How many projects have been started for our beloved machine...

[Dicer]

Only to have never been finished for one reason or another?

A list of what's and why's seems like it would be interesting and depressing stuff.

[LostFlunky]

https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=10666.0

[Dicer]

https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=10666.0

It's pinned so I never noticed it and it's out of date....this if for stuff that never came out, not the stuff that actually came out.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Most of them weren't finished due to over confidence ("This will be easy!"), ADHD ("I wanna do this other thing that is currently a thing"), or fuckit ("This is boring, I quit.").

There's also "real life".   That's a thing.

and people move on to other stuff after they're done tinkering around. 

[Psycho Punch]

I have had the domain http://pce.ninja/ for years now and I've never started what I wanted to do with it.

[OldRover]

I can speak for stuff I've been involved in and why they've either stopped or have been put on hold.

I was working with Fragmare on Xymati but it was requiring a level of competence above and beyond what I was capable of at the time. I just didn't have the skills to program all the stuff it required. That's not an issue nowadays, now it's just time. Maybe it's something that can be picked up again in the future.
Monolith basically ran out of steam, so to speak. I was having more and more issues in my "real life" and was neglecting the project, so people split, thinking it was a dead project. However, it has a complete soundtrack custom-made for it by a professional musician, and it's part of a quadrilogy so it will eventually go back into production. The game engine was an important evolutionary step leading up to the creation of the platformer sections of HE.
Dragon Arm effectively died when we decided to shut down Frozen Utopia. I doubt it will be back.
Jungle Bros ran into memory issues on the PCE, so lord_cack and I decided to try to bring it to the PC instead. We lost touch over time and the project basically faded into obscurity. I did release the code and assets to another PCE coder to see if he would pick up where we had left off but I am not sure if anything ever came of it.
Einzelganger was put on hold due to irl issues with its designer. We've since spoken about reviving the project in the future. Asteroid Challenge, a small minigame released for both PCE and PC-FX, was based on the Einzelganger game engine, and the code was later reworked for both LDP and the shooter portions of HE.

Also, that page has one minor issue... Henshin Engine isn't an Eponasoft project, it's a Saru Studio project.

[crazydean]

I can speak for stuff I've been involved in and why they've either stopped or have been put on hold.

I was working with Fragmare on Xymati but it was requiring a level of competence above and beyond what I was capable of at the time. I just didn't have the skills to program all the stuff it required. That's not an issue nowadays, now it's just time. Maybe it's something that can be picked up again in the future.
Monolith basically ran out of steam, so to speak. I was having more and more issues in my "real life" and was neglecting the project, so people split, thinking it was a dead project. However, it has a complete soundtrack custom-made for it by a professional musician, and it's part of a quadrilogy so it will eventually go back into production. The game engine was an important evolutionary step leading up to the creation of the platformer sections of HE.
Dragon Arm effectively died when we decided to shut down Frozen Utopia. I doubt it will be back.
Jungle Bros ran into memory issues on the PCE, so lord_cack and I decided to try to bring it to the PC instead. We lost touch over time and the project basically faded into obscurity. I did release the code and assets to another PCE coder to see if he would pick up where we had left off but I am not sure if anything ever came of it.
Einzelganger was put on hold due to irl issues with its designer. We've since spoken about reviving the project in the future. Asteroid Challenge, a small minigame released for both PCE and PC-FX, was based on the Einzelganger game engine, and the code was later reworked for both LDP and the shooter portions of HE.

Also, that page has one minor issue... Henshin Engine isn't an Eponasoft project, it's a Saru Studio project.

I know this is a dick question, but have completed anything for the PCE?

[Psycho Punch]

I know this is a dick question, but have completed anything for the PCE?

Mysterious Song, have you not played it?

[OldRover]

Mysterious Song
PCEFXBOMB
Asteroid Challenge
BRAM editors for Cosmic Fantasy 2 and Exile
A Crash Course In HuC (technically this isn't quite done, as I still have a couple of tutorials I would like to add, but it's done enough to allow others to start their own projects)
I also released a platform engine prototype for others to use as a basis for making their own platformer games

So yes, I have finished quite a few things for the PCE.

