[Zero Dozer]

You would have problems to implement it :
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=15538.0

Yeah, somehow I thought so. That's why I wondered if that was possible. Also, there's always a big-time coder with such an ability roaming around, especially for the PC/Steam versions.

[Vanya]

Here's an idea that I'm actually going to implement in the near future.
I'm working on a hack that I'm calling Sonic the Hedgehog Complete.
Like Sonic 3 Complete it's basically going to expand the original game to include both versions of Sonic the Hedgehog (MD/MS) plus every bugfix I can find and as much beta content as possible.
Additionally I'd like to add 3 custom stages based on concept art that was never used and as many playable characters as I can fit.

Anyway, the idea I had came about when I was looking at the disassembly I'm using and created a new routine to limit how many rings Sonic looses from the ring counter when he gets hit.
This was inspired by several fan games that have this mechanic.
But I immediately started thinking that it would be cool if when I implement the multiple characters to make things more interesting by varying 2 factors: the number of rings a character looses when hit, and the number of rings they need for a 1-up.

So basically characters will have a defense class and that will be offset by 1-up generation.

EX-
Charmy - Defenseless - All rings lost when hit - 100 rings for 1-up. (This is the same set up as in the original game)
Tails - Light Defense - 32 max rings lost when hit - 100 rings for 1-up.  (this is what my current hack does except right now only Sonic is playable)
Sonic - Normal Defense - 24 max rings lost when hit - 125 rings for 1-up.
Knuckles - Strong Defense - 16 max rings lost when hit - 150 rings for 1-up.
Mighty - Heavy Defense - 8 max rings lost when hit - 200 rings for 1-up.

What do you guys think?

[ShadowOne333]

Here's an idea that I'm actually going to implement in the near future.
I'm working on a hack that I'm calling Sonic the Hedgehog Complete.
Like Sonic 3 Complete it's basically going to expand the original game to include both versions of Sonic the Hedgehog (MD/MS) plus every bugfix I can find and as much beta content as possible.
Additionally I'd like to add 3 custom stages based on concept art that was never used and as many playable characters as I can fit.

Anyway, the idea I had came about when I was looking at the disassembly I'm using and created a new routine to limit how many rings Sonic looses from the ring counter when he gets hit.
This was inspired by several fan games that have this mechanic.
But I immediately started thinking that it would be cool if when I implement the multiple characters to make things more interesting by varying 2 factors: the number of rings a character looses when hit, and the number of rings they need for a 1-up.

So basically characters will have a defense class and that will be offset by 1-up generation.

EX-
Charmy - Defenseless - All rings lost when hit - 100 rings for 1-up. (This is the same set up as in the original game)
Tails - Light Defense - 32 max rings lost when hit - 100 rings for 1-up.  (this is what my current hack does except right now only Sonic is playable)
Sonic - Normal Defense - 24 max rings lost when hit - 125 rings for 1-up.
Knuckles - Strong Defense - 16 max rings lost when hit - 150 rings for 1-up.
Mighty - Heavy Defense - 8 max rings lost when hit - 200 rings for 1-up.

What do you guys think?

I say it sounds great, but take this into consideration:
Go for Sonic (Classic S1 sprites), Tails and Knuckles to start off, and maybe even add a Sonic & Tails combo too. That way if your goal is to make a Sonic 1 Complete you can be close to the iOS counterpart and add the GG extras!
Spin Dash and Super Sonic are also something to take into consideration and perhaps a SRAM feature too since it will be a long game with the added stages.

As for the ring stuff...
I say do not touch the 1-Up modifier, only the lost rings, and make them lose rings according to their thoughness.
This means Tails will lose the most rings, then Sonic as neutral and Knuckles losing the least rings.

Hope this helps!

PS: I just replied to you in Sonic Retro.
Send me a PM as reply!

[chevalier]

Hello,

After having purchased pokemon stadium two days ago, i had an idea, or rather a question. As this game contents many textual informations, i would like to know if it is possible to implemant a vocal synthese with ?
This question is very strange maybe, but i just want to know if yes or no it is technicly possible.
Thanks for your answers.

