In Office 2003, there was a plethora of functions in the core apps (Word and Excel, mostly). Menus and toolbars don’t scale, so the less common functions got buried in huge-ass menus and/or hidden behind some (disabled by default) toolbar. Good luck finding that one function.

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You may be thinking when you see this, what the hell Kawa you already had a map editor for OpenPoké, why the shit are you writing a new one?

Because of cross-platform concerns.

Visual Basic 6 is old, and only runs on other OSes if you’re willing to jump through hoops. So I had my pick of other programming platforms and decided to go with .Net after all. I wouldn’t need to learn too many new things and it’s fairly easy to keep things Mono-compatible, which is a really simple hoop to jump. So without further ado…

Regularly tested and approved on Mono, too.

In Microsoft Visual Studio 200x, there’s a wizard to import/export settings. I noticed something while importing a color scheme…

When you’ve given all the required information, you press Finish to go to the next page, where things are actually done. Then you get this, and you finish by pressing Close.

In most installers, which are also wizards with a similar progression (enter, confirm, use, report), you press Next at every step but the last one - you finish installation (or whatever) by clicking Finish, or close by clicking Close, depending on the wizard’s wording. But this is just odd.

The story goes, as far as I can remember it, that Jesus Christ died on the cross at Golgotha for our sins. Often enough, people get chastised with this, as if he died specifically for your sake.

Now, Jesus was born around 2000 years ago, and died a couple tens of years later. Assuming he died for the sins of those who came before him and assuming that everybody sins at least once in his/her life, however small, crucifixion seems a little… mild.

Crucifixion is no laughing matter. It hurts like hell and it’s hard to breathe. In fact, asphyxiation is the main cause of death for a crucified person, though there are several, shall we say, “backup” causes. The lead up to the actual crucifixion is equally bad if there are crossbeams involved (which is the case here), carrying your crossbeam on your shoulders, torn open by flagellation.

Still, any sufficiently disturbed person could easily come up with even worse ways to be put to death, possibly within seconds of being challenged. The timer starts now.

Now, let’s assume that granny is right. Let’s assume that Jesus did die for our sins. For the sins of people who were born millennia after his death. That only makes crucifixion seem even milder!

I think it’s safe to say then, that he most certainly didn’t die for my sake. Same goes to you.

I’d like to note that, aside from a continuing lack of sound data, M4A has successfully been replaced with Engine M4 in OpenPoké.

Update: Here’s a short demonstration, recorded from OpenPoké’s sound test. With the lacking sound data, this is one of very few songs that comes out right. I’m currently investigating in how much the soundtrack is General MIDI compliant so I can just use Ruben’s voice data.

Current Mood: stunned

The engine formerly known as m4a.

Same controls as before, but with better sound and different demonstration songs. Several under-the-hood enhancements too.

Get it here.

Update: latest build, which I will also be implementing in OpenPoké later today, demo available here. File name got mangled by Wordpress, but that goes straight onto the “ignore it” list.

1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness, and respect.
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
6. Always seek to be learning something new.
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to the facts.
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
10. Question everything.

Found in the comments on Pharyngula. In short, Be Excellent To Each Other™.

For the last few months, Ruben has been working on a music engine for the GBA.

By now, we all know about the engine used by most Japan-originated GBA games commonly known as “Sappy”, which is ofcourse wrong because that’s the player application.

At any rate, I’ve been using M4A in OpenPoké for a while now and the legality of it all irked the shit out of me. So when Ruben started on his engine, I somehow talked him into making it work with M4A data.

It is with great pride I present you m4a, note the lowercase. You can get a test ROM with assorted songs here. You may recognize some from the demo that came with Sappy…

This is ofcourse sooo going into OpenPoké

Keys
Press left or right to select a song. A button plays, B stops, and Select demonstrates a new feature explained below.

Features
Just about everything from M4A is available here, with matching function names. It’s about as much a no-edits-needed replacement as it gets. One added feature is the ability to play a given sample without requiring a song wrapper, and detect if it’s still playing. This goes above and beyond M4A’s music player distinctions too, so you could, in theory, play up to 24 samples at the same time and still have four music players free for use!

So put your hands in the air for Ruben and his amazingly well-done M4A rewrite! Comments go in the comment section ofcourse

Updates
Replaced the file with a newer version.

Now correctly handles bends and even bends on the CGB channels

Notice
The CGB channels sound better in NO$ than in VBA.

A big difference between classic Macs (emphasis on “classic” since I never went beyond MacOS 8, for my own reasons) and PCs running Windows is that Windows only seems mouse-centric. There is an absolutely immense amount of “hidden” keyboard functions that you, technically, can’t do with a mouse. I think that’s a relic of the ubiquity of mice in general.

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Note that the GBA remakes have their own font(s) with a much lower weight than Chicago, allowing more text on fewer lines and a smaller screen.

It’s true. The GBA games have their own font, with two variants: normal and fantasy.

Final Fantasy 5 and 6 use the normal font, with some very recognizable glyph designs:

It’s quite a serious font that really works on the GBA as-is, and is very interesting for homebrewers. The only thing I personally don’t like is the oversized, overweight exclamation point and question mark.

Final Fantasy 1 and 2 share the fantasy font, which is exactly like the normal font but with some extra embellishments like little swirls at the end of capitals and a hole in the corner of the B:

Final Fantasy 4 is an odd one, using the fantasy variant with the normal variant’s exclamation point and question mark, unfortunately not shown here but at least it has the open B:

All these games have one important thing in common: the menu screens use a slightly squished variant of their respective dialogue fonts.

If I were to rip the Final Fantasy Advance font for use in, say, TTE, I’d use the inverse of FF4 - normal, with smaller exclamations. Gentlemen, start your image editors!

As an extra, FF1 has a line spacing (measuring from baseline to baseline without shadow) of 15 pixels, FF2 has 14, and FF4 to 6 have 12.