[Dicer]

I can speak for stuff I've been involved in and why they've either stopped or have been put on hold.

I was working with Fragmare on Xymati but it was requiring a level of competence above and beyond what I was capable of at the time. I just didn't have the skills to program all the stuff it required. That's not an issue nowadays, now it's just time. Maybe it's something that can be picked up again in the future.
Monolith basically ran out of steam, so to speak. I was having more and more issues in my "real life" and was neglecting the project, so people split, thinking it was a dead project. However, it has a complete soundtrack custom-made for it by a professional musician, and it's part of a quadrilogy so it will eventually go back into production. The game engine was an important evolutionary step leading up to the creation of the platformer sections of HE.
Dragon Arm effectively died when we decided to shut down Frozen Utopia. I doubt it will be back.
Jungle Bros ran into memory issues on the PCE, so lord_cack and I decided to try to bring it to the PC instead. We lost touch over time and the project basically faded into obscurity. I did release the code and assets to another PCE coder to see if he would pick up where we had left off but I am not sure if anything ever came of it.
Einzelganger was put on hold due to irl issues with its designer. We've since spoken about reviving the project in the future. Asteroid Challenge, a small minigame released for both PCE and PC-FX, was based on the Einzelganger game engine, and the code was later reworked for both LDP and the shooter portions of HE.

Also, that page has one minor issue... Henshin Engine isn't an Eponasoft project, it's a Saru Studio project.

Thank you for all that information, and hopefully someday some of this either get's finished or handed to someone up to the task of  finishing it off.

[ccovell]

I have had a few...  I guess I would like to work on Downland again someday.

What happened?  Uh, I guess cohabitation and marriage happened.  :]

Over New Years a year ago, I wanted to do something with full-screen realtime "depth cueing" (?) of an overhead map, and worked on the following.  It brightened land above you, darkened it below you, and had an animated "sea level" plane that you could move up or down, too.  If you got your head underwater, it'd drown the screen in blue (seafoam layer on SuperGrafx, too).   But the visual impact is not quite there, IMO.  And I immediately found the cool NTSC chroma trick which became my "Old is Beautiful" demo, so I lost interest.


Perhaps in the future, an isometric map traveller with depth cueing would be a better pipe dream...

[crazydean]

I know this is a dick question, but have completed anything for the PCE?

Mysterious Song, have you not played it?

That's one of the few games I own for the system. Thanks for that!

[ParanoiaDragon]

I can speak for stuff I've been involved in and why they've either stopped or have been put on hold.

I was working with Fragmare on Xymati but it was requiring a level of competence above and beyond what I was capable of at the time. I just didn't have the skills to program all the stuff it required. That's not an issue nowadays, now it's just time. Maybe it's something that can be picked up again in the future.
Monolith basically ran out of steam, so to speak. I was having more and more issues in my "real life" and was neglecting the project, so people split, thinking it was a dead project. However, it has a complete soundtrack custom-made for it by a professional musician, and it's part of a quadrilogy so it will eventually go back into production. The game engine was an important evolutionary step leading up to the creation of the platformer sections of HE.
Dragon Arm effectively died when we decided to shut down Frozen Utopia. I doubt it will be back.
Jungle Bros ran into memory issues on the PCE, so lord_cack and I decided to try to bring it to the PC instead. We lost touch over time and the project basically faded into obscurity. I did release the code and assets to another PCE coder to see if he would pick up where we had left off but I am not sure if anything ever came of it.
Einzelganger was put on hold due to irl issues with its designer. We've since spoken about reviving the project in the future. Asteroid Challenge, a small minigame released for both PCE and PC-FX, was based on the Einzelganger game engine, and the code was later reworked for both LDP and the shooter portions of HE.

Also, that page has one minor issue... Henshin Engine isn't an Eponasoft project, it's a Saru Studio project.

Don't forget Neutopia 3.  It unfortunately seemed to be problematic to even think about making it as a proper Neutopia IIRC.

[esteban]

Don't forget Neutopia 3.  It unfortunately seemed to be problematic to even think about making it as a proper Neutopia IIRC.

I will *never* forget.

R.I.P. Seabloon

[Arkhan Asylum]

Don't forget Neutopia 3.  It unfortunately seemed to be problematic to even think about making it as a proper Neutopia IIRC.

