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[Strider Sombra]

These are great news. Amazing how stuff like this can take a while to surface, but it's always great to see this sort of things confirmed directly from the wolf's mouth.

Also, I though it'd be nice to do a follow-up with this on your SGX blog post, Scion. Hope you like.

[Scion238]

So...Kotaku's reporting that Capcom Japan are management dicks, to the point that one of their employees attempted suicide:

QUOTE

In 2009, a twenty-something female joined Osaka-based game developer Capcom. The new employee was assigned to a couple of different games before becoming a member of the team developing Dragon's Dogma, Capcom's upcoming big budget title. At first things were good. But by that December, things got awful—really awful. According to a recently released lawsuit, the new employee apparently felt so bullied at Capcom that she tried to take her own life. A senior female employee was assigned to the Dragon's Dogma team, and this senior employee apparently made the young woman's life miserable. Her new boss supposedly reprimanded only her at meetings and assigned the young woman impossible tasks with zero instructions on how to complete them. In the court filing, the senior employee's behavior was described as "irrational" and "repeated". The young employee felt isolated on the Dragon's Dogma team. The young employee thought the best way she could help Capcom was to create a database to help internal game development become more efficient. It was a huge project, and the young employee's superiors signed off on the project, realizing how important it could be. She thought by creating the database, she could show her worth to the Dragon's Dogma team. In addition to her regular work, the young employee slogged away on the database, working every day in July and August 2010 well into the night. Then, suddenly, on October 6, 2010, the young woman was yanked from the Dragon's Dogma team. The database was reassigned to another department. Her boss apparently said, "Even if the database is a success, you are worthless to the team." Between October 20 and November 4, two other superiors began attempting to get the young employee to quit, saying "she's problematic", "she abandons her work", "she skips meetings", and "her ideas stink". It got so bad that the young employee supposedly went to Capcom's HR claiming harassment. HR did nothing. The harassment did not stop. It got worse and worse until November 11 of that year when the woman sought medical help and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. And on December 10, the young employee took time off of work. She was depressed and dejected, and she took a large quantity of sleeping pills, antidepressants, and cold medicine in hopes of killing herself. The young woman slept for four days, but thankfully, she did not die. Even after her mental and physical health improved and even after she finished rehabilitation, there were those at Capcom who apparently did everything possible to make sure she couldn't work, by insisting she had not recovered, suspending her, and ultimately dismissing the employee. The young woman is currently taking Capcom to court over the incident. Kotaku is following up with Capcom and will update this post should they comment. Update: A Capcom spokesperson declined to comment about this matter to Kotaku, citing the company's policy not to discuss ongoing litigation.

It should be obvious why I posted this in this thread. I wonder if Capcom Japan has always been like this, or if it's a complete anomaly? It would be very, VERY interesting if Strider was cited in the lawsuit and information came out about the suicide rumor. I'd be surprised if they didn't refer to it, actually.

It goes without saying that I will be keeping an eye on this as it develops.

[Scion238]

My Isuke interview got mentioned on the personal blog of a Gamasutra contributor, Danny Cowan. This can only be a good thing.

[Scion238]

Uncovered a post by tomaitheous (aka "malducci", cited in my SGX Strider article) wherein he talks about the underlying code of the ACD version we got in 1994, and its eccentricities:

QUOTE (tomaitheous)

From the ACD ISO track, I was able to get some proof that the game existing before 1994. My conclusions weren't just pieced together speculation, there was some direct evidence in the ISO track itself. One of the biggest pieces of evidence, that game manufactures tented to leave unused data in the data track emulators (which were just hard drives). New data was written into the data tracks at specific LBA offsets, but the old data is intact. The PCE CD library is littered with remnants of other on going projects at the time. Sometimes other game code, sometimes non PCE game code (parts of text files, C source code, DOS files, game assets before assembling, even alternate game graphics/assets - like beta-ish stuff that didn't make it into the final version, even CDDA stuff!). Strider ACD has a 1991 CD game's remnants all through out the data track. That definitely puts it in around the time the Japanese magazines were stating that it would be a CD project. There are smaller interesting bits about how the data is packed and arranged, that makes no sense for an ACD project - but would be useless to go into details of that here.

Emphasis mine.

Also, a little later on in the thread, poster "Team Andromeda" provides both pages from the July 1994 issue of Edge. Since I hadn't seen part 2 before, I went back and added it to my previous post in this thread.

