A Long-Winded, Unimportant Update
Well, to kick off this month's update, let's just get to the list of games.
Classic NES Games added in this update: Barbie, Home Alone, Ikari Warriors III: The Rescue, Legend of the Ghost Lion, Monster Party, Ring King, Sesame Street: Countdown, Stinger, Vegas Dream.
Pirate Original Games added in this update: Gaiapolis, Rocman X, Samurai Showdown III, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter V, Street Fighter V Turbo 60, Super Donkey Kong 2, Super Shinobi, The, (Depressing Soviet) Tom & Jerry 3.
Prototype games added in this update: Superman 2
I usually like to do theme updates, with one category of game at a time, but that wasn't really possible this time around. All in all, the new 19 games should keep every busy for awhile. Also, I'm not sure what to call the prototype Superman game, as it has no title screen, or basically any other information about it that I can find. It's also not based on any of the movies, as far as I can tell.
As for things behind the scenes here at vNES, I have been working on a large rewrite of the program, to clean up the source and try to solve various issues with individual games. I'd like to be able to focus more on compatibility, and my work on the technical side of this has limited the frequency of updates recently. One of the other changes I've made in the beta I'm working on is a correction of various palette issues that somehow didn't get fixed previously. This is going to cause the colors in the game to look very slightly different, but it will be more accurate when compared to the NES, when hooked up to the TV.
One other thing that has been brought up at various points throughout about this time last year is the inclusion of ROM Hacks. I've told a few people that there is a plan underway to start rolling out those games. And while there is, and considering that we've gotten past the legal issues of doing so, the underlying problem remains that most ROM Hacks are terrible. For every one good ROM Hack that brings something new to the table, there's one hundred useless hacks of people re-coloring Mario or drawing a penis. (That's not a joke.) So, the question is how high the Quality Control bar for this is going to be. To be honest, I'm setting it way too high, and a lot of the people who are suggesting games for the upcoming section are either setting it way too low. Hopefully, a good middle-ground will be found in the future. But until then, it is still being planned, and I do ask for your patience.
Also, vNES Support Forum user HexStunner has sent me a patch that will be implemented soon. With it, you'll be able to log in to vNES, and the server will store your save codes, instead of prompting you to copy and paste them. I'm going to do a lot of testing to ensure this works correctly, and I'm going to work on a way to let users enter the save codes they have been using previously into the database, so you won't lose your progress. It's going to take some time, but it is in the pipeline, and will hopefully be done soon.
Have a great summer, I'll be back with more games to add in three or four weeks.
-- Jamie Sanders