Messages

1

Gaming / Re: Is there a site to download an entire library of useful save states?

« on: October 06, 2023, 12:03:15 pm »

Decades ago the bigger emulation sites like Zophar, etc, I think had some libraries. But they were far from robust.

I've thought of this idea before, but you'd really need a strong community to drive it. Writing and testing all of the needed converters would take a large effort and require people who are at least somewhat familiar with the system and the target emulators. I personally could probably whip up something for Genesis, but then I'd have to research and learn any other system I wanted to support. So not a project to take on by myself.

Alternatively, you could just choose the most popular emulator to support for the various systems, but then you're limiting usefulness of the library.

Personally I consider it to be a loss on the effort/reward trade-off. I think it would be a lot of hard work for a small audience of people. I think most people who just want to see a section of a game without getting there themselves, would probably just go to YouTube. Hackers and resource extractors might find it useful, but honestly tools like Cheat Engine go a long way in speeding through a game when you need it. Or you just extract things from the data files/ROM, which doesn't require playing the game other than to maybe verify something. But once again, that's something that YouTube can provide unless the game is super obscure.

2

VGMaps Social Board / Re: LEGO Mega Man

« on: September 20, 2023, 11:15:32 am »

If you're doing 1 stud per pixel it's a lot. But more importantly, at that scale, do you have a warehouse to show it off in? Each LEGO stud is spaced 8mm apart, so a single NES screen would be roughly 2x2 meters (2 meters is over 6 ft for us heathens in the States).

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Maps In Progress / Re: Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken (for the Mega Drive)

« on: June 24, 2022, 09:16:10 pm »

When I find a few moments I'll re-save some empty copies and get them to you.

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Maps In Progress / Re: Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken (for the Mega Drive)

« on: June 22, 2022, 09:21:01 pm »

If you're interested in the naked versions I can submit them as the labeling in all in its own layers. I just figured the "game play oriented" versions would be better suited here, with the graphics data dump versions on TSR. But there's no exclusivity or anything.

5

Maps In Progress / Re: Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken (for the Mega Drive)

« on: June 19, 2022, 10:20:52 pm »

I just submitted the second batch of maps which should complete the game. If you're interested in the level data without the item/enemy sprites, those are over on The Spriters Resource.

This is done! Better late than never I suppose.

6

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Worlds Of Power novelizations of NES games

« on: May 31, 2022, 09:24:53 pm »

These kind of remind me of this book I picked up sometime in the 00s, probably from eBay. This was published in the UK by one of the magazines over there. I do remember Scholastic releasing some Sonic the Hedgehog related stuff here in the states though.

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Maps In Progress / Re: Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken (for the Mega Drive)

« on: May 30, 2022, 04:28:45 pm »

In the event anyone is following this thread still, I've resumed work on this. Going to do a sprite dump for TSR and I'll also finish the maps for VGMaps at the same time. I had to start from scratch as I seem to have misplaced the working directory I was using years ago. I've just finished the item/enemy placement on the first three maps, so that puts me back to where I was. I'll wait to do a submission until I have some new maps.

8

Map Gab / Re: Alien³ (Genesis) map request

« on: May 03, 2022, 10:57:07 am »

The contribute link is just an e-mail address. You'll have to send an e-mail to: submit (at) vgmaps.com

9

VGMaps Social Board / Re: APRIL 2022 SITE ISSUES

« on: April 06, 2022, 04:13:47 pm »

I can't say I'm surprised. I work for a different large web solutions company, and although the part I work for doesn't deal with hosting, I certainly wouldn't recommend them to any of my friends or family based on my experiences. Personally I have been using Dreamhost and their shared hosting service for many years. There's been some downtime here and there, but mostly things just work and I've gotten decent response times the few times I've needed support.

The biggest complaint I ever had was that their internal file structures are cap sensitive.

That's going to be the case on any Linux/Unix based web hosting, which will be a fair amount of them.

