s not something that would work for me. Could some sort of password system work?

I’m planning to put some auto save feature in. Not sure about the multiple roms transition yet. We will see…

jrronimo wrote:
Lastly (geeze, wall of text post!), just from crossing my eyes as on your test image showing how the conversions work, I’d *love* to see your 2D-to-3D tool become more generic. I think something like that could greatly speed up homebrew development for certain types of games.

I will create a post about all the tools somewhen next week. If people actually plan to use it I will polish things and make a release.

jrronimo wrote:
This is all just phenomenal.

Thanks. Also thanks to everyone else who posted.

Lee Chapman wrote:
Bought a VB when released (or there after) from Telgames UK for around £149.99 if I remember correctly. Foolishly sold it (can’t remember where or for how much (probably ebay). I had Mario Tennis, Mario Clash, Teleroboxer and Galactic Pinball. Pinball was by far my fave game.

Now looking to buy another unit (pref new old stock) and complete a full collection of game titles (U.S. and Jape, nbot bothered about 1 of each region).

Came here for fellow fans, help and amusement.

I’m looking to but a new VB (new old stock). Had a U.S. version before. Like the look of the Jape box art more (and what looks like the most available new unit on ebay). Not sure on any differences (bar manual/box language). Any differences when playing games? Are they region locked?

Hey there. There is no difference in terms of hardware. No region lock as well.

RunnerPack wrote:

thunderstruck wrote:
I use a free library that allows the conversion from 2D to 3D images using depth maps.

I’m looking forward to getting more info on that. I tried to find it, to no avail…

It is this one: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/257340/Creating-D-Image-from-DepthMap

There is sample project that you can use to try things out. The lib itself is very easy to use. As I said before, I have the best results when the original image is double the size of the target image.

Here is a video that explains how to draw depth maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVSf22VT1t4

If there’s an interest I could polish my current tool to be usable by everyone. It already does the redscale, size scaling and charset conversion. It’s just a bit Snatcher specific right now.

KR155E wrote:
What kind of compression did you use? I recently talked about image compression with jorgeche and we came to the conclusive guess that it’s not practical on the VB. I’d love to hear how you managed to compress your images. 🙂

I use a very simple compression for the music. Basically, repeating values are only stored once and are followed by counter that tells me how often to repeat the value. There’s a bit more to it but that’s the core. It saves 10 – 40% of space. The sound effects usually have the higher compression rates.

The images are a bit tricky as the dialogs are tool generated. To save space I check which images are almost the same (like mika with her eyes open and closed). I then store a main image and sub-images (e.g. only mikas eyes). This makes it difficult to control the amount of chars needed in the char memory as a main image may have many sub-images (harries room for example). So I decided to not store bgmaps and manipulate the charmem directly. Thereby I know exactly how many chars are stored there and the bgmap can simply be generated in code. However, the absence of bgmaps leads to lots of data as the chars are stored for every (sub)-image independent from each other. So what I do is I create one giant charset that contains all the chars for all the images but every char only once. I then create a map (basically like a bgmap) that tells me which char goes where.

So technically I don’t compress the images. I just use them in way that saves space and gives me control at the same time.

In theory I could compress the images the same way I do with the music. However, the sub images make this a bit complicated as I have to access the main image when switching from on sub to another. Basically I need to revert the chars that came with the old sub and write the chars that come with the new one in one loop. Handling compression at the same time would make this slow again. There is not enough wram left to store the uncompressed main image in memory.

hawk1010 wrote:
If it’s possible to put this on one of the larger carts, I would LOVE to own this. There must be a way!

Well, the current demo still fits on a regular flashboy. Since I compressed the music and the images a bit there is still space left for more. We will see how far I can get with that.

Thanks to Minestorm I can actually test 4mb roms on hardware. However, as Eric stated, I intend to release the game in 2mb parts as well so that everyone can play it. I will have to see how I do the transition between roms.

Dreammary wrote:
I am amazed by the progress and dedication to complete his dream.

Red Metal was actually planning to make a different game. He wanted to create a port of the MSX version. While I decided to make a something in his memory, I’m not intending to fulfill his dream. You simply can not follow someone else’s dream.

Dreammary wrote:
Please tell me that it will be able to be sold in cartridge form when it’s released because having a click’n’play style game on VB has always been a great idea! 🙂

Unless Konami legally allows me to sell their intellectual property I will not try to monetize this in any way.

KR155E wrote:
Since the game has never been available in any other languages than Japanese and English, have you thought about a multilingual release? Would be awesome to play this in German. 🙂

Most of the text is stored in a generic xml model right now. The same text exist in multiple xml files as a xml file represents one dialog tree. When exported to vb format it ends up in one giant header file without duplicates. Some text are hardcoded (like the dialog when the inventory is empty), others are stored in text files that are exported to vb files (like the computer text and the dialog in the shooting games). While a translation could be done by translating all of those sources, there is really allot of text in the game.

KR155E wrote:
Easteregg hunt, everybody! 😀

There might be even more.

KR155E wrote:
Really cool that you write your own specialized tools for all kind of purposes! I assume the converter still needs some post-processing in cases where the stereo conversion generates gaps? Or does some kind of magic algorithm fill up those missing pixels?

I really need to make a separate post about all the supporting tools and make an interest check. I use a free library that allows the conversion from 2D to 3D images using depth maps. A depth map is a black and white image that contains the information at which depth a particular object is. There is no post processing. You just define the maximum pixel displacement (which more or less defines the depth of the image) and the tool will create the SBS image.

Attachments:

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2. 

   gillian.got_.a.gun_.bmp
   

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   17__377617464.png
   

adler_0 wrote:
Which version of the game are you porting?

The sega cd version. But as with all the different versions there are many tiny differences.