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Hi-Ten Bomberman!
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Tongueman



Joined: 27 Feb 2004
Posts: 631
Location: Japan

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2011 7:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

565x484 is about the maximum resolution that the PC-Engine can output, and that's using interlacing tricks and pushing the horizontal res past most monitors' borders. So I'd say, it's almost possible with one PCE system, but unlikely. Hi-Ten Bomberman is most likely running on PC hardware and getting controller input (at least) from the twin PCEs.
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Youloute



Joined: 20 Apr 2011
Posts: 16

PostPosted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I was looking for musics composed by Jun Chikuma and found this (1995 Hudson Game Music Complete Works): http://vgmdb.net/album/5546
Hi Ten Bomberman is called Hi-Ten Kyara Bom in the credits.

By the way, I read in the french book "La bible PC Engine volume 1" there are 2 versions of this game, shown during 2 diferent events. IIRC, the start screens are diferent, the first version was shown one year before the second.
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parallaxscroll



Joined: 27 Mar 2008
Posts: 34

PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2012 5:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Saw this on GAF

[QUOTE=twingloxx2;35705948]Brandon Sheffield's Gamasutra interview with Takahashi-Meijin has some interesting parts regarding PCFX:

(...)

That makes sense. With the HD Bomberman [Hi-Ten Bomberman] that was playable in one of these Caravan events, it was really kind of groundbreaking, because there wasn't any real HD technology at that time, and also it was 10-player. Can you go a little bit into the origin of that?

TM: Back then in Japan, there was a national TV company called NHK. They were trying to push HDTV, so with that overall flow, Hudson was thinking, "Okay, if TV gets that good, the program itself needs to be that good as well."

Also, the screen ratio was going to be 16:9, so that's why 10-player was possible, because you have more characters lined up versus 4:3. They didn't have the graphic board to support that back then, so they had to manually put one together one.

And that became the Iron Man board, correct?

TM: Tetsujin, yeah. It was only used internally. How could you know all this? (laughter)

Just to clarify because some people have been confused, even though Hi-Ten Bomberman was created on the Tetsujin board, it was never intended for PC-FX, correct? Even though the PC-FX was based on the Tetsujin board.

TM: The PC-FX was based on the Tetsujin board but it wasn't quite the same. The graphics weren't in HD because we didn't use the HD graphics board. The FX was not in our vision when we first developed that game. We developed it simply for use in HD.

What was the aim of the PC-FX console? It seems to me that NEC had very specific ideas about what kind of games could be on it, because there were only gal-get (visual novel/dating sim) titles and other similar games on it for quite some time. Can you talk some about the genesis of the project between NEC and Hudson?

TM: Their goal was to create a game with everything on the screen moving, rather than playing a basically still action game with just the characters moving around. The CPU ability back then was not that good. We did research into how to make graphics that were more motion-oriented, so FX was the answer.

Did NEC have specific types of genres that it wanted on there? It seemed like it was very much going in the full-motion video direction, rather than proper games like the PC Engine had, and it was a lot of dating sims and things like that. Was that done purposefully, or was that just who ended up developing for it?

TM: NEC didn't do anything to set the genre direction that the software was made in. Their concern was purely technical. Software-wise, Hudson was the one thinking about that and setting the direction. When you're talking about "NEC", there's a distinction. NEC Home Electronics itself just worked on the hardware. The software division that worked on games was known as NEC Avenue. When you're talking about NEC, the hardware and software divisions have to be understood.

So why did Hudson decide to go for FMV-type stuff in that era, after other consoles had already failed at doing that?

TM: I really think it's because we wanted to see how far we could go to challenge that.

There weren't very many titles released throughout the system's lifetime, and only toward the end did actual action games start to come to the console. What was the thinking within Hudson at the time this transition was happening?

We're talking between '95 and '96. Hudson was already doing stuff on the Saturn and PlayStation, but it still had its own system, which was very much not succeeding -- I'm talking about the PC-FX. The PC Engine was still doing okay.


