October 22, 2007 10:22 am - PCE, tech
HuSIC is a version of the well-known ppmckc MML compiler that's been customized to produce music for the PC Engine/Turbo Grafx-16's sound hardware instead of the NES/Famicom. I've had a request for a tutorial on getting HuSIC working on Mac OS X. Thanks to some fantastic tools by boukichi, the process is easier than it used to be, but tracking down all the relevant pieces and configuring them can be a hassle. So, I sat down to lay out how to get everything up and running. This is a first draft, so if anything is unclear or just doesn't work, let me know and I'll fix it up.
- Download the latest version of HuSIC (mirror) and extract it somewhere sensible, like, say, your home directory (for example,
/Users/your name/husic026osx).
- Download ezMML (mirror), extract the archive, and copy it into your
Applications folder.
- Open up the
songs folder in your HuSIC folder, and open the script named make_hes.sh. This is the script that will take your MML text file and eventually spit out a complete HES music file. You'll notice a lot of relative paths in the script. These will have to be changed to absolute paths in order for the script to work with ezMML. To fix this, you can download my custom make_hes.sh and replace the existing file in the songs directory.
- Open up this new script and look for the line that says
export HUSIC="/Users/your name/husic026osx". Change the path in this line to point to the folder where you placed HuSIC.
- The last line of my custom script will open the generated HES file in whatever player you have associated with HES files. Recent builds of the all-around lovely multi-format music player Cog support HES, so I recommend grabbing that.
- To associate your HES files with Cog, right-click on any given HES file, click
Get Info, select Cog from the Open With drop-down box, click Change All, and then click Continue when the confirmation dialog comes up.
- Finally, you need to configure ezMML to use your custom
make_hes.sh and run HuSIC. Start ezMML and open the Preferences menu. You'll see a dialog that looks like this:
In the config name field, enter HuSIC (HES). Click the "..." box next to the filename field and browse to the custom make_hes.sh script that you've configured. Click the Add button, and then click OK.
- Finally, once you've got a masterpiece MML composition ready to go, pull down the box that says
ppmck (Internal) and select HuSIC (HES). Click Compile and you're off and running!
If you're looking to start from the beginning at composing for the PC Engine, you can take a look at
Neonemypr's Ultimate PPMCK Reference and Tutorial, which is focused on MML coding for NES/Famicom, but the vast majority of the commands will work in HuSIC. For a list of the additional commands you'll need to use (especially the @WTxx wavetable definitions), open up
hmckc.txt in the
docs folder of your HuSIC folder. For some example HuSIC MML code, you can check out
Rophon's site or
Zero.
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October 4, 2007 11:4 pm - MULTI, news
Here's my entry for kokoromi's gamma 256 competition. dive is a simple action game with an undersea theme. It won't take you long to play, and the download is small. I've compiled versions for both Windows XP and Mac OS X (universal). Have a look. I'll scare up a postmortem in the next day or so.
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September 1, 2007 1:1 am - NON, tech
Not many updates lately, thanks to lots of work and little time to write.
Plus, I've been dusting off an old game project that I mean to finish this time. It's that clone of Heiankyo Alien I've talked about on the site before. I could take a screenshot, but I'm not quite comfortable with the graphics yet. I'm aiming to build all parts of the game myself - design, code, graphics, music, sound effects. Which is tricky for me, because I'm pretty much a straight-up developer. I don't have much experience with art or music composition (despite having spent years playing the violin and viola).
So, today I want to talk about music.
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July 23, 2007 10:23 am - XBOX, review
Still Life was a 2005 Adventure Company release developed by Microïds, who are best known for Syberia and Amerzone. It's a whodunit with two playable characters: an FBI agent in Chicago, and the agent's grandfather, a private dick working in Prague in the 1920s.
The game certainly has its strengths. All of its best puzzles revolve around forensic investigation using each character's particular skills and tools, and the investigation itself is pretty satisfying. The story switches gracefully between settings per chapter, and the prerendered backgrounds are all nicely rendered. The leads and a few of the supporting characters are quite well-developed, and the story features many strong female characters (including the FBI agent lead).
But the game falls on its face due to too many design compromises and failures in execution. The voicework is uneven, and the very Canadian actors have a difficult time pulling off the very American - and Czech - characters' accents. This game contains the very worst African American vernacular and Chicano accents I have ever heard - and the characters that use them aren't so hot, either. The puzzles that aren't directly related to investigation tend to ride the line of being irrelevant gadget affairs. While the game plays itself pretty straight and realistic for the majority of the game, the action-suspense-cop-movie cliches and... liberal interpretations of FBI operations pile up so quickly in the last two chapters that it becomes very difficult to take the game seriously.
