Secret of Mana on Master System (and other imaginary ports)

[ElkinFencer10]

Link to the Past actually looks really good. I doubt the hardware could have handled the rest, but damn, I'd love to see a workable demake.

[Anapan]

The SMS and Game Gear were seriously underexploited - Gunstar Heroes on GG proves that easily.
Not imaginary, but somewhat on topic; I'm eagerly looking forward to MM2 SMS - so close to playable!

I love mockup/demake art too.
I'm always amazed at the Gameboy Demakes (old topic - links to other mockup challenges on pixelation further down).

[Xeogred]

I actually want to know what the OST sounds like on the Genesis!

[Anapan]

No posts here recently.
Back in the late 90's and early 2000's I spent a lot of time trying to understand how videogames worked, how they were built. The first step was to understand how what I saw on screen was saved in the game file (rom). The next step was to modify the rom, or the interpreter. I never released much.

I haven't been in contact with the guy recently, (can't actually remember his name ATM) But I used to regularly converse with the guy who released the hardware-stable GBC colorized hacks of those GBM roms - Specifically Metroid II, Mario Land II, and possibly Pokemon Red Color. The fact is that although fully possible and no longer fantasy, there is a lot of error-correcting & debugging involved in making it work. I encourage anyone reading to volunteer to learn to help make another realtime color patch.

One day a long time ago I made mock palettes for real-time play in NES emulators. Linked here. The original idea was to make a palette for PocketNES that counteracted the frontlit blueish overcast hue that was ever-present in the NES interpreter/emulator while viewed through a AGS-001 - the original clamshell SP. Results through several revisions were dark and greyish or overly washed-out - turns out everyone's eyes adjust and it's a bad idea to tint-darken an already underlit palette. Further experimentation found that some more "poppy" (term from NO$GB) palettes were only OK. Since palettes are universally interchangeable, it's a simple matter to raw-load the data into a graphics editor and edit or overlay a previous palette to the raw RGB bitmap, then save it to the same raw format. Wanna realtime play Mario 3 as it would look on a Virtualboy? What if the game was ported to DOS and displayed through an EGA graphics card?
Yeah, it was a productive day - I finally got to see what would happen if a CGA graphic card could do both palettes at once . Incidentally, I read that these palettes are also compatible with that newer NESRGB mod.

Want to further experiment with your much-more capable computer with a new OS and a decent 3D graphics card?
ReShade
This framework is incredible! Palette reduction and authentic scan-lines in a simple click! My new favorite retro-inspired game which is only fake-low-res (actually a standard HD resolution) and only shows square pixels? I can calculate how many scan-lines would make it display on whichever non-existent system it might've been shown on to display every virtual-pixel as if it were actually displayed on my fake CRT (actually a 1080P Plasma). Very good. Also works out of the box for every emulator displaying in native resolution. !Also available for Android!

There was talk of imaginary soundtrack. I know how to machine-transcode audio from one console to another, sometimes realtime while emulated. Not today since drunk ATM.

[Anapan]

Re-Shade; Admittedly, it's not what I want usually with it's presets and I can't program it well enough to make it do what I want consistently.
Normally I want this configuration:

240P converted to 480P with artificial scan lines shown 28-34% intensity, bilinear stretched to 1080p while maintaining 4x3 aspect ratio.

In Reshade's programming language that scenario is not dealt with so simply (?). It deals with a window or full screen image at any arbitrary size and overlays whatever effect you want.
I guess the best is to "google image search" "reshade". Even the simple 30% scanline effect is fairly complicated for me to implement as I don't yet know how to access every other vertical pixel, or possibly the solution is to have a separate profile for every possible vertical resolution.

It goes far beyond that simple effect - people have made "cel shade" "CRT bloom" and many more pixel shader effects, and all of the popular ones have been ported to this architecture. Still haven't looked through the full list, I only ever stop when I've sufficiently approximated my desired effect. No idea if it has the Eagle, HQX, XBR, etc.

[Ack]

I gotta say, I'm really finding this thread interesting.

[Tanooki]

Same here with the comparisons done through downsampling the quality of the images and the color totals within the palette limits of the fantasy port of a game.

[Xeogred]

Sprites are the best!

[Anapan]

Seeing those last ones reminded me about some mockups I made using a hi-color image displayer for GBC by Icarus Productions back in '99 - they were the first to exploit the slightly-ghostability of the GBC. These TGA files had a date of May 2000. They're really over-gamma corrected to compensate for the GBC's unlit screen at optimal lighting conditions (1000 suns eclipsed by your head):


Of course, they cannot be ported so easily, but at least Diablo was alpha'd on the GB Mono.
Also, the V-Soft brothers did some GBC sprite and screen mockups, a GB video of the intro of Rondo of Blood, and a playable demo of the game that they were porting to GBC - whip-the-zombie. So cool.

[Fran_Montoya]

I lent my real copy to a friend many years ago and never got it back, so this is a welcome replay for me.
Hey, does anyone else think the suits or armour (on the stands) look like little koalas..it's like an optical puzzle, depends how you look at it...maybe I'm just Australian!