TM: The PC Engine was 16-bit. At the time the PlayStation came out, suddenly CG and 3D polygon graphics could be used. Sega and Sony had come out with products at around the same level, and NEC wasn't doing very well, and was ready to withdraw, because the console wasn't strong enough, so that was their turning point as well. Because that was the era of console change.

Yeah. I was just wondering about the targeting of that console. It seemed to not be focusing on actual action games anymore, which the PC Engine was, but the FX was not. Specifically, I'm wondering why they chose this different direction.

TM: At the beginning of the PC Engine era, we wanted to show what the PC Engine could do, like large characters in China Warrior, rather than a little Mario jumping around. That was very surprising at the start. During the FX era, we wanted to show even smoother and more beautiful characters, which could move better, which could not be done in the PC Engine era.

Overall, action games were losing popularity and the shooting games had really fallen down. RPGs, with a lot of story content, were on the rise. That's why Hudson, as a software development house, just followed the trend.

It's pretty much all about business. At the time when PlayStation came out with Final Fantasy, it became that some genres just didn't sell. There was nothing to be done about that. For people who grew up in the shooting and action game era, when they saw Final Fantasy and its excellent graphics, they said "Role playing games are amazing!"

The popularity started to take off from there. As they get older, they couldn't move as fast as before, but an RPG, no matter how old you are, you still can finish the game. The whole thing was shifting that way. People were concentrating on those games. That's why the direction was changing.

Think of it like a pyramid. The top of the pyramid is the core gamers, and the rest is the casual gamers. Look at the shooting game era. The core gamers want better graphics, better performance, and better everything, so those developers are looking at these people and ignoring the larger, casual gamers. I think that's probably why we then realized that those things were not really getting more popular anymore, because it's just a small group of people, so they had to make a shift.

Just one more quick question about the FX. Do you remember, or can you say what all the expansion ports were supposed to be used for? They were never used. The one on the bottom, and the one in the back.

TM: Those were expansion interface ports. The ports all over it -- they didn't end up having any function. The FX hardware just didn't sell well, and we had to give up on producing it. I'm not 100 percent sure, but I think they may have been planning to add some peripherals later on, so they kept the ports, but the console ended up not selling very well, so nothing was really developed.

I think it's safe to say that it was probably an early version of USB or a FireWire type of thing. They could have been used for a recorder, remote control, keyboard, or music hardware.

It had to be more than that, because these ports took up a lot of space in the console.

TM: I don't know! (laughs)


[URL="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3801/the_game_master_speaks_hudsons_.php?print=1"]Full interview[/URL][/QUOTE]
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Kiddo



Joined: 11 Jul 2008
Posts: 87

PostPosted: Mon Sep 17, 2012 11:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Apologies for bumping this thread, but I noticed the NicoNico.com link appeared to be dead on my end, so I uploaded the video to Youtube.

http://youtu.be/63Qz3XXBRss

Hope it's of use to you guys.
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Druid II



Joined: 04 Jan 2007
Posts: 50

PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 8:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tongueman wrote:
As posted on Digital Press:
Quote:
Simply counting the # of blocks on the Bomberman screen, assuming they are 16x16 pixels, puts the screen resolution at around 624 x 448, noninterlaced probably.


That would actually match the 640x448 the Saturn version was running at.
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Kiddo



Joined: 11 Jul 2008
Posts: 87

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2013 8:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey folks, sorry for bumping this thread up, but I wanted to call attention to a YouTube channel with some nice Hi-ten footage.

http://www.youtube.com/user/caravanforever

CaravanForever seems to have a bunch of video archives of Hudson Caravan events. The person who operates it seems to be a hardcore Hudson fan and even helped me learn some stuff about Hudson's Satellaview support! I suggest you check the channel out.
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parallaxscroll



Joined: 27 Mar 2008
Posts: 34

PostPosted: Sun Oct 06, 2013 11:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fantastic stuff, thanks!
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Kiddo



Joined: 11 Jul 2008
Posts: 87

PostPosted: Tue Dec 03, 2013 8:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So I checked back on this for a bit.

