Redkey

@Redkey@programming.dev

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

Redkey ,

Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.

Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour.

You make it sound trivial. While Sega left a security hole open for games to be loaded from a regular CD, the official games were released on GD-ROMs, a dual-layer CD with a 1.2 GB capacity.

So first off, you couldn't read them completely in a regular CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM drive. (I'm not counting the "swap" method because it's failure-prone and involves partially dismantling the drive and fiddling with it during operation.) You had to connect your console to a computer and use some custom software to read the GD-ROM on the console, and send the data over.

Once you had the data, you then had the problem of trying to fit a potentially 1.2 GB GD-ROM image onto a regular CD-ROM. A handful of games were actually small enough to fit already, and 80-minute and 99-minute CD-Rs would work in the DC and could store larger games. But for many games, crackers had to modify the game files to make them fit.

Often they would just strip all the music first, because that was an easy way to save a decent amount of space. Then if that wasn't enough, they would start stripping video files, and/or re-encoding audio and textures at lower fidelity.

Burning a CD-R from a downloaded file was easy, but ripping the original discs and converting them to a burnable image generally was not.

Redkey ,

They did, but apparently everyone has forgotten how prevalent swap discs and modchips were.

Redkey ,

Unfortunately I think that Sega themselves weren't the only group lacking confidence in the Dreamcast. In fact, I feel like they put up a valiant fight, with marketing and first-party titles.

Critics and consumers all had an extremely "wait and see" attitude that I think took the theoretical advantage of the incredibly early launch and turned it into a huge liability. People didn't want to commit to buying their next console without seeing what the other offers were going to be. So Sega had to work hard for about two years to keep the real and actually available Dreamcast positioned high in the market while their competitors had the luxury of showing jaw-dropping demos of "potential" hardware (i.e. "Here is some video produced on $50,000 graphics workstation hardware that is made by the same company that's currently in talks to produce our GPU.")

Third-party publishers also didn't want to put any serious budget toward producing games for the Dreamcast, because they didn't want to gamble real money on the install base increasing. This resulted in several low-effort PS1 ports that made very little use of the Dreamcast hardware, which in turn lowered consumer opinion of the console. When some of these games were later ported to PS2 as "upgraded" or "enhanced" versions, that only further entrenched the poor image of the Dreamcast.

I have owned all four major consoles of that generation since they were still having new games published for them. And if I had to choose only one console to keep from that group, it'd be the PlayStation 2, because of the game library. It's huge and varied. I have literally hundreds of games for it, while I only have a few dozen games for the others. But looking at the average quality of the graphics and sound in the games for those systems, I'd also rank the PS2 in last place, even behind the DC.

Sony was a massive juggernaut in the console gaming market at the time. The PlayStation 1 had taken the worldwide market by storm, and become the defacto standard console. It's easy to forget that the console launches for this generation were unusually spaced out over a four year period, and Sony was the company best positioned to turn that to their favour. People weren't going to buy a DC without seeing the PS2, but once they did, many were happy to buy a PS2 without waiting for Nintendo or Microsoft to release their consoles. The added ability to play DVDs at exactly the time when that market was hitting its stride (and more affordably than many dedicated DVD players) absolutely boosted their sales in a big way. Nintendo's GameCube didn't do that, and by the time the original X-Box came to market, it wasn't nearly as much of a consideration.

Redkey ,

Nope, you got it right. It was very much seen as only a console, despite the naming, Family BASIC, FDS, other peripherals, etc. I've been living in Japan for years with a keen interest in retro gaming/computing, and FC is never mentioned in the same breath as PC-88/MSX/FM/etc. By the by, on the rare occasions that it's mentioned, the SC-3000 is also lumped in with the consoles rather than the home computers.

Redkey ,

Colour me double-surprised! Not only is it available for purchase in Japan, but also the descriptions for the individual games even have full Japanese translations, right down to the system requirements!

Redkey ,

I want to say that I wish I could've read this 25 years ago, but really, I wasn't ready to take it to heart back then. In fact, even though I've had a couple of minor successes with free games that I deliberately didn't get too attached to, I still have extreme difficulty just sitting down and making something--anything--rather than falling into a death spiral of over-thinking and grandiose designs. I might have to re-read this a few times to make it sink in.

Redkey , (edited )

I watched the video that you linked to, and it was very interesting! I'd never thought about exploiting the possibility of double-dipping the logo. It simply wouldn't have been practical back in the day. However, there are two important facts that change the situation a bit.

(EDIT: I've left the following discussion of logo checksums intact, but I kept digging and found what is claimed to be a dumped and disassembled copy of the OG GameBoy boot ROM, which does include a byte-for-byte check of the logo data. Colour me surprised! I was interested in GBA homebrew back in the day and I'd swear that I saw a dumped GB boot ROM that only calculated a checksum. Also, those cartridges with the non-standard logos? I own them. Unfortunately I can't get my hands on them right now, but I saw them with my own eyes. If it wasn't just fooling a checksum, then I don't know what the deal was there, especially the carts with "garbage" logos. Not to mention that as I said, I don't think it was practical to do a bait-and-switch in a retail cartridge back in the day.)

(EDIT 2: Yes, I'm still reading about this! It seems like the bait-and-switch was feasible back in the day. Some publishers used special mappers, while others apparently redirected address lines with carefully-chosen capacitors, which seems delightfully hackey to me.)

