Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code

Back in the day, I remember using Glide wrappers to run the UltraHLE emulator on non-3DFX hardware. Now, a lot of older games need a DirectX shim to fix various issues (palette and some kinds of slowdowns, especially).

Well I didn't do it without losing a life! It was a little more luck than judgement though. I beat him on my last life (and I had quite a few at that point).

I still remember the music from that scene having this awfully jarring "DURRR-DUNNN" tone siren in it that was rather disturbing. Not... Sonic drowning music disturbing, but close

Hey there,

Thank you for the follow up. I have an old Pentium 3 laptop lying around that I have been meaning to try to use to simulate the audio issue. I am not convinced that giving the value of "dma" is what caused the audio glitch.

I wanted to record a video showing the issue so maybe we can try to trace what was causing the audio problem. It could have been maybe an old version of the shareware demo with the bug? Maybe there was something specifically wrong with my machine back in 1995? I do recall that I did have an ISA Sound Blaster 16 card. I am not entirely sure but I may have re-tested the game (and still had the problem) in 1998 when I got a better computer, this time with an AWE64 Value ISA card.

I have to embarrassingly admit that despite me studying CS, I would not know how to trace the game like you did to discover the cause of the memory problem. One day I hope to get to your level of expertise.

I have not been able to set aside some time to see if the audio glitch is reproduced on that Pentium 3 laptop. I am not even sure what kind of sound card is in there but it is the oldest hardware that I have so it will be worth a shot.

Sure, if you sit in mode 0 it's pretty simple. But if you're writing code for the GBA, you're probably gonna want to do stuff with the GBA's feature set, yeah? The bitmap modes, affine sprites and layers, sound, etc. get a little bit complicated. It's all stuff you can learn, don't get me wrong, and it's not like it's not so weird that knowledge you'd acquire from using other systems isn't applicable--but I find that there's a lot more that I had to have in my head when playing around with it than the NES (or systems I lean towards more, like the C64). It's a great platform to mess around with, but it is more complex. But if you're not going to use that complexity, for homebrew--I dunno, I'd just go grab a NES emulator.

GNU C++ had gremlins for the GBA last time I was writing homebrew for it, so I can't speak to that. I kinda enjoy writing assembly when messing around with this stuff, though, so, eh. For anything else, I love me some (Modern!) C++, but it kind of feels like I should be writing assembly for that stuff, it's more fun to me.

Do me a favor and chew on something for a sec, though: what does your "What?" do except add a hostile and combative edge to the conversation? Maybe don't do that. Thanks.

> GBA is clearly easier than NES.

The NES is a much simpler system. Granted, it's a simpler system that you're programming in a less-convenient language, but I think that which one is "easier" depends on what you're used to.

If you want to write C, that's an absolutely fair cop. I would much rather write assembly for this stuff--as I mentioned in a sibling, it sorta feels right?--so that wasn't something I was thinking about. Rather, the profusion of features that are kinda tricky (mentioned in that sibling) along with the ARM/Thumb mess.

> Or are people finding roms, perhaps intended for use with emulators, and loading those onto physical cartridges and selling them without renumeration or permission?

I think they're talking about this case (based on the wording "rom hack cartridges"). Someone takes an original game ROM and modifies it in some way (translation, level mods, whatever). Someone else takes the modified code, burns it onto actual hardware, and sells the result.

> Sort of related: I know this requires some specialized equipment to make new cartridges, but do you know if they sell blank cartridges that can just be loaded with games?

The usual method that I know is to remove the ROM chips from a donor cartridge (a working game), and replace them with chips flashed with customized data. The donor cart would need to provide the same custom chips/memory mappers/whatever that the game code expects to be present.

>My understanding was that independent game authors were writing games and making cartridges for these games which they then sold.

In most the cases I'm familiar with, the official release is only a patch file. You have to patch the original game with the patch file yourself. Often a third party will patch the file and host it themselves, making only add revenue. In some cases, a fourth party will take the patched file (either creating their own or taking one from the third party), and put it in a cartridge which they then sell of a significant sum of money (compared to the third party who is only getting the add revenue from you using their site).

In general, the people actually making the patch aren't making any money off it because of the increased risk of being shut down by whomever holds the original IP.

>Is the market large enough to support that much effort and expense?

I think the market for custom cartridges is mostly driven by people who buy cartridges and load their own roms onto it for their own use. Only a few do the extra work of trying to load roms and sale them.

Then again, certain games can go for $50 or more on ebay for a used cartridge. If you can fake the cartridge good enough, you might be able to make decent money selling these.

>it'd seem easier to spot this (from the IP owner's perspective) and seek preventative legal responses.

It's probably hard to track down because of the independent nature of those doing it. It's like the $50-$100 dollar craigslist ads for people offering to mod your SNES classic and add a bunch of roms to it (once you have everything set up, it is less than 15 minutes, and $50 tax free dollars is pretty good income for them amount of time).

>but do you know if they sell blank cartridges that can just be loaded with games?

That's my understanding of how most of this works, but that may be wrong. I personally don't do cartridges since my old systems are more finicky than using an emulator.

>I am guessing, hopefully, that you know more about this stuff than I do.

I only deal in the software side and don't do anything to make money. I'll help friends set up emulators on their PC, or help them with a retro-pi/SNES classic mods, but always for free. The extent of my knowledge of the hardware cartridges is based on posts by the rom hack creators disavowing any relationship with the hard copies. Though as another poster pointed out, I have seen a few people attempting to release hardware copies of new games. Mostly I just deal with unofficial English translations of JRPGs.