[Dashman]

After having purchased pokemon stadium two days ago, i had an idea, or rather a question. As this game contents many textual informations, i would like to know if it is possible to implemant a vocal synthese with ?

You mean something to make the game read the onscreen info? I imagine it's possible, but nightmarishly difficult. If you just want the pokédex info being read as in the shows, there's an android app for that.

[chevalier]

Yes incorporate a screen reader or something like that, because with that, this game would be almost totally accessible to blind peoples. But if it is too hard, i understand. It was just an idea to propose a popular game to a minority. Thanks for your answer.

[FAST6191]

Did any of the N64 emulators ever get Lua support? Adding things in that effectively run on hardware is hard, much less doing full vocal synthesis on top of that, but dumping strings/reading values and passing that on to a text to speech program is orders of magnitude easier.
You probably could do it with some kind of memory reading/cheat attaching tool (emuhaste and whatever else) but Lua would be the better bet by far.

[Tsukiyomaru0]

Silly idea of games that could be made from scratch:
- Borderlands GB/GBC/NES - Perhaps could function like Contra or Metal Slug?
- Ace Attorney GBC - Phoenix Wright once got a game for J2ME phones which, back then when that happened, were weaker than GBC. So... Why not?

[chevalier]

Did any of the N64 emulators ever get Lua support? Adding things in that effectively run on hardware is hard, much less doing full vocal synthesis on top of that, but dumping strings/reading values and passing that on to a text to speech program is orders of magnitude easier.
You probably could do it with some kind of memory reading/cheat attaching tool (emuhaste and whatever else) but Lua would be the better bet by far.

I don't understand all, but i see that it is not impossible. If there is a hope, i want to continue in this way.

[FAST6191]

Lua is a programming language, a fairly high level "scripting" one. Various emulators, though most notably FCEUX for the NES and Desumume for the DS, added the ability to run Lua scripts on top of games and speak to the games in a way that ROM hackers would find useful (the game's memory addresses, registers....). Being a programming language run on the PC though you can then quite happily pass commands on to other programs/scripts/whatever. From there you can pass on command line commands or something to a program like http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ and have what you want. If there are few enough snippets then you might even be able to convince someone to narrate the lot and then call the resulting sound files.

Here is a discussion on a lua hack for a NES game we had recently
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,18717.0.html
The sorts of changes it could make would be hard to do if you kept to the limits of hardware. Some of the tool assisted speedrunning people also make fairly extensive use of these scripts and similar ones that you could find useful.

If none of the N64 emulators ever got Lua, I genuinely do not know at this point, and the DS versions of pokemon are not what you want then you can make things slightly harder, but still far short of having to effectively make a speech synthesis engine in the equivalent of the N64's hardware (which is what an emulator is simulating after all). The way I would set about it would be to look at the cheat making tools -- not every emulator has good cheat making support but the general theory of cheat making is quite easy (you search the memory/watch things in memory and act accordingly), to this end tools have been made that attach to emulators to allow them to have cheats made even if the emulator itself does not have proper cheat searching. What one is the most popular seems to vary depending upon where you are in the world and what console/device/game series you are hacking. emuhaste and artmoney are probably the most well known of the current set, emuhaste is even open source. As all the Lua script would be doing is reading the appropriate points in the game's memory and calling things accordingly and a cheat making tool is designed to read things in the game's memory and do some action...

We have had a few hard of sight (you probably only need to go a few pages back in this very topic for that one), hearing or motor control ability use various similar techniques to help them play games they would otherwise struggle to. I can not say I have seen stuff for fully blind people but the theory of operation is no different to those things already covered.

It will mean you need a PC rather than a flash cart but controller adapters are easy to come by and, if you will permit a joke potentially in poor taste, it is not like the visual fidelity issues that many would be proponents of real hardware seem to latch onto are going to be especially troublesome in this case.

[mz]

Some of the tool assisted speedrunning people also make fairly extensive use of these scripts and similar ones that you could find useful.

What do you mean by "some" and "also"? The TAS people *are* the ones who added/created all these emulators with Lua scripting. 99.9999% of the Lua scripts for these emulators were created by them, too.

Anyway, there are probably some versions of Mupen64 with Lua scripting, if you look hard enough, but your best bet for N64 should be BizHawk: https://code.google.com/p/bizhawk/

[NES Boy]

I remember that someone converted Super Mario RPG into PAL. I wonder if anyone is willing to do the same to EarthBound.

The only necessary text changes that I can think of is changing Pokey's name back to Porky and fixing this line of dialogue referring to the X button.

[Zoinkity]

i would like to know if it is possible to implemant a vocal synthese with ? ...i just want to know if yes or no it is technicly possible.

...Yes(-ish).  It wouldn't be perfect, more along the lines of Speak-and-Spell (totally dating myself here).

There's already a game in the N64 library that did this: Doubutsu no Mori.  In its case the characters had animal-ish sounds, but replaced with slower voices in the human range the result is intelligible.  Combined sounds were also implemented.  It basically worked as a lexer, playing each sound as it was printed to the string.
The idea is each unique syllable has an encoded sound.  It then reads the string for the longest possible match, playing the corresponding sound.  It's basically the reverse of how the VRU processes sounds software-side.

That said, it wouldn't be easy to implement.  Oh no, not by a long shot.  The problem is compounded by the number of N64 hackers actually capable of doing something like that.


The idea of using high-level voice via emu would be far more portable and in the end easier to implement.  Very interesting idea though.


The current issue with N64 emulation isn't so much the quality of the output but whether it works at all. Many HLEs don't even implement all the registers or opcodes.  That's why virtually anything using libdragon won't run on them (use of TRAPs and COP0 registers).  HLE emus use game-specific hacks.  The most popular US and (sometimes) PAL titles will be emulated very well, but support drops with popularity.  Some games simply aren't emulated at all, even when there isn't an issue like microcode variation.  No joke, one of the three launch titles isn't supported by [i/]any[/i] HLE plugin.  Even LLE graphics plugins aren't supporting all games (things like vector addition).

[ETG]

It would be cool to make multiplayer games out of single player games via lua and external networking programs or custom emulator.

So take Mario kart, everyone would start up and they would be player 1 on their games. Each frame your position is picked up from ram and sent out to everyone else. Their program would then take one of the other, cpu players and set their position to be your position.

Or a simultaneous 2 player Mario game where the other player's position is used to draw an overlay Luigi graphic on your screen. If you can do this you could also start duplicating events in one game to the other (bricks broken, enemies killed, etc.)

[FAST6191]

We had a kind of related discussion for the SNES xband multiplayer stuff a few months back
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,17922.html

Mind you one of my lasting memories of the gamesmaster TV show (I think it was still gamesmaster and not one of the infinitely worse UK TV shows about games) was when they turned tomb raider into a timed racing game, though thinking now it was probably just splitscreen with a timer done in post. Doing something similar would be amusing for me. For Mario Kart I would probably first approach it from the time trials and any ghost support it has.

[gadesx]

A Metroid hack with a quarter and teammates that help you and give you missions,
maybe as Castlevania order of ecclesia equivalent in metroid planet

[mz]

It would be cool to make multiplayer games out of single player games via lua and external networking programs or custom emulator.

This was done with NES Tetris some years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gZJzmV07aw

[lucaslbds]

gemini hello, I wonder whether there is development in the English translation of Castlevania SOTN game for sega saturn, knows something online? you know translate it? Thank you already

[Zero Dozer]

gemini hello, I wonder whether there is development in the English translation of Castlevania SOTN game for sega saturn, knows something online? you know translate it? Thank you already

Good idea, I'll stick with you on that. So, Gemini, could you initiate work on that?

[Bonesy]

Really? This thread isn't for update begging.