Quick MMSF3 save post

I'm really enjoying my Megaman Star Force 3 playthrough. I'm glad my first Noise was Cygnus because a complete lack of formed brotherbands puts me in a position I would rather not take.

Anyways, here is my save up to this point. It's after the first WAZA minigame but before the second. Maybe some neat hacks can come from that. When the game was released, I actually hoped the game had some debug options leftover which would activate this minigame at your own will. Unfortunately there is nothing left, but at least this save exists now!

Hey, download it now!
http://www.mediafire.com/?bvtywxr8i9dexuy

Finally Replaying MMSF3

After months of little interest in starting the second file in my Megaman Star Force game, I finally found my DS and set everything up. Prof. 9 made a hard mode cheat months ago and insisted I try it out. So I finally got around to doing that and now I can play the game on a much harder difficulty. It's refreshing since I haven't played in months and it's just at the right difficulty for me.

This gives me ideas for my MMBN6 hard mode patch, which I will work on mostly during my break. Basically, the hard mode cheat speeds up all the enemies and gives them more HP. Very early in the game, it doesn't make that much of a difference except that you can't one-shot all the enemies anymore. I was unfortunate enough to encounter Taurus Fire Omega early in the game only shortly after the first chapter when I had about 200HP. Died in one hit because the attacks are just crazy fast. Speaking of fast, when I encountered the Wibbledee viruses (the Wide Wave attack) in the second area, I was quickly annoyed. The hard mode cheat speeds everything up in a way that breaks the Wibbledee virus. Its invincibility time becomes almost infinite and therefore becomes quite an annoyance to deal with. After the third 5-minute battle I decided to make a cheat that kills only the Wibbledee virus in battle.

94000130 FFFB0000
921C82A2 00000008
121C836C 00000000
D2000000 00000000

94000130 FFFB0000
921C80FA 00000008
121C81C4 00000000
D2000000 00000000

94000130 FFFB0000
921C7F52 00000008
121C801C 00000000
D2000000 00000000

Not to seem like a cheater, but it was getting really annoying and relied only on luck. Basically my code checks if Select and Down are pushed and if the virus is the Wibbledee class. If the conditions are true, its HP becomes 0. It's been a lifesaver since I've been using it.

Speaking of cheats, the cheats file Prof. 9 sent me also had a code that turns off edge-marking and enables anti-aliasing. The game looks great this way. If you see in the screenshot below, this is how the game normally looks like.

I think the outlines are distracting since they're a dark gray and appear very sharp and blocky against the background. The outlines also stop at the screens border which is unusual. With the cheat on, the outlines are removed and the shapes blend with the background. The graphics look much better this way. Too bad the emulators won't render the effect properly. The main thing I'm getting out of this playthrough so far is how big a difference a speed and HP increase makes. I can't wait to play MMBN6 on a harder difficulty after all these years.

New cell phones!

Well this is interesting. After a couple hours of confusion, my dad finished setting up new phones for the entire family. This is really great since I finally got to try a new cell phone and now I can call anyone in my family. Finally it's starting to feel like 2011, not 2001. Unfortunately, I didn't get to pick my cell phone. The original plan was a big mess. I ended up picking a red LG Neon II. I know I'm always kind of behind on the cell phone trends. My old phone was a flip phone from 2006. I used it for about a year and now I have a slide phone. It's still in great condition since I always take care of my things. Which will only make my next phone transition much harder. Obviously my next phone will be a smartphone with a real operating system and tons of features. But until then, I really gotta find a job...

Hard Mode Patch discussion topic

I have not yet given up on my Hard Mode patch. In fact, I'm planning on how I will finish it this summer. My summer break begins mid-June and I'm excited to work on this project again.
I've made a topic at TREZ so people can discuss what I should change about my Hard Mode patch. I will also play Prof. 9's Megaman Star Force 3 hard mode hack using a cheat he made. That way I can get a feel for the increased difficulty, especially after a long break from gaming in general.

Incomplete sprite in that new Ace Attorney game

So GM wanted to rip sprites from Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. It was a tricky process with almost no documentation to help. He made a tool that ripped the backgrounds and character sprites. But I noticed something on Edgeworth's sprite.

