Not sure what caused the recent surge of interest in this old video I've seen from analytics and posts like this, but happy if people are enjoying it. The EarthBound romhacking scene is a small but fun one.
Yes, I ran the RoboRosewater account, which is where most people saw the concept I believe. I had a few documents with thousands of cards of output, went through them for any notable ones, and formatted and posted them. Probably 5-10% of the output made my personal cut for notability.
Then I salute you. Some of the funniest things I've EVER seen in my whole life was watching the LoadingReadyRun comedy troupe, doing their 'Desert Bus' fundraiser and punchy from lack of sleep, encounter RoboRosewater for the first time. It became a real tradition :)
I have my own mystery song, but a much more recent one, one of the songs that was playing at Google I/O. The soundtrack for the weekend was largely popular stuff from groups like CHVRCHES, but this one I could never identify using every technique I could think of. I put a minute-long clip of it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48gK7Krx0TQ if anyone here happens to be able to figure out its origin these days.
Here's one way they do it that isn't documented or widely known: an account can get "searchbanned". While your account is searchbanned, your new tweets can't show up in other people's search results unless they follow you. There is no indication when you've been seachbanned or when the ban is lifted, and no documentation on its existence or how to get un-searchbanned. We know because we gather community input on a specific hashtag, and have gotten complaints that specific people's contributions weren't included, because they didn't show up in the search.
Interestingly, we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets. They would not show for that person if they logged out. We also could not find out why that person's account in particular could see them.
This sounds like a bug we're aware of where an account that goes public -> private we'll reliably purge their tweets from the public index, but if an account goes private -> public sometimes we'll not re-populate the main index correctly.
> we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets
This part doesn't match what I'm describing, but could be explained by the logged in account having access to private tweets in search results that logged out / other accounts do not.
Due to both the second part, and that of the 7 accounts that we know this happened to, they messaged us just hours after tweeting that we weren't picking up their tweets, it doesn't sound like a match. The logged-in account also had no history with the accounts in question; we were actively in a call at the same time trying to figure out why that person could see tweets the others couldn't. I'd be happy to discuss details and specific tweets if you want.
Look through the past couple hundred or so of Vitor's tweets; he's been one-by-one reprogramming all the troublesome rooms and screens for a couple weeks.
That guy is certifiably insane. He patched Contra III, Gradius III, Super Mario World, Super R-Type and Race Drivin' to use the SA-1 chip. Which means now those games have a higher/consistent framerate. Kudos to that guy.
Hopefully Nintendo learns to appreciate these contributions and doesn't try to seek legal action against him.
If history is any indicator Nintendo will release these improvements on future virtual consoles as paid upgrades. They’ll credit the open source contributions they didn’t have to pay for to make this possible.
As far as I know they have repeatedly packaged open source emulation code in their work without notice. Guessing it hasn't become a big deal since nobody in the scene wants to anger Nintendo
The article you linked is about something quite different—Nintendo used a straight dump of their game from the internet. I'm guessing some engineer who didn't know about iNES headers thought they'd save time using the internet versus going through Nintendo's archive.
Newer VC releases haven’t had these headers, by the way. I guess if you were being conspiratorial you could presume Nintendo deleted the headers specifically, but we know it’s not like Nintendo doesn’t save these files. (See things like Star Fox 2; the complete version on the SNES classic was newer than any of the leaked versions.)
I’m really not aware of a time Nintendo has ever used code from a rom hack or emulator.
As the person who built the version that got popular enough for the Gartic company to build a competitor, I can say some developers are also the worst at having any design sense whatsoever, or adapting to competition ;).
I am morbidly curious if the simple website ads are sufficient--unlike myself and this author, they clearly have a lot more than just one person working part-time on their version, so presumably it brings the company money somehow.
reply