OK, new comment after playing the demo. I absolutely LOVE it. You are, honestly, doing great work for preservation here. I finished this on real hardware years ago, and have recently been replaying it on real hardware along with emulating it using tinycdi, a fork of MAME. That doesn't run so well, since if you get Game Over the game crashes, so you need to load the inventory, quick save, and then quick load if you die, otherwise you need a hard reboot of the emulator.
Anyway...
Playing this was a wonderful experience. The screen transitions are so much faster! They are painfully slow on real hardware.
The transparency of objects showing characters and enemies behind them - YES! Genius idea. Absolutely fantastic.
The drop rate of items is perfect. You do not need a x2 option or anything. The reason I said this last time is because I had been playing the Game Boy demake, which had very poor drop rates. Replaying this on real hardware alongside your demo reminded me that you've got it spot on.
It's so fast and fluid. Maybe even too good! I find killing enemies who drop stuff, because it all flows so smoothly I end up collecting the item by touch it with my sword as soon as it's dropped. Meaning only sometimes do I actually see a rupee on the ground.
If I had any wishes for it... I wish we had access to the high resolution photos of the little dioramas they made. So instead of the 640x480 background images, you could use the original in high definition. Or maybe a fan could recreate each scene, based on the original? LOL - maybe for a future patch.
Honestly, you're doing a great job and I have no requests or suggestions. Please carry on as you see fit, and I hope you are able to finish it.
Is this a feasible idea though: that if fans were to either get hold of the developer's original photos, or were to recreate the dioramas in HD, you've be able to drop them in as part of a remixed mode? Playing the original on a CRT TV helped a lot - it fixed a lot of low res problems. Of course few people have a CRT, so this needs to be for use on HD devices, like laptops. But I'm tempted to hook my laptop up via HDMI to my downscaler, which outputs to my CRT TV, to see how it looks. I use it for films that have no HD uploads, but I think it might be a fun experiment for this.
This is a historically important game, which few people have access to. And you are making it available, and with much needed improvements, like fast screen transitions.
So again I thank you.
I will stop my playthroughs on real hardware and emulators, and instead wait for you to finish this. I look forward to testing future versions.
Good luck.
Do you have a schedule or ETA?
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Thank you for all the kind words :D I don't think a HD version is feasible, even if HD versions would be made/found, as the foreground cutouts are specifically made for the low res backgrounds, so they'd have to be remade too. It would be cool I agree, just not easy in the slightest. I'm currently working on the foreground cutouts of the Forest of Torian, which contains the entrance to the Shrine of Illusion. After that I'll have to add NPCs, warps, enemies, dialogue etc. Then after that the town of Verna and the Ubato Hills east of the Forest of Torian (with all the previously named stuff + collision and foreground) and then finally the Shrine of Illusion. I estimate it'll take me at least a couple of months, as I have to juggle multiple hobbies and projects too. It's a massive project, so I'm taking it one step at a time :)
https://imgur.com/a/o6WL3dm Here's the current progress on the forest. Btw this is only half of the forest. There's still two rows of tiles left after finishing these tiles.
All very good points - especially as you're mainly just one person. The important thing is reaching a finalised version containing the content from the base game itself. And having completed it, I know how much work you have ahead. Especially weird stuff like items and NPCs that I could never find the use for. There's a lot of stuff / rooms / screens, and lots of enemies which are only damaged by specific weapons.
Anyway, you have my moral support. Honestly I'd pay some money for the final version, but that throws up legal dangers with Nintendo. The original game sells for between £600 and £1500 on eBay now. So your project is important in more ways than one.
Have fun with it. I'll keep an eye on the page. :D
I mean, I do have a bandcamp page with my own music :P that way you're not buying the game, you're buying my music ;) https://jappawakka.bandcamp.com/
Hehehe, but don't feel obliged to pay me anything, I love working on the game and people enjoying it is already enough :)
Thank you for the link. Well, I recently bought a reproduction of this for CDi. Box, manual, printed disc, because an original disc costs way too much. But I would rather play your version than the original, because of the improvements. I'm not kidding - when you finish this, I promise I will buy a few of your albums as way of saying thanks for your efforts. I'd love it if Nintendo would license the fruits of your labours, in order to distribute it more widely, but I know the company doesn't work like that. But I honestly would drop real life coin on this. I'm not going to pay £1500 for an original CD. I owned it 20 years ago, sold it, and will never own it again. So this digital version is very exciting for me.