Jim Power is Officially coming to NES.

Hello Guys,

Just wanted to give the heads up of our new and upcoming NES Homebrew.

Jim Power Lost Dimension.

We have been able to secure the rights of Jim Power and are working hard to get the game to the NES.

Please check out this video footage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG5V-VWRtP0

NOTE: The Music if just a soundtrack, if you want to hear the NES soundtrack you can find it on the video description, or here:

https://soundcloud.com/pichichi010/jim-power-nes-level-1-1

Enjoy!

Wow, that's quite faithful for an NES translation. The music is cool, too... that grumbling DPCM sort of sounds like an Atari XL soundtrack now.

Yeah, specially the big sprites. I like when developers go "screw the sprite limit"... The result is often a little flickery, but not that bad.

Just please dont make it such that the background scrolls the wrong way when you walk forward. I think this was just a "cheap" attempt at making something look 3D. Like "hey since we cant do real 3D lets just screw with the players head and make them think they are seeing 3D"

This is one of the things I made sure we take off. As well as re-publishing the SNES versions on Multicarts or Digital Downloads, I will make sure that thing goes out the door; it gets me dizzy!

Oh wow, I'd never seen the SNES version. That looks awful, like it's trying to be some circular Sonic X-Treme world?

It's trying to make use of the Pulfrich effect, an optical illusion in which darker images are processed later, causing circle strafing in the correct direction to be processed as depth. Wear a sunglass lens over one eye to see it. It was also used in a 1989 Diet Coke commercial and an episode of Doctor Who.

Sorry I'll just chime in and bail (I've had a weird day) -- I don't care what the "effect" is called, it fucks with your eyes and takes away from the gameplay big time. It's the main reason I hated Jim Power on the SNES. I never had the opportunity to see the Amiga original until many many years after the SNES release, and I still remember my initial reaction: "Holy shit! The parallax scrolling makes sense!"

Also, and this is for Piko: please make sure Mr. Hülsbeck doesn't give you some kind of soundtrack that's ripped off from either Ys 3 (like he did with Jim Power) or Transformers: The Movie (like he did with Turrican). Hopefully he learned his lesson...

If someone is writing a soundtrack, how can he ensure that it isn't ripped off from something else? There exist only a finite number of distinct melodies, and the number of meaningfully distinct ones is on the order of 105 million (proof available on request).

The Ys 3 one I'd give a pass to. It's 4 notes that aren't very distinctive over a rhythm that is very common. The Transformers one though is a very distinguished melodic loop that's taken note for note.

I just found some sunglasses and tried out this Pulfrich Effect. I was surprised I'd never heard of it before, but after trying it I can see why. It's pretty weak. It does make a significant improvement of the intelligibility of the Jim Power 3D scrolling, but it's still ass (just less ass).

I didnt know this effect actually had a name. Pulfrich Effect huh. *gets sun glasses tries it out*

Okay so I got some sun glasses and covered one eye with it and left the other eye with nothing. I watched some pulfrich effect videos on youtube and watched some SNES Jim Power game play and honestly I don't really see any difference.

It makes sense that light will hit your eyes at two different times due to the speed of light changing as it hits the sun glasses lens but again it just didnt really work for me.

The problem with gimmicks like this in games is that if you have to have a special item an order to play the game usually over time that item gets lost or destroyed or something and then the game is just played without it.

After reading about this effect it says that look different depending on which eye you cover up. Can anyone assure me that the background actually scrolls the correct way if say your right eye or left eye is covered?

I'm thinking that if you cover up the correct eye then the background scrolls correctly.

And here's some general Jim Power info that I found neat (on Amiga):

http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/sprite- ... jim-power/

Actually, the second we announced the license with Jim Power I got an email from Huelsback people saying he owns the rights to the music. I asked them for proof, and they said " oh well they were given to him in a phone call". The IP owner, which has been the original IP owner since Jim Power was born, said he had no recollection of that and if Huelsback wanted the music he could licensed it.

By this time, they were pretty cool, even offered all the music in editable format for us to port to NES.

Then, they went silent to this day.

So all music is going to be kept original, but it is done from ground up on the NES.

Nice graphics! Don't know many NES game with that big sprites, good job.
Did you think about including some parallax effect? It cannot be that big than on the Amiga, of course. But maybe the black trees in the background?!
By the way, in the NES-video, Jim throws his arms up while jumping. This looks a bit odd. On The Amiga he just throws his arms up while falling.

If the right eye is darkened, object moving to the right will be "foreground", and motion to the left will be "background". (Darken the left eye for Jim Power.)

If you've got polarized sunglasses, and you're looking at a polarized LCD screen (most computer monitors are), you can probably play with how darkened it looks by rotating the sunglasses, which will help you find a tradeoff between darkness causing the "delay" effect and darkness removing the contribution of that eye to the picture. There seems to a balance where it works best.

The effect is weaker the slower the motion is, and disappears when there's no motion. Since Jim Power lets you backtrack, the effect is backwards if you go back to the left, and of course drops out if you ever stop. This really hurts the effect, I think, since you really need sustained motion to make work (and even then it's a fairly weak effect).

From what I've seen, black and white or other plain colouring also seems to be more successful at the effect than colourful and busy artwork like Jim Power's.

Is it possible to change the code and patch so the background in the SNES version isn't backwards like that? Would that be a huge undertaking? I had never played the game till I read this thread it is harsh on the eyes for sure.

I think so yes, We are going to try to do that down the road

I thought I would try it again this evening but this time with some dark Oakley sunglasses on, I got used to it, and it wasn't as bad as at first glance. The effect is interesting to say the least.

It is done, Will do a cart release soon, also you can get the Steam version and it is available there.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/370270?beta=0