Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

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John314
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Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by John314 »

After spending some time learning how the Gameboy Advance works, I am proud to announce Link-Keen!
Link-Keen is basically Netkeen for the Gameboy Advance. You can play with up to 4 players, play multiple maps, and choose from 8 different characters!

Image

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFw8cqKQSrk

Get the latest ROM here:
https://github.com/john314thegeekygeniu ... /Gamma.2.3
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by DoomJedi »

Wow, this will be cool on my Retropie, downloading right away!
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by Nisaba »

same here. I'm curious to see how it will preform on my RetroArch.

Awesome project. How long did it take to port it to the GBA system? And I noticed some adjustments on colour and sprite size. What was the most challenging aspect of this project so far?
Last edited by Nisaba on Sun Jul 17, 2022 7:41, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

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I started the port in February of this year, wanting to make a multiplayer game for the Gameboy Advance so I could play with my siblings. One thing the port had to include was sending the game rom over the link cables since we only have one EZ-cart. Because the GBA has such a limited amount of video ram, the tiles had to be shrunk down by 50%, however shrinking keen down that much made him hard to see on the screen, so the player and items are only shrunk by 75%, which can cause some issues in levels if not properly dealt with. To save on video ram and allow more tiles, I reduced the tileset to 15 colors (15 because one color of the 16 available has to be transparent), which doubled the number of tiles available to use. Also, the multiboot rom only has keen as a player and swaps between 8 palettes to save more room since the multiboot rom can only be 256K.
If I was to remake it from scratch (which should probably be done), I would change quite a bit in how tiles are stored and perhaps cleaner code :crazy
I'd have to say the most challenging thing about making this port was fitting all the tiles in V-RAM. Then again, I didn't really plan the structure of that very well.
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by Multimania »

Very neat!

I haven't had a chance to try the multiplayer, but the single player works pretty well here:
Image

I had thought about trying to port Omnispeak to the GBA, but the screen size difference seemed like it'd be too much trouble, so I never really started porting. This looks surprisingly good with the scaled graphics, though, and plays impressively well.
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by Nisaba »

yes indeed, this port really plays well. I'm more than surprised how good those scaled graphics do look in game. neat work!

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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

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I tried this out a while ago in Visual Boy Advance (GBA emulator -- I have a DS, but not those flash cart things), single player only. From what I saw, it's very cool! I imagine NetKeen would be pretty fun to play on the GBA! The graphics look pretty nice, especially in the picture Multimania posted, although they're a bit rough in some areas; some of the tiles (like the red ceiling slopes) are missing outlines, for one. The inconsistent size difference between Keen and the tiles seemed weird to me at first, but your explanation makes a lot of sense. I suppose tiles can only be multiples of 8 in size, right? By the way, who's that green ninja-like guy with the jetpack? I recognized all of the other characters, but not him/her.

Again, this is a very neat project! Do you plan on converting the rest of levels, as well as the other episodes? I gotta say, I kind of want to see someone port Keens 4-6+Dreams to GBA using the source codes available! :)
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by John314 »

The green character is Math Blaster. I did attempt to make keen dreams on the GBA from the Link Keen source code, but I'm not sure the GBA has enough memory for all the tiles for say keen 4,5, or 6. I don't really know.
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

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This is a cool project that runs fine on my retropie, I wish it had bots - as main challenge of a retrogamer - not having anyone to play with.
So tried it for a few minutes, and don't know what to do with it further.
I wonder if someone would add scraper image to retropie for this, would look nicer.

If someone can make GBA conversions of DOS games and mods - we could make a list of requests :)
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

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John314 wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 2:35 The green character is Math Blaster. I did attempt to make keen dreams on the GBA from the Link Keen source code, but I'm not sure the GBA has enough memory for all the tiles for say keen 4,5, or 6. I don't really know.
Wow, what you have there looks neat! I would think the GBA should have enough memory for all the tiles in a Keen game; I'm pretty sure some GBA games had tilesets just as extensive as Keen's, like Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga or Yoshi's Island, but I could be wrong. I don't know much about GBA limitations anyway. Also, I didn't know someone made a soundtrack for Keen Dreams!
DoomJedi wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 5:52 This is a cool project that runs fine on my retropie, I wish it had bots - as main challenge of a retrogamer - not having anyone to play with.
So tried it for a few minutes, and don't know what to do with it further.
I wonder if someone would add scraper image to retropie for this, would look nicer.

If someone can make GBA conversions of DOS games and mods - we could make a list of requests :)
What's a scraper image? Just curious; I tried looking that up and all I got was... images of paint scrapers. :crazy

But yeah, GBA conversions of more DOS games and mods would be cool to see! Maybe Cosmo or Duke Nukem 1 would be more feasible than Keen? I believe the latter in particular has less tiles. Although, I don't know if their source codes have been released/recreated.
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by Nisaba »

Quillax wrote: Sat May 28, 2022 6:32 What's a scraper image? Just curious; I tried looking that up and all I got was... images of paint scrapers. :crazy
there are web crawler tools that allow you to automatically extract information from a website most effectively (=scraping), for reuse reasons, in this case to display an ingame image or the cover plus some feasible information about that very game. You can think of a place "A" that stores a bunch of useful information about GBA games. To extract this web data from this place "A" to your device "B" you would use a crawler, which is in most cases a simple script that runs in the back and collects all needed info. This process is called scraping.
DoomJedi wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 5:52 I wonder if someone would add scraper image to retropie for this, would look nicer.
I added my own images. It's actually pretty straight forward. But of course scraping would be much more convenient.
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Re: Link-Keen - Netkeen for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Post by DoomJedi »

Quillax wrote: Sat May 28, 2022 6:32What's a scraper image? Just curious
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/
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