The Street Dance dance mat program, I have also sent a Melody version of the ROM, see my Notes: Development of two popular FC 2000 ROM Dance Dance Revolution , Dance Dance Revolution is one of the Invent, there Invent 2000's Logo, Cah4e3 dump the Invent 2008. Invent is a teacher at the early years in fact, opened a software company - hundreds of millions of German Software Co., Ltd. of Shenzhen City, the show's music is a student teacher at Columbia produced Yuan, Yuan Colombian, but a powerful figure in hand-made cottage FC game - simulator-based non- actual situation is that he helped design and technology into Taiwan, Wang's CPU. The Invent 2008 PCM version of the dance mat, I guess it is a game software company in Xi'an to do, to borrow the Invent 2000 Melody to PCM material will be singing live. [/quote]
from what I can work out from
that he seems to think a company in Xi'an (presumably referring to Nice Code) made the 2008 version based on Invent's 2000 version.. and from that I have Invent(or)'s Chinese name I guess, 深圳市亿万德软件有限公司 (though i kinda like Google's translation of "hundreds of millions of German Software Co., Ltd. of Shenzhen City") .. and something about Invent having helped design "Wang's CPU" from Taiwan - wonder if that has anything to do with the VT OneBus stuff, since Invent(or) games were some of the earliest to use it.
this post on Sky League mentions Inventor closed: http://www.efgcw.com/?dp-bbsthread-347.html (http://www.efgcw.com/?dp-bbsthread-347.html)
so I guess, somehow, Street Dance ended up with Nice Code and F22 with Waixing?
- taizou
-
so I guess, somehow, Street Dance ended up with Nice Code and F22 with Waixing?[/quote]Or F22 ended up with Nice Code, and Waixing licensed it from them like they did other Nice Code games!
Yeah! Or that.
And yeah, I'm getting the same gist from the Street Dance post as what you mentioned-- that the developer for Invent also played some part in designing the VT03. "Wang Tai Cheng" appears to have something to do with VRTech in the previous paragraph.
Edit: Yep, definitely referencing VRTech. 虚实科技 (which Google translates as "actual situation technology") is VRTech's Chinese name, according to the company's own site-- and it's mentioned in both paragraphs in maxzhou88's post.
Just found this Chinese forum post (http://www.waishi.net/viewthread.php?tid=29298&extra=page%3D20) with a job posting from NiceCode. Note the e-mail address: invent_2000. Hmmm.
And another reference (http://surina.cn.made-in-china.com/) on a Chinese site, this time a business listing. Note the name they had before NiceCode: Nature Color Game! And it's definitely the same company; same logo, same Chinese name, and even the same initials. This explains all the Nature Clan stuff, not to mention the credits to "Nature Color Game" in the DreamGear ROM.
Also, 亿万德 (Hundreds of Millions of Germans) is definitely Inventor. maxzhou88 flat-out says so here. (http://hi.baidu.com/maxzhou88/blog/item/d7f82cfddf0a011e09244dfd.html)
- codeman38
- Dec 20 2010, 11:26:48 PM
Just found this Chinese forum post (http://www.waishi.net/viewthread.php?tid=29298&extra=page%3D20) with a job posting from NiceCode. Note the e-mail address: invent_2000.[/quote]wow, I wasnt expecting to see such a direct link to Invent(or), with one being in Shenzhen and one being in Xi'an and all. but this seems to suggest NC were basically a successor to Invent. or at least whoever controlled that email address used to work there.
- codeman38
-
And another reference (http://surina.cn.made-in-china.com/) on a Chinese site, this time a business listing. Note the name they had before NiceCode: Nature Color Game! And it's definitely the same company; same logo, same Chinese name, and even the same
initials. This explains all the Nature Clan stuff, not to mention the credits to "Nature Color Game" in the DreamGear ROM.[/quote]
ah, it does - I always thought it was a bit weird that they had a series of games called "Nature Clan" that werent particularly nature-themed or anything, with the main characters just being those..red things. but I guess maybe they were called the Nature Clan because they were supposed to be Nature Color Game's mascots or something.
