Lost Cave running on the original coin-op hardware!?

Here it is. On the real hardware. Photo – and Lost Cave running on a real Bubble Bobble – courtesy of Olly Cotton. You can do your comparisons with a plain emulated screenshot by checking one of the earlier posts.

Behind the curtain, the Bubble Bobble Lost Cave dev team was still holding breath. Yes, the patch has been released as intended. Yes, lots of Bubble Bobble fans around the world played it and appreciated it. Yes, feedback from media and forum communities had been flattering. But there was still an achievement to unlock – maybe the bigger one, maybe a trivial one, depending on how you look at it:

to run Lost Cave on the original coin-op hardware.
because, not having an original Bubble Bobble PCB, we could test in only under emulation.

And that’s wonderful, God bless MAME! We managed to make it run on iPodpadphone, on the Dreamcast, on Xbox, on the original Taito Legends package (where you can always get Bubble Bobble ROMs legally). Basically, If MAME runs on a device, you can play Lost Cave there. But the pride of seeing it running on the orignal hardware, well, that’s something else. Think of it – running a romhack on the original Bubble Bobble PCB from the Eighties. This may mean nothing to you, it’s perfectly fair, but to us it’s like linking together the alpha and the omega of our work.

In theory,  it’s a automatic consequence of the way we worked: we just heavily modified the original data, with no hack on the emulated hardware side: if it works on emulators, it must work on the real thing, via a simple ROM swap (made easy by the socketed ROMs on the board). Aladar, the one who understands the technical part, put a lot of effort in it. But sometimes practice defies the logic of theory. Especially when you don’t have a pricey, lovely original Bubble Bobble PCB to test it…

Luckily, just under the original release of Lost Cave, the greatest Bubble Bobble enthusiasts in the world spreaded the word, which eventually reached http://www.jammaplus.co.uk, one of the most important forums about coin-op. Among its members is Olliver Cotton aka muddymusic, which happens to be one of the strongest Bubble Bobble players in the world (if not the strongest). He owns an original Bubble Bobble PCB, mounted on what looks like a Egret II Taito cab. And he immediately said he wanted to try the ROM swap, even before the Lost Cave dev team said hello on the forum.

To cut the long story short (here’s the complete, unabridged forum thread) Olly finally managed to do it thanks to the invaluable help of andyman, another forum aficionado, against all odds, faulty EPROMs and postal madness:

You can also check his former attempts on his Youtube channel – I (Bisboch) was quite scared by those ones, but Aladar was reasonably confident that the problems were caused by a phisically defective ROM, and not because the hardware was detecting our hacked data as, well, hacked data. He triple-checked everything, anyway, and in the end he was totally right – when Olly got a fully functioning Lost Cave set… it just worked! And the one in the video is his FIRST coin on Lost Cave. Quite impressive. His feedback is quite surprising too: since he can play in a way we could never dream to achieve, he’s spotting some critical points thu’ the game which we really underestimated during beta test.

How to celebrate this? Well, let me see… you could try to write on the hi-score table “BUB”, start a new match and see what happens on round 1, for example! In the meantime, we’ll keep writing the huge documentation opus for the 100 levels. Slowly but surely.

The “popping enemies” combo

So, it’s 2013! It’s time to add some documentation about how we made Bubble Bobble Lost Cave, as several users requested. Let’s start from something you’ll meet immediately in the game – the combo bonus items. Remember the original sequence? Popping at the same time two or more enemies awards you with bonus stuff of increasing value:

You get the banana by popping one single enemy, and the diamond for the seventh enemy of a 64.000 bubble burst combo. On the home/handheld versions, things ain’t quite the same (apart from the faithful SMS/GG take). You know it well if your console was the Nintendo Entertainment System, for instance. Still, we decided not to use the NES version but the Game Boy one, as reference for the popping enemies combo. Here it is:

Quite different, huh! And in black & white. Here’s how we adapted them into the Lost Cave:

As you can see, we tried to retain the original item shape, coloring and updating it in order to feel consistent in the original MTJ coin-op style. Here’s some detail about that:

WHITE GRAPE is not a palette swap for the black one already present in the coin-op: it’s the juicier Rainbow Islands version.

ROUND RADISH is a personal variant of the mysterious, pale fruit you get on Game Boy. Apricot? Prune? Could be. We opted for radish:D

ICE CREAM CONE discards the coin-op version for the more refined Parasol Stars one, but with the palette from the Master System one. Yum!

LAYER CAKE We went for the Parasol Stars version which has three layers – the Master system and Rainbow Islands ones have only two.

GLASS OF CAMPARI There’s already a nice cocktail glass in the original item set, but we wanted this bigger one from Parasol Stars instead.