I will *never* forget.

R.I.P. Seabloon

Except now with all the repros and copyright dicking arounding, its like "why the hell not!?"
lol

[OldRover]

Don't forget Neutopia 3.  It unfortunately seemed to be problematic to even think about making it as a proper Neutopia IIRC.

Yeah, and when the trademarks were renewed on the first two games, it just sealed that. N3 wasn't listed on the page though, so I didn't comment on it. There are a few other games which never made it through the production process that also aren't listed so I left them out, such as Valkyrie Midnight (since FU is no longer officially active, though perhaps SS could pick this up in the future) and our proper conversion of Golden Axe (because it's a spare time project that can never be released as a properly manufactured disc). There is also Mysterious Song II: Eternal Silence, which is inactive at the moment, as it was always a side project which I worked on by myself from time to time using stock assets until the time came to find proper talent for it. There are also a few projects that few have ever heard of that I have had a hand in but that are either inactive or just never got off the ground, such as Road to Tenochtitlan, Honey Kitty, Two Ladies, and the one that Necromancer has been pining for for years, Bikini Girls Of Puerto Rico.

One thing that many people don't know is that this all is not too dissimilar to Hollywood. For every movie that makes it to the big screen, scores of movies are either choked up in development hell, never get the necessary funding to complete, or are abandoned/shelved for a variety of reasons. Games are the same way... for every game that is released, plenty are not, for a myriad of reasons. Any dev who states that he or she has never had a game in the works that never made it is being dishonest. As Henry Rollins would say it, "you're a liar and you're boring!"

[NecroPhile]

.... and the one that Necromancer has been pining for for years, Bikini Girls Of Puerto Rico.

Fuck yeah!

[CrackTiger]

Henshin Engine already has more content completed than many commercial PC Engine games. I'm expecting complaints that the final game will be "too long!" to beat.

[DildoKKKobold]

A Crash Course In HuC (technically this isn't quite done, as I still have a couple of tutorials I would like to add, but it's done enough to allow others to start their own projects)

FWIW, this is huge. First, I wouldn't have been able to jump into TG16 programming without this.

Second, and most surprising, this doesn't exist, at all, for the SNES. Let that sink in. The #1 leader of the 16 bit era doesn't have a decent set of programming tutorials.

[touko]

chuck no-rice karate is close to be finished,and i have some SGX projects only .

[ParanoiaDragon]

Don't forget Neutopia 3.  It unfortunately seemed to be problematic to even think about making it as a proper Neutopia IIRC.

Yeah, and when the trademarks were renewed on the first two games, it just sealed that. N3 wasn't listed on the page though, so I didn't comment on it. There are a few other games which never made it through the production process that also aren't listed so I left them out, such as Valkyrie Midnight (since FU is no longer officially active, though perhaps SS could pick this up in the future) and our proper conversion of Golden Axe (because it's a spare time project that can never be released as a properly manufactured disc). There is also Mysterious Song II: Eternal Silence, which is inactive at the moment, as it was always a side project which I worked on by myself from time to time using stock assets until the time came to find proper talent for it. There are also a few projects that few have ever heard of that I have had a hand in but that are either inactive or just never got off the ground, such as Road to Tenochtitlan, Honey Kitty, Two Ladies, and the one that Necromancer has been pining for for years, Bikini Girls Of Puerto Rico.

One thing that many people don't know is that this all is not too dissimilar to Hollywood. For every movie that makes it to the big screen, scores of movies are either choked up in development hell, never get the necessary funding to complete, or are abandoned/shelved for a variety of reasons. Games are the same way... for every game that is released, plenty are not, for a myriad of reasons. Any dev who states that he or she has never had a game in the works that never made it is being dishonest. As Henry Rollins would say it, "you're a liar and you're boring!"

How could I forget about Golden Axe & Valkyrie Midnight!?  I think I'm begining to lose it!

chuck no-rice karate is close to be finished,and i have some SGX projects only .

Very much been looking forward to Chuck no-rice!!

[FraGMarE]

I can speak for stuff I've been involved in and why they've either stopped or have been put on hold.