I realized after watching some of CaravanForever's videos that the battle BGM was arranged into the "Mr. B.Bee" vocal song. Conveniently enough, I downloaded an APE/CUE set of that song a while back.

http://kiddocabbusses.tryhappy.net/soundtracks/%5bEAC%5d%20(%e3%82%b5%e3%83%b3%e3%83%88%e3%83%a9)%20HUDSON%20FXD-5107%20%e7%ac%ac2%e5%9b%9e%e3%83%8f%e3%83%89%e3%82%bd%e3%83%b3%e3%82%b9%e3%83%bc%e3%83%91%e3%83%bc%e3%82%ad%e3%83%a3%e3%83%a9%e3%83%90%e3%83%b3HI-TEN%20%e3%82%ad%e3%83%a3%e3%83%a9BOM%20%e3%83%9c%e3%83%b3%e3%83%90%e3%83%bc%e3%83%9e%e3%83%b3%e3%83%86%e3%83%bc%e3%83%9e%e3%82%bd%e3%83%b3%e3%82%b0%20Mr.B%ef%bd%a5Bee%20(ape+apl+cue).rar

I'm trying to see if I can find the version inf the previously referred Hudson CD, but so far I haven't had any luck yet.
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hiroshi



Joined: 07 Oct 2004
Posts: 50

PostPosted: Fri Mar 15, 2019 9:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Now that Takahashi Meijin found his old CDs with Hi-Ten Bomberman and donated them to gamepres.org, do we know anything about how they exhibit their preservations? Any chance this will be playable outside Japan?
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shicky256



Joined: 20 Jan 2016
Posts: 5

PostPosted: Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Several problems:
1. Japan's legal system is incredibly harsh towards copyright infringement, so anyone distributing a copy of the game would be risking jail time.
2. Only the software is available. If the preservation society could release it, maybe people could figure out the hardware the game ran on by looking at what the code does, but that would take time and effort that the society itself probably doesn't have.
3. Judging by the fact that some of my CD-Rs from 2005 are already dying, expecting the data on a CD-R from 1993 to be 100% intact is a bit naive.
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gilbert cheung



Joined: 25 Nov 2010
Posts: 33
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
2. Only the software is available. If the preservation society could release it, maybe people could figure out the hardware the game ran on by looking at what the code does, but that would take time and effort that the society itself probably doesn't have.


Actually some brief specs of the game were post in a blog entry of a veteran Hudson game director/programmer.
I'd summarised up a bit of them here:

System: PC-AT compatible
Language: Assembly or C. The original programmer couldn't remember but it's probably assembly. Too bad the source code is lost.
Graphics card: Some Cirrus Logic SVGA card
Input: Two PCE core graphics each with a RS-232 serial port hacked into a Tennokoe Bank-like cart to communicated with the PC. Each PCE used a multitap to provide 10-player support.
Sound: I'm not sure about this one. It seems that they just used chip sound provided by the two PCEs, using the RS-232 ports to tell them to output the audio. A lot of assets were reused from the original PCE game.
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Richter Belmont



Joined: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 285
Location: Murfreesboro, TN

PostPosted: Mon Apr 08, 2019 4:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I was truly delighted to read about Hi-Ten Bomberman being preserved recently. What a remarkable piece of gaming history! Both the game and hardware are quite unique.

Perhaps one day in the future, we can all try out the 10-player excellence...
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ICEknight



Joined: 15 Dec 2003
Posts: 569

PostPosted: Sun Jun 09, 2019 2:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Turned out that the CD which was found just had the game's music. Oh well. Confused

https://ameblo.jp/meijin16shot/entry-12449691343.html
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