SNOWMAN One of our favourites. The shabby GB one got replaced by the Master System one, with its lovely 3/4 perspective. Love the cold gaze.

CUPC… er, DIAMOND When we tried to replace diamonds in the game, it felt really wrong. They’re easily recognizable as high value items, therefore there’s a strong bond between form and function. So no cupcakes for you, this time. This choice proved right, listening to players’ feedback.

If you played Lost Cave a little bit, you know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of new bonus items. So stay tuned, slowly we’ll reveal them all, even those very weird ones which are so hard to find!

Merry Xmas from the Lost Cave!

Haven’t played Lost Cave yet? Please check the Download section!

(This is the actual Rnd. 50, btw)

Lost Cave 1.1 patch released!

Here it is, quick and dirty:

Bubble Bobble Lost Cave 1.1 Patchfile Download

the zip file includes a auto-patching program for people using Windows, made by Aladar. Please read the readme.txt! It’s shorter and lighter!

[I'll be away for some days, so let's hope everything works!]

Lost Cave released!

Here it is! The patchfiles of Bubble Bobble: Lost Cave have been released.

Where?

We really hope you know how to use emulators, deal with MAME ROMsets, patch IPS patch files – there’s a readme.txt inside the .zip with some basic information inside, but it has that “early adopter WTF” vibe to it, so please be patient! We’ll deliver more detailed information as soon as possible. As for now, brave early adopters, please let us know if you manage to make it work. Just be sure you have the correct Bubble Bobble “bublbobl” ROMset to patch. [Note: the official command-line version of MAME really needs to run the patched game from command-line (ie "mame.exe bublbobl", not from the internal menu) otherwise it won't work. UI versions such as MAMEUIFX don't have this 'issue']

FEATURES

- 100 new levels for the Bubble Bobble coin-op which replace the old ones. New to the coin-op, that is! They are Taito-made levels, heavily tweaked just to better fit the coin-op gameplay pace. If you ever played Bubble Bobble on a home or handheld console you’ll find them familiar: they are the best exclusive levels made for NES, Game Boy, Sega Master System and Game Boy Color versions of the game. Still, mastering them in the coin-op frame it’s a brand new challenge!

- Almost every bonus points item has been replaced. You’ll find tons of those exclusive bonuses from Game Boy, NES and Sega Master System versions. Part of these bonus GFX were redone in order to match the original coin-op quality requirements. Some newly depicted bonuses are there too, and certain guest bonuses from Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars were to good to be left out! Also, newly coloured canes may award you with something new, big and good. Diamonds are still there, though. Diamonds are forever. Power-ups rest untouched too: we didn’t want to make players feel lost, after all.

- A new progression for old secrets: As in the original coin-op, there are multiple
endings, with the best one involving the secret “Super Bubble Bobble Lost Cave” code.
The bad news? We changed the input sequence for the secret codes. The good news?
This time you can discover them inside the game itself. If you are a BB coin-op
aficionado, you’ll be baffled, but also challenged hard to play more. And with style.

- New gfx and encrypted messages in the secret rooms: can you find what’s going on this time? Who are those guys on the pedestal? What are they trying to say?

- ASM hacks to recreate some features supported by home/handheld versions, but not on the coin-op, most notably those weird custom holes on the floor/ceiling.

- A brand new attract mode, which showcases the new features of Lost Cave.

- See what happens by writing certain three letter acronyms. First, find them in the game!

- works on a real arcade machine by burning fresh EEPROMs for it (untested, but
this is the final goal for the project)

Find the last secret, one which goes beyond the boundaries of the game, and
you’ll be awarded with a symbolic prize…

This release marks the 4th anniversary of Fukio “MTJ” Mitsuji untimely death (December 11th, 2008, aged 48). We wanted to remember him like this, since the home/handheld levels which form the Lost Cave were created not by him, but by his disciples. He spent the last years of his life exclusively teaching game design in his own school. Why? Play the game to find out: somewhere in the lost cave, MTJ has a message for you.

Beta testing and fruit handling

Intevitable! the game is undergoing several last minute changes. We estimate that, in last weeks, we changed roughly 1/4 of the level content, scrapping several uninteresting levels and rebalancing the whole experience (Super mode too – but you need to find the new Super code to play it, you know).