10

VGMaps Social Board / Re: VGMaps.com's 20th Anniversary - PROMO VIDEO CHALLENGE!

« on: January 20, 2022, 09:24:44 am »

I don't have a count of the number of contributors.  Someone once used something to scrape info off the site and got an exact count, but I don't recall who that is and I'm sure it's been long since it's been updated...

I had something that did that, but I haven't run it since 2007 it looks like, and it's using a library from PHP that has since been dropped, so it doesn't work anymore.

11

Map Requests / Re: Solar Winds Sector size [Map Request or Mapping Tips?]

« on: January 17, 2022, 10:32:37 am »

I submitted the ships and planet sprites from the second game to TSR some years ago: https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/solarwindsuniverse/

One day I need to finish the rest of the graphics if no one else does. My guess is that the file you're looking at probably has some small amount of header information to give the number of sprites and then there's probably a height & width value for each frame. The ships and planets use run-length encoding if I remember correctly. I didn't figure out the communication portraits, but I am guessing they're similar.

12

VGMaps Social Board / Re: So... how is everybody doing? *slight trigger warning*

« on: November 12, 2021, 08:46:04 pm »

Terra, I'm glad you found help with your burnout. I had to take a job in 2016 that I didn't really like, but the contract I was working on previously fell out and need to find work quickly. Then, I stayed there because I couldn't find something better in the first year I was there. So that's taken a lot of energy out of me and I haven't really done any VG related stuff until recently. 2020 and 2021 have been an additional challenge and I find myself having to take time off of work just so I don't walk out. I managed to get back into some minor things this year, I've worked on the remake of the Blake Stone maps off and on, and I've submitted a few things over on The VG Resource. I would like to ramp things up, but the motivation isn't always there, so I'm limiting myself.

I'm definitely interested in the idea of a Discord space. I actually find it easier to keep up with than a bunch of separate forums.

13

Maps In Progress / Re: Blake Stone SVG remake

« on: October 31, 2021, 10:32:39 pm »

These are almost done. I just need to run some double checks on the later episodes. I would appreciate if some folks could look these over and give me some feedback. I could particularly use a few people to try these out on Apple devices. The viewer should work with a modern browser, and should be phone/tablet friendly. Maps are temporarily here on my hosting: (removed)

The viewer should have a nav bar at the top which should let you, from left to right:

• Open a dialog of bookmarks and the view should center on it as best it can when you click/press on an item in the list.
• Open a dialog of display options and let you toggle different items/layers in the map. There are two options for Blake Stone.
• Zoom in
• Zoom out
• Open a dialog for map info which should contain game, level and contributor information.

Know issues / limitations:

• Some Floor 9 maps have multiple Gold Access Key (Dr. Goldfire) entries because there are multiple spawns, although the key will only drop once. Just need to figure out a better solution for this.
• Exits on Floor 9 need a bookmark.
• Generators on Episode 6 Floor 9 need bookmarks.
• Using your browser zoom can create issues. Use viewer controls for now.

14

Maps In Progress / Blake Stone SVG remake

« on: September 02, 2021, 10:15:35 am »

I'm getting close to finishing this, so I wanted to share a preview. I've been working on re-doing my Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold maps in SVG. Those files can then be loaded into a webpage to create a viewer with some interactive options. Not sure when it will be done, as it's always the small details which take the most time and energy right?



If the image tag doesn't work: https://garoux.net/forum/blakepreview.png

15

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Any idea why the Genesis "index.htm" file is a problematic file?

« on: September 02, 2021, 09:57:38 am »

Is your web hosting using Linux? If so check your folder and file permissions. There exists scenarios in Linux where you can delete files from a folder because you have write access to that directory, but you can't overwrite a file in that directory because you don't have write permissions on that specific file. I would expect you'd see an error message with this sort of thing, but it's possible the server or maybe your client isn't properly handling the error or suppressing it for some reason.

Text vs binary mode can also create issues, but this usually has to do with white space or character encoding, that is, I would not expect the behavior you're describing. Doesn't hurt to try though.