Contra is my favorite game of all time so this is a real treat, and the co-op idea is fantastic. Not to be greedy, but how hard would it be to add music? :)
One of the things that I'm curious about: How easy / hard is it to use the same NES game with higher resolution / color graphics, and sample-based sound?
Are there any emulators out there that let you swap in higher resolution assets so a game can be freshened without a complete port?
I would not think so, at least not in a meaningful way. That would require to edit the cartridge data thus the ROM, as all sprite data was contained within the cartridge. Sample based sound is impossible natively, as NES and older game consoles don't work with digital data but synthesizers. You could perhaps synthesize the music to WAV files and then enchance it. But then again, NES and thus its emulators have no way of playing digitized audio!
The NES in particular is probably not too difficult to upscale, because the graphics data is stored on its own ROM chip (sometimes RAM) in a well structured layout. SMB1 just uses a ROM chip containing many tile graphics which the CPU code addresses by tile index. It would be really easy for an emulator to use the same tile indices to address any arbitrary set of tiles loaded from a PNG. Some games use RAM, which makes it harder as you'd have to index the PNG by hash or something.
100% AI I'm sure. I played around with this kind of thing a month or so ago and Codex had no problems mashing games up from just the ROMs. In about 30 minutes I had the contra guys running through SMB 1 shooting enemies.
Contra is my favorite game of all time so this is a real treat, and the co-op idea is fantastic. Not to be greedy, but how hard would it be to add music? :)
But the Japanese Contra was so much better! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CiXzONyCDW0
Is the audio not supposed to work? I was hoping to hear the legendary tracks!
One of the things that I'm curious about: How easy / hard is it to use the same NES game with higher resolution / color graphics, and sample-based sound?
Are there any emulators out there that let you swap in higher resolution assets so a game can be freshened without a complete port?
You might like 3dSen, which came out several years ago. It does some pretty crazy stuff, converting NES games into essentially 3D voxel environments.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147940/3dSen_PC
whoa, that's cool. I didn't know about this. Thanks for sharing!
I would not think so, at least not in a meaningful way. That would require to edit the cartridge data thus the ROM, as all sprite data was contained within the cartridge. Sample based sound is impossible natively, as NES and older game consoles don't work with digital data but synthesizers. You could perhaps synthesize the music to WAV files and then enchance it. But then again, NES and thus its emulators have no way of playing digitized audio!
The NES in particular is probably not too difficult to upscale, because the graphics data is stored on its own ROM chip (sometimes RAM) in a well structured layout. SMB1 just uses a ROM chip containing many tile graphics which the CPU code addresses by tile index. It would be really easy for an emulator to use the same tile indices to address any arbitrary set of tiles loaded from a PNG. Some games use RAM, which makes it harder as you'd have to index the PNG by hash or something.
Compute motion vectors, faux depth, and add DLLS5 to it maybe? Could be pretty cool, or pretty horrific. Only one way to find out :)
Mesen has texture packs. Don't know about sound, you'd have to reverse each game's sound driver first. https://vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Famicom/NES_Sound_Dri...
Idk about swapping assets but zsnes used to have a range of video filters that could improve the experience on a modern screen quite a bit.
Edit: For SNES, not NES, my bad.
All that work and then somehow transposing the A and B keys at the very end.
thanks for bringing back my childhood memories!
Cool, how did you build the multiplayer mode? And how much AI was used?
100% AI I'm sure. I played around with this kind of thing a month or so ago and Codex had no problems mashing games up from just the ROMs. In about 30 minutes I had the contra guys running through SMB 1 shooting enemies.
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Most of the keys aren't working for me in Firefox though :-(
i only testing in chrome. Will look into it!