This kind of fine tuning has being possible only thanks to our fellow beta testers. They are playing the game with various setups, emulators, operating systems and peripherals. The more crazy control system must be the one you see in the above photo, set up by our good friend Fabio “Kenobit Bortolotti”. He just got his MakeyMakey kit [the wonderful gimmick which trasforms nearly anything into a controller] delivered, and he tought that collecting fruit bonuses with a real fruit controller could have been fun.  It may sound crazy, well, it IS crazy, but Kenobit states it’s also pretty responsive, even if we suspect that the more intense moments, such as the final boss fight, may really  jam your desk:

Speaking of fruit, why not checking this retro-styled videogame soundtrack I have just composed? It has been made for a game of a friend of mine called Fruitiny for iOS. The game, not the friend. There’s also a Game Boy remix by the multi-talented Kenobit above.  As you can see, the game is heavily inspired by MTJ graphic style, so this spam bit is not totally unrelated on this webpage. Have a try.

Enough! Let’s go back to the Lost Cave testing, the deadline is really close and there’s still so much to do and fruit to handle!

The long and winding logo

Well, the logo itself its neither long nor winding: it fits into a 22×18 grid of squares measuring 8 pixels a side. Long and winding was the process which brought to its creation. I’ll spare evereyone the lesson about the importance of a logo in modern communication. But I’ll stress that to create a coherent logo for the Lost Cave was for us a way of respecting the creators of the original one.

THE DRAFT: The very first draft didn’t take much time and, surprisingly, it captures the mood of the final version quite well. Done with the good old GIMP 2.6 (just before they made the program useless to my purposes) whthout caring about coin-op limitations. The small “Bubble Bobble” font comes from the Game Boy version of game.

NO TILEMAP CHANGE… My first attemp was based on the assumption that a good logo could be obtained even without changing the tilemap of the logo screen. Further inspection with an old arcade gfx editor called TURACOCL gave me this scenario. What does it mean? I could not put gfx on the empty places on the map. And, what’s worse, I was forced to use the same 8×8 character for those brightly coloured coordinates. So every “blue #62″ block had to be filled with the same content.

… NAME CHANGE: How you could see, there were several limitations. To render faithfully the draft logo was really difficult, whith those holes in the middle. So I tried to come out with something else. Quite radical, indeed, since I had to change the name of the game. Scaling down the Bubble Bobble little logo was also a pain in the ass. The little cute dragon from Bubble Bobble Jr. was meant to patch a holein the logo, but at the same time I was happy to embed it there, since BB Jr. brings back sweet personal memories. Still, “Lost 100″ was a weird name – not bad, but it was not the name I wanted to give to the ROMhack. “Lost Cave” had been chosen as an hommage both to Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels and to Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.

LIGHT IN THE CAVE! when the hopes of using the “Lost Cave” monicker seemed, well, lost, my fellow caveman Aladar wrote me an email. We had no contact for some months, and he was happy to see the project was not dead, as witnessed by this post, and said that, during the hiathus, he managed to get control of the Bubble Bobble code to a deeper level, allowing me to do many nice things. “Just ask what you need”. Wow. Can I just create a bmp with indexed color and inject it into the game and use it as the logo, redefining the opening title tilemap? “Yes”. So the “Lost Cave” name could survive. I kept the “Lost” words I already created and went on.

THE 4:3 RATIO, OLD MONITOR TEST: Bubble Bobble hardware displays a 256×224 image, that is, a 8:7 ratio picture. In the original coin-op pixels are not square: the ratio is stretched to fit the 4:3 ratio of the old CRT screens. As I went on creating the logo, I tried to check how the graphics would appear on the real thing, aptly simulated by MAME emulator  video options. Here’s a WIP example, which also shows how I upgraded the old TAITO logo to the ‘new’ one (click on the picture to see how MAME simulates via HLSL lots of analog monitor effects, pincushion included):

 

THE LARGE LOGO: At this point, I just finished the “LOST CAVE” writing and polished the “Bubble Bobble” one. Actually, it was quite good like this, but the lower rightmost part of the bubble cloud felt a little too empty. I could resize the cloud, but It would have been a pity, its shape perfect as it is. Also, the “LOST” part and the “CAVE” one were quite unbalanced, being the A and V very large. Loved the diagonals per se, but they had to be more vertical.

THE ALT-ALPHA This logo version really split the testers of the alpha version which beared it. somebody found the dragon face (taken from the border of the Game Boy Color version when played inside the Super Game Boy hardware for the Super Nintendo, blame me for my nerditude) Somebody found it wonderful, somebody found it crappy. In the end I agreed that it’s not totally bad but quite naïf, just as the whole Game Boy Color version of the game.

THE TOO MUCH LOGO: Since Bubblun and Bobblun are two, why not putting two dragons in the logo? Yes, the ones from the Game Boy  Bubble Bobble Jr. game. Clearly too much. To think that it took maybe one week to Mitsuji-san to create the original logo!!!

 

 

THE FINAL LOGO: In the end, I’m still unsure about the final shape of the logo! Writings are ok, well balanced and so on, but the lower rightmost part of the pic has not been fixed yet. So… let’s wait for December 11th!