Translations and ROMhacks II

RT-55J · February 2, 2021, 4:12pm

What a legend

meauxdal · February 5, 2021, 3:55am

this is getting WEIRD

BustedAstromech · February 5, 2021, 7:23pm

Argonaut had some real impressive 3D accelerator tech for 1992

loki · February 5, 2021, 7:25pm

i hope someone hacks corporation and star cruiser to make use of the svp chip, to bring smooth 3d to the mega drive

meauxdal · February 8, 2021, 3:52pm

Broco · February 9, 2021, 6:59am

The amateur laserdisc preservation community developed a high-quality laserdisc digitizer that’s starting to show results. So far focused on movies, but could also be used for better preservation of games like Dragon’s Lair.

https://twitter.com/frisky_noodle/status/1358986739235385347?s=19

https://www.domesday86.com/:

The Domesday Duplicator captures the raw RF signal from a laserdisc player’s laser. The player provides the mechanical tracking, focus and movement of the laser over the disc’s surface and the duplicator records the signal. This effectively turns the laserdisc player into a highly accurate optical scanner. The resulting sample is the spiral of analogue data represented by the continuous track on the disc. The aim is to ensure that the sample resolution is higher than the resolution by which the disc was originally recorded. This way you could (in theory) produce another disc from the copy – and that ‘round-trip’ preservation loop means you capture everything on the disc, even if you can’t decode it yet (or if there is data you didn’t know about).

Since the resulting sample is still a laserdisc, you need a laserdisc player to play it. Therefore, the next stage of development is to produce an emulated laserdisc player in software that will play the ‘disc’ and output the resulting sound, video and data (data being a complex mix of Acorn VFS partitions, frame data, VBI, teletext, etc.). Of course, the better the emulator, the better the resulting video and sound – and it’s fairly easy to see how a fully digital emulated player could out-perform a 30 year old analogue VP415 (and the ‘samples’ won’t wear out or degrade like physical discs).

The Domesday Duplicator project is completely open-source and open-hardware.

meauxdal · February 9, 2021, 3:18pm

the music in this clip is fucking mind-expanding holy shit

i don’t know what this even is but i’m in love with it

shnozlak · February 9, 2021, 3:34pm

Twilight by ELO?

Daicon 4 is a fan film made by kids that went on the form Gainex for the 4th Daicon anime convention

meauxdal · February 9, 2021, 3:37pm

i hadn’t heard that ELO song in forever (is the intro music ELO too?) and it just happened to be the most perfect accompaniment to the visuals that it was like hearing it for the first time again. i cried! i feel new

Sakurina · February 9, 2021, 3:41pm

Twilight is one of those songs they use as BGM for variety show segments that mention Akihabara on Japanese TV. It became a famous song amongst otaku because of Daicon 4 in the 80s, and then twenty years later, it was used as the opening theme for Densha Otoko, a TV drama based on a 2ch thread about an otaku protecting a pretty girl from a drunk guy on the train, which was absolutely huge and made “Twilight = nerds” mainstream

loki · February 9, 2021, 3:49pm

also, the making of the daicon iii short is a subplot in the excellent show aoi honoo

Rudie · February 9, 2021, 3:58pm

Densha Otoko was absolutely a whole thing. Dang.

Broco · February 9, 2021, 9:25pm

Yeah Daicon IV somehow elevates all the pop culture that it homages. I loved it since the first time I came across it, there’s a touch of magic to it. Even before I learned its history as a cultural hinge point, the heart-and-soul commitment was so palpable even in decades-old degraded illegal copies

shelter · February 15, 2021, 8:09pm

meauxdal · February 17, 2021, 6:48pm

VastleCania · February 17, 2021, 6:55pm

“anti-life trooper androgynous” holy shit

loki · February 17, 2021, 7:16pm

Father.Torque · February 17, 2021, 7:52pm

Title material

meauxdal · February 18, 2021, 11:24pm

meauxdal · February 20, 2021, 4:43pm

a very dedicated romhacker has been patching oodles of megadrive/genesis games to use SRAM instead of passwords or nothing at all

games with patches for added SRAM thus far include:

Batman Returns
Comix Zone
Desert Strike
Jungle Strike
Kid Chameleon
Shinobi III
Urban Strike
X-Men
X-Men 2: Clone Wars
Zombies Ate My Neighbors