actually i've found a couple of signs of a Xi'an based company with the same Chinese name as (Shenzhen) Inventor. maxzhou mentioned it in a comment on this post:
http://hi.baidu.com/maxzhou88/blog/item/d4d0a0871f65df2cc65cc305.html (http://hi.baidu.com/maxzhou88/blog/item/d4d0a0871f65df2cc65cc305.html)
only other mention I can find is this (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9xsRiacEYLgJ:www.jy90.com/qyhtml/61shanxi/2429.Html+%22%E8%A5%BF%E5%AE%89%E4%BA%BF%E4%B8%87%E5%BE%B7%22&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk), some kind of company listing (cached, original seems to be down). just has their name and address anyway:
西安亿万德软件有限责任公司
陕西省西安市徐家湾渭滨街９３号
Incidentally, maxzhou88 is right: after stripping the UNIF header (the first 104 bytes), the 2008 Street Dance ROM works wonderfully in the VT03 emulator. Whee.
Incidentally, the post that mentions the company with the same name as Inventor that's in Xi'an? That ROM is still around, despite the apparent demise of ys168; here's the link (http://www.uudisc.com/user/maxzhou88/file/2171427). Seems to have much in common with the menu on the Famikon Yarou and Advance Bright clones, further suggesting an Inventor connection with those blasted things. (Also makes wonderful use of the fact that many folk songs share the same tune...)
And this other karaoke ROM (http://www.uudisc.com/user/maxzhou88/file/2171434) includes the same exact version of "Long Long Ago" that's used in the Penalty Kick ROM. Alas, "Battle Hymn" doesn't seem to work, but I wouldn't doubt that it's the same version from the Famikon Yarou menu.
interestingly I'm having no problem accessing ys168 for once. even in Chrome. looks like they finally fixed it! maybe.
& yeah that karaoke game does seem quite.. menu-ish. Weird sound engine though. and the usual fantastic backgrounds you get in this sort of thing
(http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/4576/bone.png)
Oh, the second of the karaoke ROMs that I linked to? Here's maxzhou's post (http://maxzhou88.blog.163.com/blog/static/106856037200882172854490/) (Google translation (http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmaxzhou88.blog.163.com%2Fblog%2Fstatic%2F106856037200882172854490%2F)). Guess where it was developed? Xi'an, of course! So yeah, probably an Inventor and/or NiceCode connection there, too.
Edit: And wow, you're right: ys168 now works in Firefox. Apparently they've finally decided to join the 21st century. :P So nice to not have to load up IE6 in Wine anymore to browse the ROM dumping grounds there.
Well ive just been editing Nice Code related stuff on the wiki, I started an article (http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Nice_Code_Software) and moved the whole list of games from Trump Grand's page. but i'm pretty sure at least *some* of the games in that list were actually developed by Waixing, especially the ones that they remade in 16-bit for the Zone 40 and whatnot. on 8-bit consoles like the Sudoku 49 in 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsHU0D2ymtU) they seem to have mixed their own games with Nice Code stuff with new graphics so its kinda hard to tell, but I definitely think these few are Waixing's own creation:
* Over Speed Racing
* Highway Racing
* Edacity Snakes (its lumped in with Greedy in the list but its definitely a different Snake clone)
* Hitting Mices
* Shooting Ballons
* Guard Farm
* Hua Rong Dao
* Police Skill
* Desert Gunman
* Diamond - the version on the Sudoku Games anyway, its different from the usual one
* Table Tennis (the pong clone)
* .. and more?
any thoughts?
I thought Waixing only made Super Fight I, Desert Storm and Hua Rong Dao on those things, judging by the copyright dates. Why do you assume that those other games are made by them?
well they always seem to show up together, and only on famiclones/carts with Waixing copyrighted versions of the Nice Code games.. I've never seen alternate versions of any of them on Trump Grand/Qi Sheng long/etc famiclones. they mostly have similar music and/or sound effects and HUDs and stuff too.
- codeman38
- Dec 21 2010, 12:50:52 AM
And this other karaoke ROM (http://www.uudisc.com/user/maxzhou88/file/2171434) includes the same exact version of "Long Long Ago" that's used in the Penalty Kick ROM. Alas, "Battle Hymn" doesn't seem to work, but I wouldn't doubt that it's the same version from the Famikon Yarou menu.[/quote]just noticed something in that karaoke game -
(http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3328/64668435.png)
no doubt about who made that one, i guess. :D
makes me wonder exactly what the connection is between Invent(or) and Nice Code though.. Nice Code was founded in Xi'an in 1999 according to their website, but Invent were still making games under their own name in 2002.
edit: actually it says in the RAR comments (probably in the associated blogpost too, if I could be arsed looking for it) that the two karaoke games in that archive were demos from a Xi'an based developer .. so it doesnt necessarily mean Invent was still around in 2002, maybe Nice Code just updated the copyright year on an older Invent production.
