Existence of Centipede/Millipede prototypes for the NES?

[Existence of Centipede/Millipede prototypes for the NES?]

We have been successfully nudged and are closer now

[I completed the entire Philips CDi US longbox set. Or did I? Plus, general CDi collecting gems.]

I just wanted to say that I am enjoying this thread very much, I love when there are still obscure things to discover in the past when you look past the known "full sets" on common systems. I'm very happy for you obtaining that Euro longbox game to make your complete set even more complete!

[New NES prototype found, will be released on Monday.]

Buildable source code and ROMs now on GitHub:

 

https://github.com/DickBlackshack/Days-of-Thunder-NES-Unpublished

 

And since nobody else linked to it, here's our original story on rebuilding the game:

 

https://gamehistory.org/days-of-thunder-nes-unreleased/

 

If you don't know us, we're a charity of volunteers dedicated to doing this kind of work. 

[New NES prototype found, will be released on Monday.]

The only reference to this game existing is one programmer interview, and the interview isn't crawled by Google, so if anyone figures it out they're probably a time traveler.

[Kangaroo For The Nintendo Famicom By Hal Laboratory.]

He told me this as well in 2013, but I believe that his memory is the ONLY source so we shouldn't take it as fact necessarily, he could be misremembering. 

[Existence of Centipede/Millipede prototypes for the NES?]

Supergun is confused, the games mentioned were programmed by HAL in Japan, not by Atari. They were actually commissioned by Nintendo as first party titles, to use in their pitch to Atari when they were meeting to discuss the possibility of the Famicom being an Atari system in the U.S., so in a fun way they're arguably unreleased first-party titles that later got picked up by third-party publishers.

 

The Ed Logg games have not been found. If they existed and are anywhere public, they might be in the Atari Games archives at the Strong Museum of Play, which has not been completely processed yet.

[Atari's unreleased Garfield arcade game design idea document]

16 minutes ago, Dutchman2000 said:

see accompanying illustrations

Did these survive???

[To share an unreleased ROM or not to Share?]

On 10/2/2019 at 2:36 PM, Jettgogaming said:

Here is where I disagree. Collectors are not bad people, and I sort of got angered by his comment that collectors are just hoarding games and not sharing them with the world. 

 

Hi it's me. In the context of the article, I was explaining how I felt in 2002, literally 17 years ago, and how I've changed my perspective over time. You can be angry at young me but this is not a blanket feeling I continue to have had after nearly two decades of growth.

[Sim City for NES]

...the game has been reverse-engineered and has a source code repo available to tinker with, there's even a GitHub that has a bunch of fixes already documented. It's been that way since the ROM was released last Christmas:

 

https://github.com/g0me3/bfs_nes_sims

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

Feature request, if it's possible:

 

Can re-selecting the run cartridge option while a cartridge is already running do the equivalent of a power cycle instead of a "soft reset"? Currently I can't think of a way to get back to the SD2SNES menu to switch games other than loading Super Turrican to flush out the cartridge, and then booting the cartridge again.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

I believe this is the original source of Kevin being a full time employee of Analogue:

https://retronauts.com/article/622/the-ultimate-nes-gets-a-super-follow-up-mdash-and-this-ones-priced-to-sell

 

""Kevin joined Analogue full time late last year. He's been working on the SNES FPGA core for the last 14 months — a mind-blowing amount of work and effort into just that single aspect of the product."

(this is a quote from Christoper Taber, Analogue's owner/CEO)

 

But "joined ... full time" is a somewhat ambiguous phrase. He might just be referring to an increase in his contracting hours from part to full time.

 

Yeah I was just quoting this article, I don't have any insight into Kevin's career other than what I read in the papers

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

He doesn't think they're not going to pay Kevtris, I think he's a fulltime employee now. He thinks Analogue will pay Kevtris for months to write a Genesis core, which will probably be completed months after the release of the Super NT and all of the initial excitement about it. After the people most excited about it have already bought it. He thinks that after all these months of work, they will just plop the core out for free, and not create another product tailored for a different market segment, because this will increase sales of the Super NT more than a Mega NT would sell. He thinks a company who has stated that their mission is to preserve video game history and give it the respect it deserves will just handle one of the most successful and popular consoles of all time by just plopping out a core for it on a system designed around its rival platform, which will not work with original controllers or consoles, nor will it work with the 2 add-on consoles, the Sega CD and 32X.

 

Oh that's an even MORE interesting way to think.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

Assuming someone is going to do months of fulltime work for free is an interesting way to think.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

Since this is like the only place on the internet to check in on NT Mini updates can we maybe move the useless legality arguments somewhere else?