Finally, here's some scans of the March 1990 issue of GamePro, where they mentioned the SGX Strider in the US and A for the first time:

This post has been edited by Scion238: May 18 2013, 05:02 PM

Attached 3 File(s)

[Captain Weird, Jr.]

Great find (as always) Scion, I hadn't seen that Sega-16 thread.

His discovery of the sloppy coding and palette issues is especially interesting. I used to own a Duo with a few ACD games and, sadly, Strider was the worst of the bunch. I couldn't figure out why it even needed the upgrade to run. The cutscenes and music were nice-but-standard PCE-CD fare, while the actual game could've passed for a mediocre HuCard port. Apparently the .iso confirms just how badly NEC Avenue half-assed it...

[Scion238]

Yeah... you know, Dire's of the same opinion as you about the ACD release. I'll admit it has its flaws, but I have a soft spot for it, myself. As to why it uses the Arcade Card... you know, it's interesting. I happened across a thread in the Magic Engine support forums that backs up Tomaitheous' post above, and goes some way to explaining the technical stuff he left out:

QUOTE

According to a trusted source... The reason Strider does not work well with Magic Engine emulation is that it is not truly an Arcade Card game. It is [a] standard PC Engine CD game that was simply coded so that it would not work [without] the Arcade Card. Basically it is a 1991 abandoned beta that NEC Avenue pulled out of their butts in 1994 and modified to help sell off remaining hardware stock. When the Magic Engine tries to map 2 MB of memory for a game that uses 72 kb of total RAM, it causes serious problems.

Magic Engine being, of course, the only worthwhile PC Engine emulator around.

Pretty interesting, huh? The "long-lost" SGX conversion may have been staring us in the face the entire time, disguised as the ACD version.

[Dire 51]

QUOTE (Scion238 @ May 5 2013, 03:45 PM)

Magic Engine being, of course, the only worthwhile PC Engine emulator around.

That was true ten years ago, but not now. Ootake is in every way far superior. Magic Engine used to give me all sorts of issues (on multiple PCs), Ootake hasn't.

If I had a copy of Strider to test out with Ootake, I'd let you know what the end result was there. Unfortunately, I don't.

[Scion238]

It's my understanding that Ootake has issues playing CD-ROM2 games, though? I can't speak for how well Magic Engine emulates other PCE games, but it never gave me any problems with Strider.

[Captain Weird, Jr.]

QUOTE (Scion238 @ May 5 2013, 03:45 PM)

QUOTE The reason Strider does not work well with Magic Engine emulation is that it is not truly an Arcade Card game. It is [a] standard PC Engine CD game that was simply coded so that it would not work [without] the Arcade Card.

HA! Surprise, surprise... I mean, I didn't think NEC would've actually pulled something that shady, but whaddya know.

QUOTE

Pretty interesting, huh? The "long-lost" SGX conversion may have been staring us in the face the entire time, disguised as the ACD version.

Indeed! I think you could be right about that. Glitchy colors aside, some of the in-game graphics are actually pretty detailed; much closer to the arcade than the Mega Drive version. I'd bet those parts, at least, are left over from the SuperGrafx days, considering how nice the ports of Ghouls 'n Ghosts and 1941 looked.

This post has been edited by Captain Weird, Jr.: May 5 2013, 11:22 PM

[Dire 51]

QUOTE (Scion238 @ May 5 2013, 08:55 PM)

It's my understanding that Ootake has issues playing CD-ROM2 games, though?

Hasn't given me any problems with any of mine when I've used them, but maybe it does with some of the ones I don't own.

QUOTE

I can't speak for how well Magic Engine emulates other PCE games, but it never gave me any problems with Strider.

Emultaion's never been an issue with ME, it's that the program would go wonky after a time and no matter what I did, I couldn't resolve it (slowdown, crashes, framerate issues). This happened on multiple PCs, including one that was pretty top-of-the-line, so I know it wasn't a problem with the hardware.

This post has been edited by Dire 51: May 5 2013, 11:24 PM

[Scion238]

QUOTE (Capt. Weird @ Jr.)

I didn't think NEC would've actually pulled something that shady, but whaddya know.

It's hard to say whether it was NEC Ave or Dice Creative, in this case... but yeah, I feel ya.

QUOTE (Cap)

Glitchy colors aside, some of the in-game graphics are actually pretty detailed; much closer to the arcade than the Mega Drive version. I'd bet those parts, at least, are left over from the SuperGrafx days, considering how nice the ports of Ghouls 'n Ghosts and 1941 looked.

