Fuck the Super Game Boy: Introduction (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Fuck the Super Game Boy: Introduction (2010)

loveconquersallgam.es

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This is somewhat interesting from the point of view of Ninendo nerdery, but the author clearly thinks the SGB is great rather than hating it. I don't understand what she's trying to say with the title at all, it seems to be nothing other than linkbait.

She comes back to it at the very end pf the series, with a likely explanation of why the special SGB features weren't used:

Now, imagine you’re a Game Boy developer. You want to add the bullet point “Super Game Boy compatible!" to your box, because it’ll help sell a few more copies. But not many people own one. If you want to do something really neat, it’ll add entire days to the project, require changing some art resources, and doing extra testing on a completely different system. Going that extra distance is going to cost a lot of money, and won’t help that much because most people don’t own an SGB to see it. What are you going to say?

Man, fuck the Super Game Boy!

Exactly.

I would have read a lot farther if she had explained that at the beginning. Thanks for the summary.

nothing other than linkbait

Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything "interesting enough to catch people's attention[1].

What the fuck is HN's problem with interesting headlines? Should everyone create articles and put headlines on them like "My overview of the pros and cons of the Super Game Boy as a platform for game developers"?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_bait

It's a bait-and-switch. The headline implies that the article is about X, but it turns out to be about Y.

Here I thought it was sarcasm.

It would be a bait and switch if it were a bait and switch, but in this case it's not.

You can't say that the title of every single type of article should just be an objective summary of what's in the article. That's like criticising Steinbeck for calling it "The Grapes of Wrath" instead of "Dirt Farming Oakies Do California".

> What the fuck is HN's problem with interesting headlines?

Linkbait isn't an interesting headline. Its a headline that is interesting at the expense of not being an accurate reflection of the content of the article for which it serves as a headline.

Its a trick, and unsurprisingly, people don't like to be tricked.

Its a headline that is interesting at the expense of not being an accurate reflection of the content of the article for which it serves as a headline

Well, that's your definition of Link Bait but as far as I can see it's not the generally accepted definition of Link Bait (outside of the hyper critical anti-marketing world of certain elements of the HN readership).

Perhaps you should refer to that type of article as "Link Bait and Switch".

I would contend, however, that in the case of this article it's neither. It's just a strong headline attached to a well written article about the Super Game Boy.

If you want to understand why we hate linkbait, you are going to need to understand the communities definition. We see it as a lie, we don't need a way to trick us into reading an article. We are not that sort of community.

And article with the title "intricacies of x86 branch prediction" is going to be read by us, it doesn't need to be called "how to predict the future".

> Well, that's your definition of Link Bait but as far as I can see it's not the generally accepted definition of Link Bait

I've seen the term "linkbait" (never two words, and never capitalized) used lots of places besides HN, and always with that meaning.

> I would contend, however, that in the case of this article it's neither.

Neither what? Only one thing was addressed in your post, so "neither" doesn't make any sense.

> It's just a strong headline attached to a well written article about the Super Game Boy.

A strong headline does two things: provides a clear idea of the thesis of the article and draws attention. At best, the one here does the second without doing the first, making it a weak headline. At worst, it creates a misleading impression as to the general thrust of the article.

"Linkbait" seems a pretty fair description, though its probably not the worst instance in the world.

For the record, dragonwriter's use of "linkbait" is how I use it.

Nerds I know don't like shallow things, they like straight information and not double talk. So your definition of linkbait is exactly what nerds I know, and myself, hate.

This reminds me of the trick where you can create a GIF of more than 256 colors, by making an animated GIF with a different palette per frame and only selectively updating parts of the image.

I believe you're referring to this awesomeness..

http://phil.ipal.org/tc.html

Is this how Game boy games have color when playing on a Game Boy Color or Advanced?

A brief search[1] turns up that the GBC had a few palettes actually built into the hardware, so games that were released before the system out would end up being colorized by one of these; supposedly for some first-party games, the system would actually determine what game was being played and select a more appropriate palette.

Once the system had been released, games could be made in "dual-mode" which would support a monochrome palette when played on the original hardware, but would use custom colorization on the GBC[2].

I'm trying to find more technical sources but haven't located any yet, so if anyone help me find more information I'd be very interested.

EDIT: I found a little more information. Here's[3] someone who disassembled the GBC boot ROM. It looks like on boot, the system would check to see if the inserted cartridge is one of 93 first-party games, and apply a specified palette; otherwise, it would just apply a default palette.

[1]: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=497582

[2]: http://www.allgame.com/platform.php?id=17662

[3]: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?19247...

SGB palettes aren't recognized by the CGB, which instead only has a hardcoded set of 12 to apply on regular GameBoy games. Backwards-compatible CGB games used another incompatible format. Some games (Pokémon Yellow) contained both. If you want you can see all the gory details in The Game Boy Programming Manual (huge PDF):

http://chrisantonellis.com/files/gameboy/gb-programming-manu...

I knew that the CGB allowed you to pick among the hardcoded 12 color palettes (by holding down various key combinations at the Nintendo logo boot screen), but after reading the article I was curious about this as well. I wonder why they decided not to make the CGB recognize the SGB palettes?

Because SGB palettes weren't intended to be used on the whole screen at once (or, at least, you couldn't assume that they were intended to be used that way). What looks great on one region might look terrible on the entire screen. So they decided to simply set it up so that if you wanted to make a palette available on the whole screen, you could do so by making a CGB version of it.

Interesting article, though. It would be interesting to see more games designed this way, though I doubt that'll ever happen. Pity, that.

It would just use a default palettization system.

Immensely entertaining read. Thanks for the link!

She had me curious as to how DK 94 pulled that one off, that grid made it pretty clear.

DK 94 really was a good game.

I really liked this article series.

The pattern areas are a cool idea on how to add more colors to a 4-shade monochrome game without "changing the API"

(See also http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/50580417138/this-is-neat-a... on how developers/designersprobably used to test it..)

Never forget the day I got my first GBC...

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