I was working with Fragmare on Xymati but it was requiring a level of competence above and beyond what I was capable of at the time. I just didn't have the skills to program all the stuff it required. That's not an issue nowadays, now it's just time.

Yea, it is quite an ambitious project.  Funny part is, I've still got all the completed graphics sitting on my hdd, ready to go.  It's literally almost all completely drawn.  I still crack open the WIP folder and tinker with pixels sometimes.     If somebody gets the balls to try and program it in HuC6280 one day, let me know... it's definitely not for the faint of heart.  It's basically on par, in terms of complexity , with any TG-16/PCE vertical shmup you can think of.

[elmer]

A Crash Course In HuC (technically this isn't quite done, as I still have a couple of tutorials I would like to add, but it's done enough to allow others to start their own projects)

FWIW, this is huge. First, I wouldn't have been able to jump into TG16 programming without this.

How come I'd never heard of this until you mentioned it ... this is HUGE! 

This is just what I've been looking for! 

Brilliant! 

[touko]

Very much been looking forward to Chuck no-rice!!

Thanks 

[OldRover]

How could I forget about Golden Axe & Valkyrie Midnight!?  I think I'm begining to lose it!

They were both a pretty long time ago so hey, it happens. I would like to be able to finish both of them someday but the latter is more likely, as you and Black Tiger pretty much finished all of the assets for the game, and ChrlyMac's sprite dumps are already color-corrected for the PCE hardware. Now it's just a matter of time, like everything else.

[elmer]

I was working with Fragmare on Xymati but it was requiring a level of competence above and beyond what I was capable of at the time. I just didn't have the skills to program all the stuff it required. That's not an issue nowadays, now it's just time.

Yea, it is quite an ambitious project.  Funny part is, I've still got all the completed graphics sitting on my hdd, ready to go.  It's literally almost all completely drawn.

I'd seen the Xymati page on FB, but stopped scrolling down when I saw that it had gone Windows and dropped PCE.


Then you just posted this in the other thread ...

Here are a few > http://pixeljoint.com/p/7851.htm  ;)

Your art for the PCE is excellent, I absolutely love what I'm seeing there!   

[DildoKKKobold]

A Crash Course In HuC (technically this isn't quite done, as I still have a couple of tutorials I would like to add, but it's done enough to allow others to start their own projects)

FWIW, this is huge. First, I wouldn't have been able to jump into TG16 programming without this.

How come I'd never heard of this until you mentioned it ... this is HUGE! 

This is just what I've been looking for! 

Brilliant! 

I'm not sure why you'd need a tutorial? You code the compiler!

[OldRover]

I'm not sure why you'd need a tutorial? You code the compiler!

Not all coders are accomplished in all things code-related. Coding games requires a specific set of code-related skills; you don't have to be a hardcore h4xx0r to be a great game programmer, you just have to understand game systems and have enough knowledge of programming to make your ideas work. You can be the most amazeballs programmer of operating systems in the world but still hardcore fail to code a fun game... at the same time, you can program an awesome game and still be absolutely clueless about coding a compiler or a memory manager.

[DildoKKKobold]

Not all coders are accomplished in all things code-related. Coding games requires a specific set of code-related skills; you don't have to be a hardcore h4xx0r to be a great game programmer, you just have to understand game systems and have enough knowledge of programming to make your ideas work. You can be the most amazeballs programmer of operating systems in the world but still hardcore fail to code a fun game... at the same time, you can program an awesome game and still be absolutely clueless about coding a compiler or a memory manager.

I disagree, I find coding skills to be mostly portable. I'm not a game programmer by any means. My background was in computer and electrical engineering. The majority of my research has focused around signal processing in MATLAB, but I also had to write my own data acquisition system in C#. Additionally, I had to write embedded C for arduino for one part of the project. The point isn't to brag, the point is, it seems like most coding skills are incredibly transferable, depending on what your needs are. My strongest coding language is MATLAB by far, but I can manage my way around HuC.

