[CANCELLED] Marilyn Fan-game Project Thread

[LameGuy64]

I'm glad to hear that my game is attracting some newcomers... Man you sure are lucky that you unexpectedly got yourself a chipped PS1.

Yes, XA audio does mean in-game music. I'm kinda baffled as to why my XA playback code won't work on Shadow's SCPH-5502 but works perfectly on your SCPH-5501.

As for the 'up' button glitch, I'll be fixing that in the next release.

[Administrator]

If you tested it on a 5501 and know it works, there is no reason for it to not work a 5502.
I just downloaded and burned V0.12A again using Alcohol 120%. One thing I noticed instantly was that there is no cue sheet, so I made my own for it and mounted the image to be burned with that. This time it worked.

Code: Select all

FILE "Marilyn - In the Magic World (0.12a).iso" BINARY
  TRACK 01 MODE2/2352
    INDEX 01 00:00:00

Always include a cue sheet. Some burning programs will just 'assume' the track mode and sector size, getting it incorrect and burn it anyway. Good thing this happened actually because I didn't think it would be an issue without a cue sheet since it's never happened. Weird.

[Techdisk]

Heh, not completely lucky, since the very first PS1 I got (also a 5501) seems to have been chipped, but then subsequently destroyed by someone basically grabbing the chip and pulling it off, taking traces and other important things with it (either that or they tried desoldering with, like, a clothing iron ). It boots up fine, showing the main menu, outputting video, and reading memory cards, but literally NOTHING will make it even attempt to spin disks, let alone read them; burned, official, or audio (and I know its the main board, I've successfully tested the CD assembly in a working 1001 model). Shame, since other than that the console's actual case was mint.

But yeah that's quite weird with the audio glitch; I literally used the absolute worst possible conditions to burn the CD-R (max speed, dollar store disk, iso file only) and it worked fine. Meh. Luck of the draw for me, I guess. I make sure to burn at the most 2x now with high quality disks, by the way.

[Administrator]

Burning at 2x is useless nowadays since CD-ROM burners are much better to what they used to be in the 90's. Most if not all CD-R's now do not support 2x support in their ATIP. Your drive also has to support 2x speed for burning. The slowest I get is 16x with my drive and discs.

[Techdisk]

Burning at 2x is useless nowadays since CD-ROM burners are much better to what they used to be in the 90's. Most if not all CD-R's now do not support 2x support in their ATIP. Your drive also has to support 2x speed for burning. The slowest I get is 16x with my drive and discs.

Well if it's burning at faster than 2X i don't know about it; I select 2x in imgburn (or itunes when i'm just burning audio) and it doesn't give me errors, and from the sound of the drive (which admittedly isn't a good indicator) it seems like it's going slow.

I really don't think disks could ever stop supporting slow burning speeds, considering a normal audio CD when playing spins at 1x speed (meaning the drive 100% has the ability to spin at 1x speed). It doesn't make sense that you can't burn at 1x when the disk reads at 1x for audio; it would mean that the quality of the disk has become low enough that the heat of the laser would simply damage the writing area by being there for too long. Again, since technology generally gets better over time, that doesn't make sense.

Of course, I'm no expert, this is all simply logical reasoning and educated guesses. Maybe it's all just magic.

[Administrator]

Burning at 2x is useless nowadays since CD-ROM burners are much better to what they used to be in the 90's. Most if not all CD-R's now do not support 2x support in their ATIP. Your drive also has to support 2x speed for burning. The slowest I get is 16x with my drive and discs.

Well if it's burning at faster than 2X i don't know about it; I select 2x in imgburn (or itunes when i'm just burning audio) and it doesn't give me errors, and from the sound of the drive (which admittedly isn't a good indicator) it seems like it's going slow.

I really don't think disks could ever stop supporting slow burning speeds, considering a normal audio CD when playing spins at 1x speed (meaning the drive 100% has the ability to spin at 1x speed). It doesn't make sense that you can't burn at 1x when the disk reads at 1x for audio; it would mean that the quality of the disk has become low enough that the heat of the laser would simply damage the writing area by being there for too long. Again, since technology generally gets better over time, that doesn't make sense.

Of course, I'm no expert, this is all simply logical reasoning and educated guesses. Maybe it's all just magic.

If the drive and media doesn't support the write speed you selected, it will progress through the ATIP's write speeds and read the firmware from the drive until a match is found, in which case it select it and burns with it.

It makes perfect sense. The data can be written quicker than (in the case of audio) what it needs to read. It must rotate the disc at a fixed speed (1x) since it's a PCM stream directly from the disc. Data however, can be read at the maximum speed since it's buffered (that is, until it receives a read error and ECC kicks in).