First, neither the OG nor the Color GameBoy have a complete copy of the Nintendo logo stored in their boot ROM. Instead, the boot code calculates a checksum of the cartridge's logo data, and compares that to a stored checksum of the official logo. If the checksums match, the check is passed. There are unofficial cartridges which boot just fine by having "garbage" logo data that passes the checksum test. I have even seen one company that took the time to come up with a different recognizable logo that still passed the check. The lettering looked weird, but you can read it.

By the time the GameBoy Advance came around, ROM was cheap enough to include a complete copy of the official logo and compare it byte-for-byte, so they did.

Second, Sega tried a similar tactic on some of their consoles: The boot rom contained a routine which would display a screen claiming that the software had been produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises. If the code on the cartridge/disc didn't call that routine fairly early, the boot ROM would cause the console to lock up. The idea was that if software had to call that routine, Sega could sue unapproved publishers for claiming to be licensed when they weren't.

Unfortunately for Sega, the US courts ruled (Sega vs. Accolade, 1992) that since it was impossible to run software on the system (which the court upheld that Sega had no right to block, ah the days before DMCA) without calling this routine, that unlicensed publishers couldn't be said to be wilfully claiming licensing rights from Sega; they were just calling a routine that was necessary to make the console work. The fact that Sega had attached this licensing screen to it was immaterial.

No doubt Nintendo's legal team would go after anyone who tried this on one of their systems, either under DMCA somehow, or even simply on the premise of being able to bankrupt their opponent with requests and delays before ever making it to trial. But I suspect (I am not a lawyer) that technically, anyone putting a Nintendo logo in a GB cartridge could claim the 1992 case as a precedent.

Redkey ,

This article is so strange in its discussion of the "cul de sac" that Gilbert wrote into the ending of Monkey Island 2, to "sequel-proof" it deliberately. Rot! For people who haven't played it, (mild spoilers coming up soon, in just a moment, as soon as I close these parentheses) the final shot of the game literally has the older brother mug the camera (behind Guybrush's back) while his face morphs back to LeChuck's ghoulish grin and some decidedly unnatural magical flares and sparks dance around.

(Spoilers mostly done)

The entire premise of Guybrush being trapped in an illusion cast by LeChuck was already baked in. And I think that helping Guybrush realize that and to escape could've been an excellent first chapter of a third game, but unfortunately the designers decided to basically handwave the whole thing and start the their story back in "reality".

Redkey ,

Ha ha, it certainly does look like it, doesn't it? Kind of like how Sega would put their consoles into various games for fun, like as parts of the robots in the Virtual On series, or the backpacks in Typing of the Dead.

Redkey ,
  • GBA or GBA SP, you'll get a backlit screen as well (around the same budget?)

Careful! The original (landscape) GBA had a similar, unlit, reflective screen to the Gameboy Colour, and even the GBA SP was frontlit for most of its run. Only the later GBA SPs had the bright, backlit screens.

I modded an original GBA with an aftermarket frontlighting kit back in the day. I didn't like the GBA SP as it made my hands start to cramp up after only a few minutes.

Redkey , (edited )

I think that the demographics of gamers have been skewing older and older, and it's finally reached the point where a critical mass are past the age where they place significant value on the "newness" of a game.

You can still find 13-year-olds decrying PS3 and 360 games as being "unplayable" due to their perceived technological shortcomings, but every year they represent a smaller and smaller slice of the total market. The surveys I've seen lump 18-35 into one group, but I'd be interested to see the results of splitting that into two groups at around 26-27.

Redkey ,

Unfortunately we all know what happens when you tell hackers that something's going to be very hard to break into.

I understand that they were excited about the idea and wanted to share it with gamers, but if they actually wanted to give the system the best chance of success, they should've kept their mouth shut.

Redkey ,

Similar concepts (i.e. connect to random strangers' devices when in close physical proximity, and trade mini profiles/trading tokens/whatever) have been done at least half a dozen times, both before and after Nintendo, but somehow they never seem to stick. Street Pass may have been the most successful iteration that I'm aware of. I think that it's hard to get critical mass. Users are excited at first when they set things up, but after a few days or weeks of not getting any hits, they tend to lose interest and turn the service off to save battery life.

Redkey ,

According to promotional material, the 2021 VCS "Classic Controller" has a twistable joystick for paddle controller functionality. "Paddle" is the usual term for the rotary analog controller, which I think is what is meant by "dial controller"

Redkey ,

OP must have a phone, tablet, or computer, since they're posting here; they could even just use that.

Redkey ,

VRidge works great for me, I recommend it, but it presents to software as a standard SteamVR headset, so I don't know if that addresses OP's problem. Also, it's a paid product if you want to use it for more than a few minutes at a time.

Redkey , (edited )

This game is criminally unknown even in Japan. I first learned about it years ago and wish I had paid the high price to buy a copy then; now it sells for 10 times as much, and that's if you can even find a copy. It's the only game missing from my physical collection that I know I want.

I've tried a couple of times to get into it over the years, but the language barrier was always too high for me and broke immersion. Hopefully I and others can now give this game the attention that I think it deserves.

Edit: A link to the patch:
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7187/

There was already a Spanish patch a few years ago, as well.

Edit 2: And now it's been flagged as "noncompliant". I'm not sure what that means, but it's not available from that site for the moment.

Redkey ,

Object pooling is an absolute necessity for performance in modern environments that remove all manual memory management in favour of automatic garbage collection. And it's still good practice to reuse memory when you do have some manual control.

Not many things will slow your program down (or make a garbage collector blow up) as effectively as alternately freeing and requesting tiny chunks of memory from the OS thousands of times a second.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •