New / Customized Games

[Andrew]

I was wondering what the current thought is on the difficulty of modifying or creating a new pb2k game with this system. Are the 'roms' in a binary format, or is there some level of ability to modfy/replace them?

Obviously we don't have source code or a development environment, but would this product enable someone to do any of the following?

1) Replacing an existing game graphic with a custom one.

2) Replacing an existing video, with a custom one.

3) Modifying an existing game rule (score value, count, etc.)

4) Creating a new game from 'scratch'.

[nwojedi]

i've been thinking on doing this for awhile, and I really do not think it can be done until they can do away with the prism card and we can load the game with flashdrive. Which will make a whole world of oppurtunties.

[Chuck]

I was wondering what the current thought is on the difficulty of modifying or creating a new pb2k game with this system. Are the 'roms' in a binary format, or is there some level of ability to modfy/replace them?

Obviously we don't have source code or a development environment, but would this product enable someone to do any of the following?

1) Replacing an existing game graphic with a custom one.

2) Replacing an existing video, with a custom one.

3) Modifying an existing game rule (score value, count, etc.)

4) Creating a new game from 'scratch'.

1) Yes. This one wouldn't actually be too hard for us to do.
2) This is probably possible also but more difficult.
3) We haven't explored this at all. Unless Steve did and hasn't told me
4) Honestly if anyone was to try this they would be better starting from scratch with a standard pc and writing the code from the ground up. Interfacing to the driver board is fairly well documented and not that complicated. There are a couple of issues to overcome but they would be relatively simple. Our solution would be a good option if anyone tried to finish wizard blocks though. They could use the existing code and add to it rather than starting from scratch.

[sellenoff]

1) Replacing an existing game graphic with a custom one.

I'm not sure it's that easy. There might be some tricks we can pull to achieve the result, but only time will tell.

2) Replacing an existing video, with a custom one.

I'd say it's about the same difficulty as #1.

3) Modifying an existing game rule (score value, count, etc.)

This would be very difficult to do, although not impossible, but we won't even be considering it until the product is done and everyone is happy.

4) Creating a new game from 'scratch'.

In fact, I'm going to disgree with Chuck in a sense. The 3 of us never discussed this much, but to me it's obvious that our product will greatly enhance the ability to create a game from scratch.

Why? Because in addition to the emulation software, our product is aimed to make integration into the original machine as simply and plug and play as possible.

So while it's true our software won't help you make a new game from scratch as Chuck said, our product in fact will give anyone a great advantage towards achieving this, since they'll only need to write the software.

If things go well with our product, I can see us possibly working on a game development kit if time and interest allows.

[Chuck]

Steve is right about #4. We do provide all of the IO and graphics handling so you would just need to worry about game code and graphics.

I was thinking from the standpoint of how I would do things differently but the systems we've built work pretty well.

<dream> I would love to have access to the original videos some day so we could do much cleaner versions of them. I'm sure they compressed the hell out of them to fit them on the roms. We don't have that problem.</dream>

[Andrew]

So while it's true our software won't help you make a new game from scratch as Chuck said, our product in fact will give anyone a great advantage towards achieving this, since they'll only need to write the software.

If things go well with our product, I can see us possibly working on a game development kit if time and interest allows.

This is fantastic! It's very easy to pretend that I would have time to design a custom Star Wars game to play using the existing board. Of course reality will be something else... but even the potential to write code (whether part of an SDK or not) and see it run the game could really inspire my interest in the project!

[sellenoff]

So while it's true our software won't help you make a new game from scratch as Chuck said, our product in fact will give anyone a great advantage towards achieving this, since they'll only need to write the software.

If things go well with our product, I can see us possibly working on a game development kit if time and interest allows.

This is fantastic! It's very easy to pretend that I would have time to design a custom Star Wars game to play using the existing board. Of course reality will be something else... but even the potential to write code (whether part of an SDK or not) and see it run the game could really inspire my interest in the project!

Funny, I've had the same desire to re-program my own version of the SWE1 game!

I hope I can find free time in the future to do it, as it'd be a great project. Like yourself, I pretend to myself all the time I'll have the time to actually ever get to it though.

[JMX]

I'm blatantly quoting myself from another thread:

I would like to know if you have been able to extract any resources, like animations, music and sounds out of the game? And if so what format they were in?

What i was fishing for there was the ability to make an modification of the game like change the rules (or remove a certain annoying character).

Also, when knowing exacly how the resources look like, you could compare them to what the game projects, and maybe findout if the original platform make them justice (i know this sounds a little fuzzy, but i'm tired )

Another cool thing about decompiling the game roms would be the tiny possibility of finding unused stuff in it. This might be wrong, but the masked rom contained the music and graphics?, and was read-only? And the gamecode was the thing you could upgrade afterwards? So maybe they had extra resources they placed in the masked rom to be safe, but was newer used by the software.

[sellenoff]

No, we've not spent time trying to understand how the graphics are stored, formats used, etc.. It'd take a lot of time looking at the assembly code to figure out exactly how they do it. I will say that having the emulator working makes it much easier now to figure that stuff out, so perhaps in the future we could look into it.

