#27651 - Mucca - Mon Oct 18, 2004 12:08 pm
Howdy
Was just wondering roughly what percentage of GBA games offer on-cart save options, as opposed to the old password systems. I imagine its quite high. Anyone got any info?
#27652 - Steve++ - Mon Oct 18, 2004 12:17 pm
I'd say all of them do.
#27654 - Celeryface - Mon Oct 18, 2004 12:49 pm
I've only seen maybe 2 or 3 GBA games without the save option, so far.
#27659 - poslundc - Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:07 pm
Passwords haven't been in wide usage since the original NES/Gameboy days. Even then, a significant percentage of those games used battery backed-up RAM instead of passwords.
Dan.
#27661 - Mucca - Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:42 pm
Cheers, that pretty much confirmed what I was thinking. Sorry for ingorance but Im not really a GBA player.
#27677 - sgeos - Mon Oct 18, 2004 9:56 pm
I think password systems are really nifty, but I have yet to see a password based GBA game.
-Brendan
#27678 - SimonB - Mon Oct 18, 2004 10:20 pm
I dont have any password based GBA games myself but I do remember some early 3rd party games without any save chips. I particularly remember an early racing game that used SRAM in Japan but the US version was made to use passwords instead (keeping in mind that it was 3+ years ago so I might be mistaken). *searches IGN* oh yes...here it is... GT Advance Championchip Racing...Im sure there are loads more though.
Simon
#27679 - Miked0801 - Mon Oct 18, 2004 11:48 pm
We were almost forced to use them in save on per unit costs, but sanity finally reigned and we were able to convince our publishers that they were necessary - even a 512 byte EEPROM is much better than a password system.
#27691 - Abscissa - Tue Oct 19, 2004 5:55 am
| Miked0801 wrote: |
| and we were able to convince our publishers that they were necessary |
Ick. That really says a lot about publishers, and the industry, if they needed to be convinced of something like that.
#27693 - sajiimori - Tue Oct 19, 2004 6:32 am
Industry is profit driven. Let your wallet to the talking and they'll listen.
#27708 - Miked0801 - Tue Oct 19, 2004 8:53 pm
Adding EEPROM costs an addition roughly $1.00 per unit. Sell 1M games, lose 1M in revenue. Not a big deal on a million selling game, but everyone likes more money. Now, the same module on a game that bombs and only sells 40K units. That's a lot of money they just lost.
You must convince that spending an additional dollar per cart will generate an addition 50+K units of sales to cover the costs. We were able to do this, luckily.
#31055 - Johna - Tue Dec 07, 2004 12:37 pm
Some of the first games had passwords, like WWF Road to WrestleMania & so on. Maybe the games shold have both saves & passwords.... You know, passwords for cheating, level codes... etc.... I don't like cheating myself untill I finsh the game (ex: GTA) makes the game last longer.
_________________
Do you want me to cook that or not?
#31065 - blinky465 - Tue Dec 07, 2004 2:49 pm
| Johna wrote: |
| You know, passwords for cheating, level codes... etc.... |
I was considering using passwords on my next game, purely to allow those players who aren't that devoted to solving the puzzles a way to "by-pass" the most difficult parts, and feel like they're making progress in the game.
I too don't like cheating (too much, I did spend a significant part of the 80s writing poke, poke, poke into my Speccy to get to the next level though) but I suspect that if a player feels like they're going forward, they're more likely to return to your game....
Anyone else in favour of passwords? (for their players, not necessarily for themselves!)
#31076 - sgeos - Tue Dec 07, 2004 5:16 pm
I just think that the math behind passwords is really nifty.
-Brendan
#31098 - Johna - Tue Dec 07, 2004 9:21 pm
I'm going for saves for the main game, but passwords for well.... cheating- some times players want, (ahm need) some help!
_________________
Do you want me to cook that or not?
#31102 - Lupin - Tue Dec 07, 2004 9:40 pm
a nice way for cheating is adding posibility for key combinations inside the menu...
btw i don't think that passwords would be that nifty... but i think technically there is no need to not use SRAM or EEPROM (and i think 512 byte should really be enough for GBA games - just compare 512 byte of memory to a password that is maybe 6 chars/bytes long or something...)
_________________
Team Pokeme
My blog and PM ASM tutorials
#31106 - Lord Graga - Tue Dec 07, 2004 11:12 pm
| Lupin wrote: |
a nice way for cheating is adding posibility for key combinations inside the menu...
btw i don't think that passwords would be that nifty... but i think technically there is no need to not use SRAM or EEPROM (and i think 512 byte should really be enough for GBA games - just compare 512 byte of memory to a password that is maybe 6 chars/bytes long or something...) |
True. I think that I personally could do fine with around 128 byte. And then, if you really need to spare, you might as well just compress your SRAM data with the LZ77 function that was released a while ago.
#31182 - Miked0801 - Wed Dec 08, 2004 7:25 pm
No, you shouldn't compress your save data. Compression routines are not guarenteed to compress data. As soon as you rely on compressed data in save ram, you'll get hosed when a data set appears that it expands (or doesn't meet your base compression needs.) If you think your save data can be compressed, do some manual bit-packing. That will always save you space.
#47692 - Ferakk - Tue Jul 12, 2005 12:29 pm
I've seen both being used. Still saved games more than passwords.
_________________
I dig.
#47734 - Miked0801 - Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:07 pm
Huh? I'm not sure what you are saying here - and I haven't seen this thread in ages :)
#47910 - Mucca - Thu Jul 14, 2005 5:55 pm
Er, to finish, we weren't as lucky as Mike, and didnt get the cash for SRAM or whatnot, so we went with passwords.
#47914 - Miked0801 - Thu Jul 14, 2005 6:32 pm
Passwords ok - 512 Bytes of EEPROM (for .50 cents per cart - come on) good, anything else - preferable :)
#47922 - tepples - Thu Jul 14, 2005 7:36 pm
I hope it's not a 48-character password like in The Lord of the Rings for Super NES. The generally low design quality of that game (and its long loading times, which appeared to involve filling the APU memory) turned me off from book licensed games to an extent.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#47934 - Miked0801 - Thu Jul 14, 2005 9:14 pm
48 chars that store about 36 bytes of info of which you need a checksum and other code to make sure random codes don't work. Been there, done that on the GBC :)
#47950 - gauauu - Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:08 am
| tepples wrote: |
| I hope it's not a 48-character password like in The Lord of the Rings for Super NES. The generally low design quality of that game (and its long loading times, which appeared to involve filling the APU memory) turned me off from book licensed games to an extent. |
Wow, yeah, that sucked. That game hurt me.
The best password system I ever saw was for the Lost Vikings. Only 4 or 5 characters...it was simpler since it only had to save which level you were on. And the passwords tended to be easy to remember words that had something to do with your level, so you could fairly easily remember them in your head if you wanted to.
#48002 - Miked0801 - Fri Jul 15, 2005 9:43 pm
Lol - you should have seen the password for the Frank Thomas / All-Star Baseball GBC/DMG games. We generated something like a 64 letter password. Just plain ugly...