- taizou
- Jan 2 2011, 03:54:39 PM
makes me wonder exactly what the connection is between Invent(or) and Nice Code though.. Nice Code was founded in Xi'an in 1999 according to their website, but Invent were still making games under their own name in 2002.[/quote]Maybe Nice Code were originally called Inventor and then they renamed themselves sometime after 2002. That's just a wild guess though. I also forget where Inventor were/are based, although it might have changed like Waixing's.
One thing I've noticed is that one plug and play Famiclone (which I can't find the video of ATM) has the same tune as the one the DreamGEAR 75-in-1 has, except it's a note lower in pitch and seems to use a different sound engine. That particular Famiclone has some of those awful Inventor hacks on it, and the DreamGEAR has those awful Nice Code games which means I might be right on that guess.
- Cheetahmen
- Jan 2 2011, 04:15:22 PM
- taizou
- Jan 2 2011, 03:54:39 PM
makes me wonder exactly what the connection is between Invent(or) and Nice Code though.. Nice Code was founded in Xi'an in 1999 according to their website, but Invent were still making games under their own name in 2002.[/quote]Maybe Nice Code were originally called Inventor and then they renamed themselves sometime after 2002. That's just a wild guess though. I also forget where Inventor were/are based, although it might have changed like Waixing's.
One thing I've noticed is that one plug and play Famiclone (which I can't find the video of ATM) has the same tune as the one the DreamGEAR 75-in-1 has, except it's a note lower in pitch and seems to use a different sound engine. That particular Famiclone has some of those awful Inventor hacks on it, and the DreamGEAR has those awful Nice Code games which means I might be right on that guess.[/quote]as far as I know Inventor was in Shenzhen, but I'm not 100% on that. its pretty far from Xi'an, which is why i'm not exactly sure about Inventor becoming Nice Code.. but then there was that job advert for Nice Code with an Invent email address, and a Xian based company with the same name as Invent does seem to have existed at some point.
was that Famiclone the Famicom Yarou 54? I have one of those, it does have the same menu music as the Dreamgear, and it is full of Inventor hacks (with about five original Nice Code games mixed in there too) .. Cube Technology seems to own the "rights" to those hacks now. even though Street Dance went to Nice Code and F-22 seemingly to Waixing (but it might have been via Nice Code anyway).. but maybe if Nice Code *was* formerly Inventor, they wanted to distance themselves from cheap hacks like that, and thats why they changed their name? I dunno.
- taizou
- Jan 2 2011, 04:31:25 PM
was that Famiclone the Famicom Yarou 54? I have one of those, it does have the same menu music as the Dreamgear, and it is full of Inventor hacks (with about five original Nice Code games mixed in there too) .. Cube Technology seems to own the "rights" to those hacks now. even though Street Dance went to Nice Code and F-22 seemingly to Waixing (but it might have been via Nice Code anyway).. but maybe if Nice Code *was* formerly Inventor, they wanted to distance themselves from cheap hacks like that, and thats why they changed their name? I dunno.[/quote]I don't remember the name of it, but it certainly wasn't a Famicom Yarou and if I remember correctly, there were no original Nice Code games on it. And if they did want to distance themselves from these cheap hacks, that'd make sense given that they probably would have been caught sooner or later. Doesn't explain why Cube would get the rights to them though.
I think I can confirm that Nice Code had something to do with SNT's games from NJ065-NJ074. Most of their other games are 2mb big, whereas those are 512kb and use the same sound engine as the first 30 games SNT made.
As well as this, Sleuth on this Famiclone (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZ9yeS6984&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL) uses the same song as the one in Gu Mu Li Ying (Tomb Raider). It's very quiet for some odd reason but you can hear it if you listen closely enough. Well, not exactly the same but does sound very similar as far as I can tell.