Changing rules and stuff is crazy hard w/o the original source code or if you have tons of time to hack the assembled code, so no plans for that any time soon. I'd rather re-write the same exact game, as it'd probably be easier in the end.

I'm blatantly quoting myself from another thread:

I would like to know if you have been able to extract any resources, like animations, music and sounds out of the game? And if so what format they were in?

What i was fishing for there was the ability to make an modification of the game like change the rules (or remove a certain annoying character).

Also, when knowing exacly how the resources look like, you could compare them to what the game projects, and maybe findout if the original platform make them justice (i know this sounds a little fuzzy, but i'm tired )

Another cool thing about decompiling the game roms would be the tiny possibility of finding unused stuff in it. This might be wrong, but the masked rom contained the music and graphics?, and was read-only? And the gamecode was the thing you could upgrade afterwards? So maybe they had extra resources they placed in the masked rom to be safe, but was newer used by the software.

[tanthony]

So do you think any of you or anyone you're aware of would ever create a Attack/Revenge from Mars #3 ? Now THAT would be COOL even if it is still on the same playfield.

[sellenoff]

So do you think any of you or anyone you're aware of would ever create a Attack/Revenge from Mars #3 ? Now THAT would be COOL even if it is still on the same playfield.

Yes it would be way cool!!

We've discussed this briefly as I had the same idea myself. There's a lot of challenges to doing it of course, but in theory it could be done, though copyrighted images etc.. and other stuff might make it impossible to do in practical terms.

I'm hoping it can happen some day though as it'd be truly cool.

[tanthony]

Well, it could be made into attack from jupiter and change the aliens a bit

.... OR perhaps Attack from Venus -- with very attractive female aliens

OR someone could license "Mars Attacks" from the movie studio -- minimal licensing fee at this point?

OR ... well you get the idea. I'm sure creativity could be displayed.

Plus, with all the Visual Pinball stuff that's out there that's probably violating copyright/trademarks like crazy, I'm not sure there is too much risk if that hasn't gotten shutdown. Not that I condone copyright/trademark infringement... but in a case where it seems like it's causing no actual damages to anyone OR the product/rights have languished for years, it's kind of hard to feel badly about it.

..... Actually, I'm really liking the Attack from Venus thought We could swap out the RFM aliens on the PF with "Venus" aliens and switch the software and off we go. Then, of course, there could be Revenge from Venus as a follow up sequel.

[tanthony]

P.S. I would pay money for something like this (new game, that is). I'm not sure what the development effort/time would be and obviously the audience is limited to RFM owners, but if 200 owners paid $100 for a new game, would $20,000 make it worthwhile? Heck, I'd pay $200 for a new software game if well done. In fact, I can't believe that basically every owner of nucore wouldn't be willing to buy a new add-on game... I really think this would be the way to go in order to encourage further development too. Plus, it adds revenue opportunity to the system. At the same time... clearly need to sell people on nucore to begin with, so you need to include enough stuff that it helps sell it at the start --- it can't be just something people buy when a PRISM or computer board dies. The easy swapping of SWE1/RFM, jukebox, and a new mini game (of any kind) would be enough to make me buy it as long as the hardware price tag doesn't put it out of range for me.

RFM seems to have the best flexibility to do new games. Hard to work with Star Wars without immediately having a Lucas rights infringement. However, I'd love a Episode 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 game using the platform.

[sellenoff]

P.S. I would pay money for something like this (new game, that is). I'm not sure what the development effort/time would be and obviously the audience is limited to RFM owners, but if 200 owners paid $100 for a new game, would $20,000 make it worthwhile? Heck, I'd pay $200 for a new software game if well done. In fact, I can't believe that basically every owner of nucore wouldn't be willing to buy a new add-on game... I really think this would be the way to go in order to encourage further development too. Plus, it adds revenue opportunity to the system. At the same time... clearly need to sell people on nucore to begin with, so you need to include enough stuff that it helps sell it at the start --- it can't be just something people buy when a PRISM or computer board dies. The easy swapping of SWE1/RFM, jukebox, and a new mini game (of any kind) would be enough to make me buy it as long as the hardware price tag doesn't put it out of range for me.

RFM seems to have the best flexibility to do new games. Hard to work with Star Wars without immediately having a Lucas rights infringement. However, I'd love a Episode 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 game using the platform.

I agree about RFM being the better candidate for a # of reasons. SWE1 is a license / copyright nightmare, so I don't know how much if anything can be easily done to improve / enhance or change it, unless someone wanted to developer their own game for their own home use which is perfectly legal.

I'm sure we'll talk more about new RFM versions going forward. It will be very intereting to see what we can do.

[Svante]

I recalled a guy from Sweden who was trying to create a customized p2k-pinball themed around the music band Sparks and presto: I found the link to Sparks pinball 2000. Now it looks like the site haven't been updated since 2007, so maybe he gave up, I don't know, but it looks like he was able to change gfx and sound at least...