[Techdisk]

If the drive and media doesn't support the write speed you selected, it will progress through the ATIP's write speeds and read the firmware from the drive until a match is found, in which case it select it and burns with it.

It makes perfect sense. The data can be written quicker than (in the case of audio) what it needs to read. It must rotate the disc at a fixed speed (1x) since it's a PCM stream directly from the disc. Data however, can be read at the maximum speed since it's buffered (that is, until it receives a read error and ECC kicks in).

Ah, that makes sense then.

[cosi]

do you have QLP editor or packager. Because once competition finished you said you will share QLP packager. I need this one, because i created lots of files but need to pack them into QLP file

Please advise.....

[LameGuy64]

Oops, I somehow completely forgot about that ... But anyway, you can get it here now:
http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=643

[LameGuy64]

Well guys, as much as I'd hate to say it, I've decided to cancel this fan-game project mainly due to the fact that most fans of Kenny Anderson's Marilyn character have pretty much lost interest about this project and that Marilyn's lore is not yet fully realized which makes it difficult for me to find good set pieces to be translated in video game form which you can tell by the fact that the main game doesn't really take place in her home world and instead, takes place in an alternate world I just came up with. The lack of updates for an very long time is due to the fact that I have pretty much ran out of ideas to add to the game though I'm quite surprised that this thread got quite a lot of views.

I've already announced the cancellation back in February 2nd on my DeviantArt page and I was originally going to announce this on my Youtube channel as a vlog but I decided to announce it here instead after doing several failed attempts at making a decent enough vlog.

If anyone really wants to though, I can release the complete source code of the game the last time I've updated it (which is back in August 2014) alongside its tools and data files to either learn stuff from or continue development. Keep in mind though that the source is very cluttered and is very difficult to manage since its one of my first games written in C and I didn't know how to structure things better at the time.

I might make a spiritual revival of this project soon with a fancier graphics engine and other neat stuff that I've recently learned how to do on the PlayStation and will no longer feature the Marilyn character but I can't really tell when I'll start development of such a successor as I'm currently doing Nintendo Wii stuff at the moment mainly to help develop my code structuring skills and that I wanted to try out different gameplay concepts besides just action platformers.

[Rettroix]

Hey lameguy, using your source code I attempted to compile it using this method: http://www.psxdev.net/help/psyq_hello_world.html however it would come up with somthing about certain files being missing.

So I was wondering if this wasn't the complete source code and if there were assets missing from it or if I'm just compiling it wrong. I'm really interested in the source code as I intend to study it and use it as a starting point for my project. Would it be possible for you to upload all the files or link a tutorial on how to compile this, if it is that I am doing wrong.

~Thanks! Big fan of this homebrew

[LameGuy64]

Sorry, it was my bad that I only included the source and nothing else to actually get it to compile and work. I've made this development package which contains basically everything to compile an ISO of my game.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ovzcoiac5 ... DevPack.7z

The only thing it lacks is XA audio is mainly because it would make the package pretty big if I included it. To compile, simply run the run_emu.bat program but before you do that, make sure your PsyQ SDK is set up correctly.

[Rettroix]

Sorry, it was my bad that I only included the source and nothing else to actually get it to compile and work. I've made this development package which contains basically everything to compile an ISO of my game.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ovzcoiac5 ... DevPack.7z

The only thing it lacks is XA audio is mainly because it would make the package pretty big if I included it. To compile, simply run the run_emu.bat program but before you do that, make sure your PsyQ SDK is set up correctly.

Wow didn't expect to get a reply so quickly! Thanks

However I'm now getting another issue, when I run run_emu.bat I get the following error:



PsyQ SDK should be set up correctly since I'm using the already set up virtual machine from this site: http://www.psxdev.net/help/virtual_machine.html and I've been able to compile hello world and such so I don't think that is the problem.

Edit: I fixed "System can not find the path specified" simply by placing the folder on the C drive however all errors about the memory card not being defined still remain.

[LameGuy64]

Ah, you need to add libmcrd.lib to the list of library files to your SN.INI or PSYQ.INI file located in the same directory where ccpsx is located. That should get the code to compile.

[Rettroix]

Ah, you need to add libmcrd.lib to the list of library files to your SN.INI or PSYQ.INI file located in the same directory where ccpsx is located. That should get the code to compile.

I hate to be a pain but there is another problem. I spent ages trying to figure it out to no avail. This is the error I'm getting:



This is with Dosbox disabled since I'm using a 32 bit virtual machine.