Edit: Oh, and as it turns out a glitched version of the song plays in Eidolon's Revenge in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa4vXyE0N2M&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL) of the same clone.
yeah, i think youre right.. Nice Code's games seem to display text differently too, everything is 16x16 characters and sometimes theyre drawn in quite slowly. but Nanjing's own stuff usually has a full 8x8 font as well as the 16x16 one, which is used for numbers and punctuation and also makes it way easier to insert English text than most other chinese games - i tried it with Pokemon Yellow a while back:
(http://i55.tinypic.com/2r61bfs.png)
(incidentally thats the same font used by pretty much every keyboard famiclone: uppercase letters/punctuation/numbers from Family Basic, lowercase letters from *somewhere else entirely* and they don't even remotely match up with the Family Basic ones. that always kinda bugged me.)
- taizou
- Jan 27 2011, 07:18:07 PM
(incidentally thats the same font used by pretty much every keyboard famiclone: uppercase letters/punctuation/numbers from Family Basic, lowercase letters from *somewhere else entirely* and they don't even remotely match up with the Family Basic ones. that always kinda bugged me.)[/quote]I never quite understood that one either. The lowercase letters were ripped from the ROM of a VGA card-- surely they could've ripped the uppercase from the same place to match?
Oh, something else interesting in the video Cheetahmen linked: "Corsair (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZ9yeS6984#t=14m45s)" uses "Edelweiss" as its opening music. Like, the exact same version used on a lot of the multicart menus. And then it gets all weird and glitchy during the game, as if the developers didn't know what they were doing with that sound driver.
Also interesting to see as-yet-undiscovered variations on Nice Code games we already knew about. For instance, "Whale" is obviously "Submarine", while "Cursed Pond" is a sprite swap of "Mirror Devil World".
- codeman38
- Jan 28 2011, 10:42:17 AM
Oh, something else interesting in the video Cheetahmen linked: "Corsair (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZ9yeS6984#t=14m45s)" uses "Edelweiss" as its opening music. Like, the exact same version used on a lot of the multicart menus. And then it gets all weird and glitchy during the game, as if the developers didn't know what they were doing with that sound driver.[/quote]I think there are two different 8-bit renditions of that Edelweiss song, the other of which (I think) appears on the Asder PC-95. And I'm not surprised it glitches out, considering that the same thing happens in Eidolon's Revenge. I also like how the game after it is essentially Toy Factory with different graphics and music, which also appears on this thing. Oh, and Fairy seems to be an earlier version of one of those games included with the Factor 5 Famiclone.
BTW, the music in Final Fighter sounds vaguely familiar to me, but I can't remember where it's from.
Edit: Just realised that the death music in Aether Captor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioY815ijju8#t=190) is a badly edited version of the game over music in Track & Field.
Anyone notice that several of the games on the Games Xplosion have some sort of company logo on the title screen? Dune War (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M3ZGTZ39b8#t=10m9s), for instance. Can't exactly read it, but it looks like... "TWCS"? ...I've got nothing.
Ghost Palace (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M3ZGTZ39b8#t=13m24s) confirms what we've all been thinking: it's credited to "Nature Color Game", with the exact same logo they use as Nice Code Software. Whee.
- Cheetahmen
- Jan 28 2011, 11:42:50 AM
Edit: Just realised that the death music in Aether Captor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioY815ijju8#t=190) is a badly edited version of the game over music in Track & Field.[/quote]Exactly the same version used in Nice Code's hacks of Track & Field, in fact!
- codeman38
- Jan 28 2011, 12:08:23 PM
- Cheetahmen
-
Edit: Just realised that the death music in Aether Captor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioY815ijju8#t=190) is a badly edited version of the game over music in Track & Field.[/quote]Exactly the same version used in Nice Code's hacks of Track & Field, in fact![/quote]Not entirely sure if those are hacks, TBH. Some of the events weren't actually in Track & Field and the physics seem to be different.
Yeah, I've been trying to figure out if they actually are hacks or just really close copies.. either way, theyre weird.
Just noticed another giveaway of Nice Code's RPGs which allowed me to pretty much definitively identify NJ065 (Zui You Ji Zhi Tang San Zang) as a Nice Code game: the font that's used for numbers. NC's games (obviously) don't use the Family Basic font for stats; rather, they use that odd little serif font where the number 4 has a 'hook' in it, the same one that shows up in their multicart games.