You're not the only one who thinks that. More on that below.

QUOTE (Dire 51)

Emultaion's never been an issue with ME, it's that the program would go wonky after a time and no matter what I did, I couldn't resolve it (slowdown, crashes, framerate issues).

Huh. Weird. Never gave me those issues. Granted, I have an old version that I paid for back around the time that I got my ACD game.

Anyhow... while researching another rumor, I came across a thread on the PCEngineFX Forums where someone was trying to retool the ACD game's color palette. It's referenced in some other threads on those forums, in ways that lead me to think that this is Malducci's doing; but as he has a PCEngineFX account, I don't know why he wouldn't have done it under that name, rather than as a guest.

In any case, here's the highlights:

QUOTE (Tom)

Not only did they mangle the palette, they also used some wrong colors. See his belt. One other color was repeated, yet the pixels were still there but appeared as lack of detail It definitely looks like the did some automated conversion job and on the sprite pixels and palettes. Probably why the palettes choices are so dark. Funny thing, it's not even a direct conversion (a shift and clip). Thy did retouch up one sprite manually - the little robot with the fox hat.

QUOTE (Tom)

I was working on the boss area for stage one. There was something definitely wrong with their automation tool. That or the original project gotten some corruption and they didn't realize it. Take a look at the boss chars: The pic on the left is the original ACD palette. There's no way that could be what they wanted   Green hands and face!? I'm not changing the pixels in these frames, just the colors associated with them. They match up perfect with the arcade. This means either the palette data got corrupted in the project before pressing or they employed a 3 year old to over see the colors. In the data track, there multiple instances of the same boss sprites/data. The funny thing is there not all the same in regards to pixel # alignment. They reordered the pixel #'s in the final sprites for some reason and it's not for color recycling or reduction. Weird. The first boss has issues of crossed colors/pixels and the damn thing is compressed. Looks like I need to figure that out and decompress them. QUOTE Do you think that it will be possible to restore some of the missing shades in the background (compared to the original ACD) in the future? Dunno. I'll need to dig deeper and decompress the tiles. Edit: This keeps on getting weirder. Ok, I figured out the decompression routine. Should be simple enough to write an external compressor/decompressor. When the AVE logo is spinning in the beginning/startup of the game, it's loading the first level data. The weird part is that it's loading multiple 192k segments and then decompressing them to arcade card memory. The strange this is that it's using old and almost useless RLE word based compression for PCE format of graphics. It's an old compression method from before '92 for most PCE games. When this game came out, almost all CD games that I know of used the much more efficient LZSS compression. The second strange part is 192k is usually how SCD games load data. 64k code is left intact of 256k memory and level/data/graphics are loaded usually as a single 192k chunk. Not only that, but these 192k chunks contain some redundant tiles - like the stage was divided up into 3-4 segments. That, and the left over garbage data in the CD track contains tiles and sprites from a '91 CD game. Just further proof in my mind that this was an old SCD project. Another thing. In the data track, there are tons of sheets of uncompressed sprites - all the bosses and enemies. Of course the game doesn't load these for some odd reason. But the peculiar thing I noticed, using a palette match, is that those uncompressed sprites have some of the color #'s in different places. Given that some of the sprites really do have the wrong colors in certain places of the final game definitely leads me to believe whoever was responsible for those sprites, their graphics didn't end up making it into the AC ram. Instead the originals were used. Speculation of course, but things are fitting together suspiciously well.

QUOTE (awack)

So it uses an older compression method, maybe a CD or CD/SCD game, it loads 192k chunks like SCD games and was released as a ACD game, the pc engine equivalent of Frankenstein,s monster.

EDIT: Tom's comments are indeed those of Malducci/Tomaitheous. His revised files are placed on PCEDev.net, which was Malducci/Tomaitheous' site before it became a blog: http://pcedev.wordpress.com/

This post has been edited by Scion238: May 6 2013, 02:52 PM

[Captain Weird, Jr.]

QUOTE (Scion238 @ May 6 2013, 01:45 PM)

while researching another rumor, I came across a thread on the PCEngineFX Forums

Ah FECK... of course, the pics he posted are long gone I really wanted to see how the game could've looked; Tomaitheous/Malducci definitely knows his stuff.

Another nice find nonetheless! I'm no code monkey but can follow what he's saying about the game being very poorly assembled.
This would make a fascinating (and perhaps essential) addendum to the ACD/ SGX articles currently on LSCM... if only we could snag those comparison pics. And I had a little extra free time to write it.

