Playable Quotes for Game Boy

I love this idea! I have a lot of little game memories that would fit perfectly into this form. I wonder how much of our feelings about particular moments are informed by the process of playing up to that point or what comes after. e.g. the introduction of the Medium Tank in Advance Wars is uninteresting on its own but really funny in retrospect when you get to the end of the game and you still have yet to see anything bigger (well i found it funny anyway).

Very interesting concept as well as technical execution by encoding the whole thing into the PNG pixels :)

Also cool to see myself featured there, so in case you need another homebrew game with access to the source try https://gitlab.com/BonsaiDen/vectroid.gb

Most gameboy games use banked memory, swapped in as 16k chunks. I'd wager a guess that the recording process monitors what chunks get banked in during the recorded gameplay, removes any bank that isn't used, and then restarts the demo if that removed data is accessed, as a failsafe.

The Raccoon demo behaves the way I might expect this to work: most potential player inputs allow you to reach the Raccoon, trigger his two text prompts, and cut the grass with Link's sword. But you can't enter any other screen, can't leave the second screen out the bottom, and can't perform most other actions; the moment you do, the game would need to run code that the quote never accessed, which triggers the failsafe. Even performing certain "safe" actions out of order occasionally fails, I'm guessing due to the RNG for stuff like leaf particles and whatnot.

You can see the source here: https://glitch.com/~tenmile we haven't taken the time to figure out what precisely what the appropriate license should be, though it will probably need to be GPL since the emulator we use is GPL licensed.

That said, the basics of making a quote are so simple that it should be pretty easy to add Playable Quote capabilities to other emulators with a minimal amount of code.

A full writeup of how it works is here: https://joel.franusic.com/playable_quotes_for_game_boy

Thanks for reminding me that our site said the post wasn't ready yet, I've just updated it with the link to that blog post!

It doesn't sound like they include the entire ROM, only the parts necessary to play back the recording. If you "take control", the game may try to access parts of the ROM which are missing, which causes the quote to reset. This happens frequently with the Metroid II example - the Tetris one seems much more robust.

We're big fans of GB Studio! In fact, the "Get the Gurdy" demo is from a game made with GB Studio. You can read more about how that game was made here: https://isaackarth.com/games/rom_gen_test_5/FDG21_Demo_Gener...

I got a Tetris too but the quote restarted as soon as it happened. I think this might be what they meant by “without Tetris”. Based on the high level description of how this works, I bet the code for handling a Tetris is masked out and accessing it during play restarts the quote.