I added a tool to Tilemap Town to quickly add properties to group of tiles so you can place those tiles onto maps. Previously you had to set it up one-by-one for every single tile, which can get tedious. Might be about as easy as I can possibly make this, given the requirements.
I've been having fun experimenting with fast vehicles with bad acceleration and seeing if I can treat star slides as a way to accelerate fast anyway. Tank Star seems good for this because I can also turn quickly to easily get back onto the star slide path.
And today I went and wrote some fixes for the packet acknowledgement issues I noticed as well as a few other problems: github.com/ares-emulato...
I suppose an emulator whose goal is being documentation should not be documenting the Super Game Boy being able to hold way more than a single packet.
illustration commission for novasquirrel! thank you very much 🩷🍰
It'd be interesting to see what kind of specs the Tamagotchi Connection line was working with. There's information on the 90s ones and people have picked apart and even made patches for several of the Color ones, but I haven't seen anything about the 2000s toys. I know Tama-Go from 2010 has a 6502.
No surprise the minigame is effectively just flipping a coin; it would be very hard to fit anything much more complicated than that. At least the number guessing game in the second version with the same hardware is slightly more interesting
Interesting that the graphics are embedded in instructions
github.com/agg23/tamago... I thought the original Tamagotchi was really minimal feature-wise and character-wise (compared to later toys) because the concept was new, though from this disassembly I can see that there's barely any space left on the microcontroller that was used.
It is time! Dizzy Sheep Disaster: EX is now available for purchase for your Nintendo E-Reader! Here's the store link: store.nes.science
It contains 30 puzzles to test your reflexes and skills!
I'm so excited to share this with the world!
#indiedev #homebrew #gba
Had it pointed out that changing Mesen to use a better heuristic for whether some memory is for the SPC700 or the console's main processor also means you can now debug FDS games with labels and comments. Previously it just didn't even bother to load them for FDS, probably because of this issue.
There's a joke in there about how you shouldn't bring a console older than the GBA SP when you wait in line to buy the Xbox 360 on launch day to avoid "damage to your bleeding-edge tech-king credentials" caused by being seen using a worm light.
My VGHF magazine subscription got me the Xbox 360 Complete Launch Guide (made by the people who did the official Xbox magazine), and there's a claim repeated several times that the Xbox 360 is going to have watercooling?? And TVs used to be much more expensive. And I learned what DLP TVs are.
There was a flaw in the way it handled debug info for SNES games, and I had just been dealing with variables that are actually in audio RAM appearing in the main processor's debugger when the address matches (and not appearing in the audio debugger at all?) but the fix for that was really easy.
It's empowering to be able to just directly go fix things in Mesen that don't work right (or where a new feature would really help me) instead of having to just hope it eventually gets fixed. Whether a tool is open source or not ends up making a direct impact on me instead of just being ideological.
Really cool show, and it's something I wished I had when I was a kid. It would have helped a lot with figuring out how to interact with people and understand allistic behavior better. Also a show where the characters are animals and it's not metaphorical, they are actually animals and acknowledge it
Caught up on Carl the Collector yesterday after noticing an episode I hadn't seen yet on the schedule, and then finding out there were actually several new episodes. It continues to do a surprisingly good job at writing the autistic characters, and I think more people should check it out.
A smooth, shiny rubber Shinx from Pokémon, leaping and creating a big ball of electricity between her stubby cat paws with printed-on pawpads. She's got bluish gray rubber, some hair, purple ears, and a SNES controller cord for a tail, ending in a gold colored plug.
I've been fixing the lack of rubber Maffi Shinx art recently, and this was the first picture to get finished. Art by @funnyhat12.bsky.social who draws incredible rubber and is really good at shading and lighting. I've been using Pokémon moves as themes for art, and this is Electro Ball. #toyfur
Yeah there's an aspect of magic for it to me that never went away and part of the reason I keep going for it. Especially fun on a handheld since my sprites are being displayed on an official screen.
Oh yeah I know that with browser-based emulators, old consoles are just as accessible as Godot and PICO-8 for casual players checking stuff out. It's just kind of funny that if I get a cool game idea, then the next step is pretty much automatically "let's go write it in assembly language!"
For me the biggest benefits of PCs are keyboards and Internet as a standard feature, and easier 3D (though a good library/framework could help; I should look at Pyrite64 someday. Feels arbitrary though and currently I'm just inclined to try and use Godot for 3D stuff I want to eventually do.)
Sometimes it feels silly to always default to having all my game dev projects be homebrew, but I guess when I'm at the point where I already know how to do everything and I don't care about the market, I might as well boost the project's coolness and give myself interesting technical stuff to solve.
If you just want to play around with having a small NES game you made and you're not too picky about the specifics, you might have fun with puzzle.nes.science
I would also like to improve the UIs for setting up collections of map tiles to make it a less repetitive process. UI design is tricky; I feel like I want to add wizards, but I don't know if they would set people up for not knowing how the rest of the UI works. Doodle boards need better UI too.
I wrote a bunch of articles documenting Tilemap Town on my wiki, adapting the help pages and tutorials I'd already written and writing lots of new ones: wiki.novasquirrel.com/index.php?ti...
Probably needs more screenshots and guides though; I'll have to ask around and figure out what's confusing.
A screenshot showing storage and graphic usage for the game, including a large chunk of graphics memory being dedicated to level data, showing as blurred patterns
Did you know? Dizzy Sheep Disaster: EX for the Nintendo E-Reader only has 16kb of program code space- that’s half of Super Mario Bros! The game has to store some of its level data as graphics just to fit!
#gba #nesdev #homebrew
Spent a chunk of yesterday making an emulator test ROM for exactly how the Super Game Boy's "a packet from the Game Boy is available" register should work, because I thought Ares was doing it very wrong but I didn't want to file a bug report without proof: github.com/ares-emulato...
Simple graph made of text showing three lines, showing an object's position over time. The bottom line (made of zeros) is doing small bursts of speed that decelerate at a steady rate, and the other two lines travel a higher distance and have delayed, but stronger deceleration.
Wrote a quick Python script to draw a graph to show how far the player would get if they just kept repeatedly boosting at both the normal and faster speeds (and an additional line showing what happens if the initial speed is slightly faster) and okay yeah this is a meaningful difference.
Sometimes I see discussions about whether or not a specific console is "retro" or not, and it can be fun to use it as an opportunity to talk about graphics features, but really I think the main thing I'm feeling is "wow I hope that I'm going to have an audience when I eventually make DS games"
Still playing around with this to try and get the numbers just right; I think the triple tap boost should be even stronger but decelerate faster, so it can fulfill its purpose as a "get me out of here fast" button but let you regain control quickly. Maybe I should make a graph to better compare.
This specific game doesn't scroll, so in this case I'm just using most of the tilemap for the game and part of the tilemap for the status, and the only fancy thing I'm doing is the color gradient, where I have HDMA overwrite a color every scanline.
Yes this game uses the SNES mouse! You can use a regular controller too. You rarely need interrupts on SNES because you usually have 3 layers, so a status bar can just be a layer, and you can tell the hardware to automatically write specific values to registers on specific scanlines ("HDMA")