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

Frank Cifaldi said on twitter that Kevin has been hired on Analogue full-time. I hope that doesn't mean they want to stop him from releasing cores....

 

I was just quoting Retronauts, I have no inside knowledge:

 

https://retronauts.com/article/622/the-ultimate-nes-gets-a-super-follow-up-mdash-and-this-ones-priced-to-sell

[Wizard of Wor ARCADE proto found!]

I happened to see this in person last week at the museum, it's in the right hands.

[Intellivision III Brochure Restore]

Do you mean the image at the beginning of the thread? If so, sorry, I had trouble with posting an image that was the right size to be posted. The originals are much bigger than that.

 

No no no, your image is as large as the original! What I'm saying is that the PDF posted in the other thread was only scanned at 72ppi, and at a lossy JPG format. I think time would be much better spent trying to get better scans of the original (600ppi TIFF of each page) than trying to touch up what is already a bad scan.

 

If that bad scan is all that ever exists, great! But to me, if the original is still available, I'd want to figure out how to help make proper scans from it instead of spending your time working on an inadequate scan.

 

EDIT: To further clarify: no, you will not see the dot patterns at 72ppi at all. If you were to print those scans, they'd be very blurry, as they're less than 1/4th the resolution of the original artifact.

[Intellivision III Brochure Restore]

Unfortunately the original seems to have been scanned at a teeny tiny 72ppi, you'd need at least 600ppi to restore a scan back to printable quality. I'd work on getting a better read of the original before I spent any time "restoring" what is basically a thumbnail.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

Kevtris, do you know if there are any plans on updating the UI of the NT Mini to a GUI?

 

I can't imagine you're going to get much of a GUI out of the 30 bytes or whatever that's left.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

 

Damn you, you beat me to it

[Debating an RGB Upgrade - Anyone using a Framemeister?]

FWIW I think RF > TV tuner > Composite > Framemeister looks pretty cool, it's upscaled but with authentic ugliness. If you're going for RGB I'd just do an AnalogueNT Mini at this point.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

 

It finishes the "loading rom" dialogue, and never starts the "loading bios" dialogue. It does this with both versions of the BIOS file I've located, and only Gamate does this (though I've not tested Coleco or either GB).

 

I can also force it to load if I change BIOS instead of "reloading" the core. Reset on the controller does nothing when it's in that frozen state.

 

EDIT: Sent you a video

 

By the way, my Gamate loading bug has resolved itself at some point, it works as expected in the latest FW.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

Has anyone here experienced or heard of the Mini NT having sudden or straight out of the box controller port 1 issues?

 

Hardware thread is here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/263325-analogue-nt-mini-hardware/

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

I am going to say that is a problem with your capture card/device. Opening the menu does not do anything on the hardware except set or clear a single bit that makes it visible/invisible. Unless someone else can corroborate. In 5x mode I do not have that edge issue at all. That should stick out like a sore thumb but I see nothing. I can stretch the hell out of the image (like each NES pixel occupies 100+ output pixels) and don't see that happening.

 

I think you're right. I just tried something I should have tried earlier, which was recording video instead of taking stills from my capture software. When I take individual frames from the video, it's perfect. False alarm, so sorry man.

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

Checking it out here, setting to 5x and max width, I don't see it at all. It's possible it's there and I just can't see it though. I stretched it way out to make those rogue areas bigger and still can't see anything. I need moar infoz.

 

Here, I've got a 100% repro process that should probably give you some clues as to what's happening, the problem goes away entirely when bringing the menu up on screen.

 

1. Load Super Mario Bros., press start on title screen, leave Mario in his starting position

2. Size to 4x horizontal and 4x vertical

3. Observe Mario. He looks perfect.

4. Exit menu.

5. Observe Mario. He has the "teardrop" effect on his face.

6. Press hotkey to bring menu back up.

7. Observe Mario. His face is perfect.

 

I've taken screenshots of his face in both states 8 separate times, the results are the same every time. Images attached.

 

Explanation of attached images:

 

mariotest01.png - 4x horizontal and 4x vertical with the menu open. Note that Mario looks perfect, as if from an emulator screenshot.

mariotest02.png - 4x horizontal and 4x vertical with menu closed. Note the "teardrop effect" on Mario.

 

Bonus:

 

mario5x.png - this is the same game with 5x horizontal and 5x vertical. Totally separate issue obviously, but there is some "ringing" around Mario with 5x horizontal.