It's the last frame in one of his walking frames. It seems they left in a previous version of the completed sprite in their. If you zoom in, you can see how they went from an outline with basic coloring, to the finished product. The head is already detailed since they just paste it on and work on the rest of the body. Shapes like the fluff in his shirt are crudely blocked in as a solid shape, then carefully shaded. Hands get shaded in. His left arm gets noticeable and proper anti-aliasing. It's an interesting find since I've been looking at spriting tutorial websites to help spriters on TREZ. I was correct for the most part, but this incomplete sprite sort of confirms what they were saying. Just outline the parts that need to change first. Then fill in the colors, and shade consistently. Seems like a lot of work, especially considering his sheet is about 6000px long and each line of animation is 88 pixels long and 256 pixels wide.

The sprite rip topic is at The Spriters Resource.
http://www.spriters-resource.com/community/showthread.php?tid=17344&pid=374907#pid374907

Today was a festive day, apparently

So I've had to think about what I'm going to write about for this essay I have due next Friday. I'm supposed to write about 10 things that I take for granted, culturally. It's kind of hard to make comparisons when almost everyone in the neighborhood is of Hispanic origin. But today made me think about it more since it seemed more festive than usual, and I'm not sure if it's a coincidence. On one side, there was a jumper and obnoxiously loud music. Obviously some sort of party. In another part, I noticed lots of cars parked where there aren't usually many cars parked. A nearby neighbor had some people over that I hadn't seen, and they looked similar. I'm guessing they had relatives over. I also went to a first communion of another relative, so there were a lot of people there, too.
All this in one day seems kind of hard to believe, but maybe there is something I can use from there if it's unusual enough.

Also today, I made the most expensive impulsive buy ever. Just yesterday, I was looking at the selection of Rock Band 3 instruments. I had my eye on the keyboard, but it was close to $100. Today I find the same one at Best Buy for $71 and I buy it on the spot! That was fast and expensive, but it feels like it's worth it. Instantly, there is another side to the game that has lots of other things to offer. It's easy to miss out on the other instruments, but they are lots of fun. Especially if you're considering playing the real thing, which I'm not. But on the topic of Rock Band, on Tuesday they're finally adding the song "Rope" by Foo Fighters. I've been waiting for it since its announcement was leaked about a month ago and I've never been this excited for a release. Maybe because I think the song is awesome and ever since I started driving (about a year ago), I've started to enjoy music more and this is something I'm looking forward to. I'm not even that great at the game! Still, it should be fun.

One more thing, only this time it's about monitors and stuff. On Friday, the class I was in has a projector that is the absolute worst I've seen. I decided to do something about it and the instructor ended up calling a tech guy over because I was complaining about the terrible color output. It turns out all he did was change some default mode from "presentation" to "sRGB". Now, I've heard about this sRGB stuff. My photo instructor said that all the monitors at school are calibrated to sRGB, and the colors on all the screens are very decent. I remembered that my monitor had that option as well and decided to try it out. Apparently I had to raise the brightness to get it to look decent. Now my monitor is on sRGB and everything looks great. Still can't seem to pass the white saturation test, but everything is fine. The colors are still much better than when I plugged in the monitor for the first time using the VGA cable. I remember colors being oddly oversaturated (such that MMBN6 on the emulator looked very unusual). So if your monitor has an sRGB option, I suggest you try and set it up properly under that setting. Everything could look better, I guess.

Too much homework

This is kind of difficult to work with. This quarter has been really difficult and I'm very busy with homework. It stacks up and it's a lot of lengthy work. Certainly all this will help me later in life when this is more common-place. See, this all fits with the rants I made a couple months ago about "easy" and "hard" modes in life. Well, it's probably really obvious but life gets more difficult as you get older. But it's much more stimulating for the mind. Imagine how mind-numbingly boring it would be to go back to first grade?

So a lot of difficult things are coming up. I need to find a job. I'm 19 and I've never worked a day in my life. It's really not looking well and working only gives me less time to do other things. Plus, I need the job for the money. I'm not giving up on this computer build I'm planning which is very important to me. It brings me to another thing that bothers me right now. I want to hate Apple's Macs, but I have to work with them. I've tasted fast computers for too long and now I feel I must make a stronger computer for the sakes of making a statement. It baffles me how many people at school willingly chose MacBooks as their personal notebook computers. They're stupidly overpriced and always seem terribly slow (since they presumably know little about their own computer). It's like owning an Apple computer is a mask for the real reason they continue to support Apple: either they're computer-illiterate and failed at understanding Windows like the rest of the world, or they have a lot of money, even to the point where they are simply overspending for something they think they need.

I need more time to think and balance things out.