High Hopes

I've got a little off-topic question: Is that music actually from the ROM, i.e. NES-made, or is it just put over the video?

If it is from the ROM, does anybody know where I can find the ROM?

I have found it.
If there's any problem posting this link here, please, let me know and I'll remove it.
Edit:
So no problem posting this.
Thanks for calrifying!!

Thanks.

Interesting. Does not run in NTSC mode at all. Everything remains blank. Has to be set to PAL mode. And in fceux, you need to reset the emulator once after setting it to PAL.

But yeah, the music is actually real.

A lot of demos from the demoscene are PAL-dependent because the demoscene was mostly a mainland Europe phenomenon.

Pouet links are treated the same way as PDRoms links.

Yeah, I thought so. Probably because the demo scene became big with the C64 and the C64 was most popular in Europe.

I'm still surprised that some demo artists require the system to run on PAL, though.

I mean, first of all, that's not a C64. They code their stuff on modern, region-independent PCs and test it on emulators that have NTSC as the default option.

So, not only did they consciously alter the default option from the master console version, that 99 % of the games were programmed for, to the localized version of the country they happen to live in.
They also decided to use features that only work on their own version and are totally incompatible with the most common version of the console.

If you live in a PAL region, you're likely to think of PAL as default, even if we got localizations last and only a small minority of titles were written for PAL first. PAL is home. From that standpoint, opting for NTSC may be the active choice and PAL the passive neutrum.

Maybe that's just payback for all the craply converted games they got, with slow music, slow gameplay, and broken raster effects.

EDIT: In all seriousness, the extremely longer vblank (about 3 times longer) makes possible a lot of effects that simply can't be pulled off in NTSC, and the demo scene is all about effects. But even when the extra vblank time isn't absolutely necessary, a person living in a PAL country might think that optimizing the code isn't worth the time and the trouble.

I come from a PAL region (Germany) and in today's time, I would never program a game with PAL as the master. Maybe in the 90s when I didn't know better, but not in today's time.

Besides, I would never program a game to be incompatible with either version at all. Even my NTSC game runs on both consoles. On PAL in 50 Hz, but it runs. And I even let it adjust the music in the beginning.
And if it had relied on something like timed code (for example for raster effects*), I would have included an if-else for these parts.

So, yeah, taking PAL as the master is fine if that's home for you. But I don't like it if people abuse features that work only on one console.

* I use the nine sprite overflow flag and sprite 0 for raster effects, so no timing adjustment necessary if you pay attention that the level is designed in a way, so that the pixel line with the split consists only of one color.


"Nintendo treated us badly. Let's show them by getting revenge on the players who had it better than us."

In a game, that's highly problematic of course. In a demo, on the other hand - some boundaries of the system may be region specific. If you want to explore such a boundary, you don't have much choice. And the user case is very different. A demo is supposed to probably be shown for those who might appreciate the code acrobatics in relation to the limits of the hardware; both requiring at least some prior knowledge; studied or experienced. Or at a party where the VJ knows what system it should be shown on.

I completely agree, releasing an "NES game" that doesn't work on the majority of NES consoles around the world is a very weird thing to do, to say the least.

But if it's a demo, it's understandable that someone would want to take advantage of the ridiculously long vblank to do things that would normally be considered impossible on the NES, just for fun, like I said in my edit above.

The payback thing was a joke, obviously, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone from a PAL country chose not to do the extra work to support NTSC after getting the short end of the stick for so long.

And today's AAA "PC games" don't necessarily work on the majority of PCs in existence, particularly obsolete PCs, mobile PCs, PCs with Intel graphics, and PCs running an operating system other than Microsoft® Windows®, not to mention obsolete mobile PCs with Intel graphics running a non-Windows OS such as the nearly 7-year-old Xubuntu netbook into which I'm typing this post.

True.

High Hopes is PAL solely because back then I only owned a PAL NES (it's obligatory to run the demo on the real hardware at Assembly, where it competed). There were also no flash carts around when I was working on the demo (PowerPak came out right after) so I used a gutted Bart vs the World cart. Didn't cross my mind to import an NTSC NES + game(s).

All that said, even though I do own an NTSC NES nowadays, I might still target PAL NES for a new demo, because nostalgia and the other reasons mentioned so far.

(High Hopes doesn't utilize the longer vblank time. As a sidenote, none of the effects use any MMC3 features either, they're all NROM-compatible.)

Would you object to an NTSC port?

I don't really want to do it myself. (Maybe some day, since you've now put the thought in my head.) If somebody else wants to do it without source, prepare yourself for some very ugly code. BTW, I can't say for 100% certain whether there's something in there that did end up utilizing the longer vblank time, it's just my recollection.

This is definitely completely off-topic, and as the thread author I officially demand a thread split at quoted DRW's post (i.e. DRW, you should have started a new topic).

Oh man, I can only imagine the backlash that I had gotten from certain users on this forum if I had written something like that.