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thought you guys might be into this
Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
avatar

Hey! I coincidentally had (more or less) that exact same idea here ages ago. But I said 'how about once of knocks up a library which limits the display and sound to some similar to an old computer or console, and additionally we set a speed target, either by saying 'must run on a 486SX/25 or whatever, or by use of the RDTSC instruction and limit ourself to PC platforms'.

And people were interested. But obviously nothing became of the mild idea! And thankfully I wasn't so blinkered as to try and make us all 'do the american thing' and think of all old hardware as being as badly designed as the NES.

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

heh, badly designed, yes. Full of retro nostolgia? you betcha. And this lib's almost done...

Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
avatar

Its only retro nostalgia if you've ever actually played on one. Otherwise you'd just be suffering false memory syndrome, often known nowadays to anyone in the UK as 'I love the false memory syndrome'.

Remember that Nintendo never distributed the NES themselves in Europe, relying upon various small and dodgy companies with often very limited advertising budgets in the different European countries. Add that to the fact that it apparently was never that great a seller in Japan and you have two of the three major markets suddenly without any great feeling of 'nostalgia' towards what I gather was a really really half hearted piece of hardware. Which isn't relevant if the games are good, but is relevant if you're trying just to recreate the feeling of working with the hardware as in that project!

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

man, get off my back. A lot of people (one involved in the sound API of this project) from the UK are behind this and are for it. What's your deal? I'm not emulating a system you don't like? boo-hoo. Don't use the lib then, or write one of your own.

god, everybody's a critic now a days.

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

um Mandrake... You need to settle down or something...

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

I just don't see why you felt the need to attack what console we were "styling" our simulator on for the challenges. It seems to me, to be unnecessary, esp by acting like we were doing the wrong thing by doing, as you so elegantly put it, the "american thing" by modelling our virtual console on one that you yourself think is not designed to your specifications.

Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
avatar

You said "Full of retro nostolgia? you betcha.". I said that I didn't agree and explained why not only I might not, but why it probably wasn't safe to assume that I was all alone.
But you may have ignored my text since you leapt from an explanation of why the NES was not seen much in Europe to how several people from the UK (aside : which is a very insignificant part of Europe and not even Eurozone) are involved. And I don't see how that is relevant, except to agree with my idea that the NES was not widely seen and hence does not conjure up a great deal of nostalgia.
Additionally, I personally have designed libraries that duplicate the hardware of the following systems :
- ZX Spectrum
- Amstrad CPC
- Colecovision & Sega Master System
- MSX
- Acorn Electron
in that I have written emulators for all of them at some stage. So, then it seems I have retrospectively taken your suggestion "Don't use the lib then, or write one of your own." - but even that doesn't fill me with nostalgia!

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

see, now this is what i was talking about. Attacking a simple comment I made. Sorry I upset you in some way because I enjoy the NES as a system, and know enough people that do that are programmers that would enjoy this project. Which is nearing completion btw. Some of whom are from Germany and Austria. But either way, why do you care what system I am modelling it after? Why is this such a big deal to you?

Nostalgia is a personal thing, and enough people are supporting it, i see no reason to model it after the ZX Spectrum or any of the others on your list. You might as well ask why I didn't model it after the ATARI 2600.

If you don't like it, don't use it. I'm not putting a gun to your head. It was a simple post, hoping some people here might be interested in it. I was wrong.

23yrold3yrold
Member #1,134
March 2001
avatar

checks TH's posts

Umm, Mandrake, what are you going on about? He just made a few observations. He never bashed the NES, he never bashed you or your project, he personally said that he had done much the same thing you did ... are we suffering from holiday stress or something? His comments may have been a bit general, but hardly flamewar material. Chill some.

--
Software Development == Church Development
Step 1. Build it.
Step 2. Pray.

Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001

That reminds me, I've made two Gameboy ROMs in my life. One had a title screen promoting one of my games in Gameboy form then when you hit start it became a random number guessing game. My other rom was a parallaxing starfield which caused overflows into the sound registers since I hacked it together in record time. In fact, I have conceptual screenshots for one GBC game and two GBA games in my art folders :)
I still have those ROMs I made if anyone wants them, though you'll need to E-Mail me to get them, and I must warn you, they REALLY suck. (But work nonetheless.)
--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
"gemini000.geo@yahoo.com in case anyone really DOES want them..."