[Arkhan Asylum]

I disagree, I find coding skills to be mostly portable. I'm not a game programmer by any means. My background was in computer and electrical engineering. The majority of my research has focused around signal processing in MATLAB, but I also had to write my own data acquisition system in C#. Additionally, I had to write embedded C for arduino for one part of the project. The point isn't to brag, the point is, it seems like most coding skills are incredibly transferable, depending on what your needs are. My strongest coding language is MATLAB by far, but I can manage my way around HuC.

raw "coding skills" might be transferable, but you're only talking about like, how to properly use a C library, or the constructs of a language.

That has nothing to do with knowing how to use said things for a game engine VS. writing a compiler.

The two are very different things, with very different mindsets, skillsets, and hurdles to deal with.

being an expert on writing a state machine or enemy AI isn't going to help you much when you're trying to write a parse tree for a programming language, lol.

[elmer]

This is just what I've been looking for! 

I'm not sure why you'd need a tutorial? You code the compiler!

Because I've hardly found any documentation on how HuC is *supposed* to be used, and if I'm trying to make improvements, then I need to know what people think stuff is supposed to do.

There's some stuff in there that's not how I would have done it, and I need to know how to avoid breaking things.

It's pretty clear that compatibility with existing code is far more important than whatever notions I may have over what I personally feel to be the "preferred" way (there's hardly ever a hard "right" or "wrong" in this stuff).

I also want to be able to point folks to some decent documentation in the readme for Uli's HuC, and in any page of programming links that we make.

Anyway ... I'm just messing around inside someone else's code, not "coding the compiler". That's different. And remember that the core of HuC is based on Ron Cain's SmallC, which was designed to be short enough, and simple enough, to be a type-it-in-yourself magazine article, back-in-the-day.

And just because I messed-around in GCC to get the compiler outputing PC-FX code again, doesn't mean that I have any clue of the *real* complexity of the internals inside their compiler.

I disagree, I find coding skills to be mostly portable.

I've got to both agree, and disagree.

I hope that we can all agree that just because you've got a lot of experience in one area of programming, doesn't suddenly mean that you can instantly be a productive expert in a different area of programming. There is usually a *lot* of domain-specific knowledge that needs to be learned.

That *seems* to me to be the main thrust of what The Old Rover and Arkhan are saying, and I totally agree.

But I've found that a *good* programmer can usually pick up the simple stuff quickly, and transfer their problem-breakdown, and logic-organizational skills between domains and languages, pretty easily.

That *seems* to me to be what you're saying, and I agree.

But (IMHO), the really hairy areas in any domain, are going to take anyone a long while to master.

Luckily, there are very few of those (if any) on these old 4th-gen single-processor consoles.

[DildoKKKobold]

I also want to be able to point folks to some decent documentation in the readme for Uli's HuC, and in any page of programming links that we make.

If you didn't know about the tutorial, you might not know about this- http://archaicpixels.com/Main_Page
I apologize if you already did know. I use this as my main "WTF do I do now?"

I hope that we can all agree that just because you've got a lot of experience in one area of programming, doesn't suddenly mean that you can instantly be a productive expert in a different area of programming. There is usually a *lot* of domain-specific knowledge that needs to be learned.

That *seems* to me to be the main thrust of what The Old Rover and Arkhan are saying, and I totally agree.

But I've found that a *good* programmer can usually pick up the simple stuff quickly, and transfer their problem-breakdown, and logic-organizational skills between domains and languages, pretty easily.

That *seems* to me to be what you're saying, and I agree.

Yeah, I think that is mostly what I was getting at. In academic settings, there seems to be two (10) types of people, those that just *get* coding, and those that don't. Even if they don't have the mastery of a language, it seems much easier to switch around, because the fundamentals stay the same. Its a lot easier than learning a new spoken/written language.

[OldRover]

Yeah, once you understand programming in general, it's not nearly as difficult to take on another language, provided the paradigm doesn't differ too radically. For many years (nearly two decades), I mostly used BASIC and C, so trying to learn C++ was a major pain in the tail because it's a completely different paradigm. However, once I managed to wrap my head around the differences, I learned other OOP languages as well. In addition to coding HE and LDP, I'm also studying Android and Python... they are very different but understanding the basic principles of both procedural and OOP methodologies helps tremendously. Still, my eyes glass over if I look at the source code to gcc or even huc (and this is coming from someone with formal education in PLT, mind you)... but the code for Quake, for example, makes perfect sense to me.