[Scion238]

QUOTE (Captain Weird @ Jr.,May 6 2013, 03:25 PM)

Ah FECK... of course, the pics he posted are long gone I really wanted to see how the game could've looked; Tomaitheous/Malducci definitely knows his stuff.

Well, I emailed him a couple of days ago to ask him about this directly. We'll see if he responds. Given my track record of late, I'm not holding out much hope. If he does respond, I'll ask him about those images.

QUOTE

Another nice find nonetheless! I'm no code monkey but can follow what he's saying about the game being very poorly assembled. This would make a fascinating (and perhaps essential) addendum to the ACD/ SGX articles currently on LSCM... if only we could snag those comparison pics. And I had a little extra free time to write it.

Heh. Why else do you think I'm doing all this research? That article needs a rewrite: the PCE Fan/CPS-1 side-by-side comparison has been mooted by Chris Covell's discovery of the Marukatsu Famicom screenshots, the Edge interview has surfaced, and malducci's pulled up hard evidence off of the ACD conversion itself.

[Captain Weird, Jr.]

QUOTE (Scion238 @ May 6 2013, 03:52 PM)

Heh. Why else do you think I'm doing all this research? That article needs a rewrite: the PCE Fan/CPS-1 side-by-side comparison has been mooted by Chris Covell's discovery of the Marukatsu Famicom screenshots, the Edge interview has surfaced, and malducci's pulled up hard evidence off of the ACD conversion itself.

Right you are... I guess it HAS been that long since I read through them myself! Carry on, then :) And yeah, here's hoping Malducci responds to your inquiry.

[Scion238]

Me too. He hasn't responded yet, but happening across his forays into the ACD conversion will be enough hard data, I think. For the article, anyway. For some hard-line skeptics, not even holding the alpha in their hands would be enough.

EDIT: More info from the PCEngineFX Forums!

QUOTE (malducci)

There's either a hidden mini game or partial of another game inside the data track of Strider. There is also a "visual selector" area and a comic drawn bmp in the iso (warning screen maybe?).

QUOTE (shubibiman)

Looks like these pictures come from a pachinko game (I couldn't tell which one though).

QUOTE (malducci)

How do they look like a pachinko game? They look like overworld map and characters + larger characters(last pic) - to me.

QUOTE (shubibiman)

Pachiokun game series, that are pachinko games, have RPG aspects, so you have to speak to people to know which pachinko parlour you're supposed to go to and, of course, as in any RPG, Pachiokun, the main character, as to go across town to find the right pachinko parlour. These pics are definitely from one of the Pachiokun game series, I'm 200% sure. Edit : now I can even tell you that the pics are from Pachiokun Maboroshi No Densetsu

QUOTE (malducci)

Awesome, you nailed it! I just checked out the off line PCE catalog and it has the same tiles. This is important as the date of that game is 1991. Often companies will re-use projects as a starting point and change from there, but a lot of times there are left over code and graphics in the data track. Last Alert has both Valis II and Cosmic Fantasy I tiles and sprites through out the ISO. So in other words, this game probably started developement from 90-91 as an old CD or SCD format. This would explain the use of compression on the tiles and enemy sprites. The weird thing is that Pachiokun is not published by NEC AVE - unless they had help from NEC or Coconuts was the developer who started the Strider CD project. Also; some of the graphics look more than just redrawn. The gorilla in the second stage has scaling artifacts on him  - the kind you get from doing a "nearest neighbor" down size instead of a redrawn from scratch(like the Gen version). If it did start out as a SGX game, then it probably used the 352(376)x224 res mode like GnG and they rescaled the graphics for 256(288)x224 mode res. If it were on the SGX it would have probably used the 3bit(8color) mode (for storage) for tiles and sprites like GnG appears to do instead of the native 4bit(16color) format. Edit: looking through the data/sprite blocks - it appears to be 7 levels - is this correct?

I just want to emphasize that last line. Seven levels. Not six. Not the five levels we all know, plus the desert stage on the ACD. Seven.

Also... I just have to laugh. In addition to bouncing this game through all of those different consoles and formats, NEC Avenue apparently started the conversion by reusing assets from Pachiokun Maboroshi No Densetsu, a crap game by an entirely different company.

Wow.

EDIT 2: Dire's probably gonna get a kick out of this.

This post has been edited by Scion238: May 7 2013, 01:17 PM