Still Life is the second in a planned trilogy, and while you don't have to play the prequel Post Mortem to enjoy the game, the story's conclusion is a different matter. See, this is a murder mystery, but the developers thought it'd be a good idea to save the big reveal until the next game. That game has yet to be announced, and it most likely will never be, as Microïds' Canadian branch was bought out by Ubisoft just before the release of Still Life. (Recalls Beyond Good & Evil, doesn't it?) This game has no payoff. You simply don't find out who the killer is, and the game keeps nearly all of its suspects tantalizingly ambiguous. I've heard a lot of complaints about similar cliffhanger endings lately, but this one takes the cake.
I wanted to be able to recommend this, but I just can't, with the way it shoots itself in the foot.
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July 5, 2007 11:5 pm - XBOX, article
It's always fun to pick a console's remains after its death for cheap goodies that are worth playing. The original Xbox has hit this sweet spot, and as I still have a perfectly-functioning black box, I don't have to worry about backwards-compatibility issues. I've been rifling through the budget bins with a taste for Western titles with good writing and an adventure bent. The first of these I've finished is Tomb Raider Legend.
Before Legend came out, there was a lot of speculation that it would be the game to save the series after Core Design's bumblings, and it had a lot to live up to. Clearly, it was successful. Since I'm only just now playing the game, after all its promises have been fulfilled, I can thankfully evaluate it on its own merits.
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June 21, 2007 9:21 pm - PS2, review
Vingt-et-un Systems is showin' em how it's done. The Genshijin - just about to be released in the US as The Adventures of Darwin - was the highlight of D3's Simple 2000 release schedule in 2006, and the peak of VSC's creative output to date. This year's spiritual sequel, The Nekomura no Hitobito, is even more polished and full of personality than The Genshijin, and it's gone even further to demonstrate what can be done on the Simple 2000 budget.
The game is set in an Edo-era Japanese village populated not by humans, but by anthropomorphic cats. The Genshijin, for those unfamililar, was heavily based on Nintendo's Pikmin series. And here, too, you directly control the leader of a team of these villagers. They follow you around as you navigate obstacles, and they attack enemies once you give the command to swarm.
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June 15, 2007 2:15 pm - PS2, news
Juicy details on the changes made to Raw Danger have surfaced over at NeoGAF. Several cuts have been made to reduce the rating to a more marketable Teen, and one change might drag out old memories of how the original Persona game ended up in the US. Poster randomwab explains (after the cut, spoilers ahoy):
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I finished Landstalker off for the first time last night. I first started the game somewhere around six or seven years ago, and after selling the game once and buying it again, I'm finally done. I originally bought the game when I was in a mad dash to find all of the decent RPGs and action-RPGs for the Genesis, and with Landstalker I was hoping to find a Zelda-like experience. Naturally, the lighthearted, carefree tone and focus on difficult platforming threw me off. I quit playing somewhere around the third dungeon and eventually sold the game off.
When I really sunk my teeth into Castlevania Chronicle recently, though, it's like a switch in my head got flipped, and suddenly I really dig, understand, and crave extra-hard platforming. I don't know why, so don't ask, but it makes sense to me now in a way it never did before. So when I found an $8 complete copy of Landstalker at a local shop last December, I snapped it up.
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On my trip to Japan last March, I had the chance to pick up both The Cameraman for PS1 and Gekisha Boy 2 for PS2 for cheap. I've been able to play through both in the past few days, so now's as good a time as any to talk about them a bit.
Gekisha Boy was originally a PC Engine game released in 1992, which was relatively late for a HuCard release. It's not quite like anything that had come before: your character can move back and forth on the auto-scrolling playfield, but as you control the photographer, a box that represents your camera's viewfinder also moves. You use that to target subjects and photograph them for points. Particularly interesting subjects, often involving references to '80s movies and pop culture, are strewn throughout the levels, and capturing them can net you extra film and power-ups. Timing is always important. You'll get more points and that 5-shot film pack if you capture that Marilyn Monroe look-alike just as the air vent is blowing up her dress, but not before or after. And the goal of a level isn't simply to get to the end: it's to finish with a certain point total, so you'd better make sure to get as many juicy shots as you can. With as original as the premise still is, the game stood out that much more on a platform that was cluttered with mediocre shooters and platformers, and it became a cult classic in its home territory.
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June 8, 2007 10:8 am - PS2, news
Here's another bit regarding Raw Danger that I found interesting.
This is from the ESRB's ratings database as of last January:
Raw Danger AGETEC M Blood, Mild Language, Sexual Themes, Violence PlayStation 2
And this is the entry that's currently in the database:
Raw Danger AGETEC T Blood, Language, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence PlayStation 2
Amazon's listing for the game shows the T rating on the cover, so it's safe to say that this is final. (Also, note the difference between the brunettes on the cover and the blonde coiffure of the in-game leads.) It seems like Agetec's really tearing up the flooring to try to get this game to sell. But is it really going to make any difference? And how much of the original is going to be left?
I realize that I'm blowing a lot of hot air over a relatively minor release that not much of anybody is going to notice, but it's just such an entertaining train wreck to watch.
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