Nice Code Software - the real developers of those Trump Grand/Qi Sheng Long games?

[taizou]

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.

[Awesome Panda]

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 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 of the same clone.

[taizou]

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:
(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.)

[codeman38]

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" 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".

[Awesome Panda]

codeman38

Jan 28 2011, 10:42:17 AM

Oh, something else interesting in the video Cheetahmen linked: "Corsair" 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 is a badly edited version of the game over music in Track & Field.

[codeman38]

Anyone notice that several of the games on the Games Xplosion have some sort of company logo on the title screen? Dune War, for instance. Can't exactly read it, but it looks like... "TWCS"? ...I've got nothing.Ghost Palace 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 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!

[Awesome Panda]

codeman38

Jan 28 2011, 12:08:23 PM

Cheetahmen

 

Edit: Just realised that the death music in Aether Captor 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.

[taizou]

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out if they actually are hacks or just really close copies.. either way, theyre weird.

[codeman38]

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.