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

holiday stress+work stress= stressed out Mandrake.

yeah, sorry about that.

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

Mandrake> Take two <insert favorite pain killer here>, get lots of rest, and call us in the morning :)

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Funklord
Member #467
June 2000
avatar

I like the idea very much, remember that the good ol' NES is probably the system that will wake up the most nostalgia out of all of them.
It was more widespread than C64, SNES and Atari ever became.
thus I think it is perfect.
even though I personally think the limitations should be set closer to SNES than NES just because I enjoyed the hardware and those games better.
(The point is they weren't that much better, just enough to make it bearable for screenshots and sound samples)
A quick note about the NES sound:
It had 2 square wave,
1 triangle wave and
1 noise generator
thus usually creating:
Main melody with square+triangle waves
Bass with one square wave
Drums with the white noise (it really did sound like noise)
All sprite-based videogames used to have bugs with too many sprites per vertical line, these used to be very apparent on the NES
making errors in palette or weird flashing pixels.

----------------------
[ Me payge | Me shoutcast (128k) | Me in aktOin! | Me OS | Me friends ]

Age is inversely proportional to how much drink you've had - Funklord

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

heh painkillers...
naw i cooled off now that all my work projects are done (for this month...ugh). Anyway, the guy working on the sound is doing exact NES sound emulation, right down to exactly how you mentioned it. And the simulator library is almost completely done. All that's left is doing the examples and writing a small tutorial on how to use it...

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

hmm.. will it be possible to use the sound engine in other things?

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Paul Pridham
Member #250
April 2000
avatar

See, Mandrake, I'm not the only one all keen on a bleepy synth sound library. ;)

(This is Madgarden, by the way)

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

I wanted to get as close to the original (music anyway) as I could when I made my Dr. Mario clone but I couldn't rip the sound engine out of any nes emulator with out taking most of the emulator with it...

quote: (This is Madgarden, by the way)
Oh.. yah

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

hey MadGarden. From what I heard, Golrien is almost done with the sound engine. Speaking of which everythin but the sound engine is complete, and dloadable here:
http://sixgallerypress.com/frg/GDR_Retro_Box.zip
it's got DJGPP and MSVC binaries in it. And yes, you can rip out the sund engine and use it as you will when it's finished (as long as you give credit to golrien, i think...), since it will be entirely open source.

23yrold3yrold
Member #1,134
March 2001
avatar

Think I saw spellcaster on that swoo board too. What's a swoo?

--
Software Development == Church Development
Step 1. Build it.
Step 2. Pray.

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

personally I cant read anything on the swoo boards... my monitor has a permanant gamma problem.. its way to dark...

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

gnudutch
Member #951
February 2001
avatar

quote:Mandrake:
A 24 year old Ohioan who is the main driving force behind Faerie Ring Games. Programmer, Artist, Writer, most of the works in the games is done by him, with help from others. He also designs and upkeeps this webpage.

Hey you forgot modest too.

Mandrake Root Produc
Member #300
April 2000

pthbth

modesty is for wussies, nyeah :P

MkTerran
Member #577
August 2000
avatar

quote: Think I saw spellcaster on that swoo board too. What's a swoo?
I don't know what swoo is but Game developers refuge is a community of game designers, programmers, artists, and musicans... including myself, mandrake, spellcaster, and madgarden. hell even kenny(sirocco) posts their.
http://boards.swoo.net

[ AIM:MKTerran989 ]

23yrold3yrold
Member #1,134
March 2001
avatar

Quote:

personally I cant read anything on the swoo boards... my monitor has a permanant gamma problem.. its way to dark...

Yes, it'd be nice if colors could be customized :) Don't seem to be many people there; I keep seeing the same dozen over and over :P Ah well, I need a new forum to waste time on. Wouldn't want to get any work done or anything .....

--
Software Development == Church Development
Step 1. Build it.
Step 2. Pray.

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