But I did try it with dosbox too in case that might have been the issue and got a diffrent error:



~Thanks

[LameGuy64]

Looks like you just need stripiso to convert the img file buildcd produces into a usable iso image:
http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=997

If you want, I can whip up an XML script of building the CD image using my much better MKPSXISO tool when I have the time.

Also, the DOS tools would throw an exception like that on a 32-bit VM for some reason but it works fine under a real 32-bit system so you'll have to use Dosbox to get them to work. By the way, ccpsx actually works fine under 64-bit versions of Windows. Its just that some of the tools included with the PsyQ SDK are DOS tools.

[Rettroix]

Phew thank you so much for the help, finally got it to compile Just one little extra thing I needed to do after downloading that stripiso, was change a line in the bat file.

I had to change:
stripiso s 2352 %iso_name%.img "%iso_name%.iso"

To:
call stripiso.bat %iso_name%.img "%iso_name%.iso"

One final issue though, it seems the level editor doesn't load at all. I clicked on it in the XP virtual machine >nothing happens and tried it again on my windows 10 and still nothing. Was wondering if the level editor works at all? But apart from that, everything seems to work

[LameGuy64]

It looks to be the issue with the level editor itself because I made it in the most janky way possible as I was still using QB64 as my main programming language at the time I used to work on this game. Basically, I integrated the OpenGL API into my level editor written in QB64 in a very convoluted manner that it would simply not work on certain graphics cards (usually ATI or AMD) and is usually driver related.

Try updating the graphics drivers on your computer to the latest one possible and make sure it isn't a Microsoft supplied driver as those lack OpenGL support as well as a couple other features.

[misthalu]

Hello

Had to sign up here to post some feedback. I understand that this project was cancelled years ago, but I wanna give some feedback anyway.

I'm not really a PlayStation user as such. But I'm into retro stuff and I like homebrew a lot. Combining those two interests of course have me looking into homebrew on retro platforms (or niche platforms). (Don't much care for modern platforms for some reason).
So when/if I stumble across older (and cheap) computers and consoles here and there, I sometimes buy it. As a result I have two PS One devices (among many others), despite never really experiencing the PS1 back when it was trending. I've had these two consoles for years, and only recently decided to have a go at some of the games I've also bought up through the years. (Mainly classic arcade games and children games (for my daughter)).

So after the family was done playing all of the games we had for it, I decided to check if any of the two consoles would run homebrew stuff, and found out that one of them would! This of course got us checking out a lot of various homebrew games, including Marilyn in The Magic World.

I gotta say, this game is definitely one of the better homebrew games I've managed to find for the PS1. You got everything right. Nice graphics, great music, well coded. I'm sad to see that you decided to cancel it.
Looking at the debug level, a lot of unused functionality is revealed. This is a great game engine you've got yourself here.

I noticed that your reasons for cancelling it was a lack of interest? I don't know how long you'd been doing homebrew stuff back then, but surely at this point you must have found out that we generally just don't see a lot of interest? People are just busy living their lives.
You gotta do homebrew stuff because you like doing it. Do it for yourself, because it's a fulfilling hobby for you. And realize that the target recipient group is of course small - but they are there.

I'm a sparetime retro-game-dev myself (with no time for it, like everyone else). My niche platform is Blu-ray, because it lets me target PS3 + PS4 + XB1 in one go with the same disc, and I find that fun. (All Blu-ray players run Java apps as part of the Blu-ray specification, which means you can code Java games for any console that feature a Blu-ray Disc player).
But how much interest do you think my projects have had?
It's the same for any indie dev. (Well, probably with few exceptions, but not many).
I know my projects have a very small recipient group, and I'm ok with that.

My encouragement probably won't change much, if anything at all. But I still wanna encourage you to resurrect Marilyn in The Magic World. Maybe target more platforms too, if possible. It definitely deserves more attention, imho.

Anyway, we definitely had fun with your game here. So you can at least take that with you.

[Aerokoth]

I want to mirror @misthalu 's sentiment here... Amazing work! It's rare that you find a post from 3 years ago that was revived only 12 hours before you found it, so must be on the same wavelength or something... I have been heading rabbit hole of retro games over the last few weeks. It has been a lot of fun for my son and I. I come from a development (your typical Silicon Valley kinda stuff) and have been wanting to get into game development as a hobby for a while. The PSX seems to be the one of the older platforms to develop for so have been doing some research, and here we are. GREAT work! Thanks for providing the source as it has given me some really good insights. Thank you so much for sharing!