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Limited Run Games released a Carboncast Episode today, and with it came a variety of interviews and information regarding some of the games that Limited Run Games has made available once again through the work and effort of the original developers of said games, as well as people contracted through the homebrew community, like Dimitris Giannakis, popularly known as Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube with a background on developing source ports and emulators way back from the original Xbox homebrew days, helping on developing the emulators for the most recent releases of Shantae and River City Girls Zero (and even worked on the more recent release of Quake), and even Randy Linden, who worked on the the Commodore 64 emulator for the Amiga, the original Bleem emulator and also developed some game ports like Dragon's Lair for Amiga and also the SNES port of Doom.

In this Carboncast Episode, Limited Run Games has announced a new title that they'd been working on, Trip World, a fun sidescrolling platformer for the original monochrome Game Boy by Sunsoft that only got released in Japan and Europe back in the day. For this endeavor, the developers contacted the renowned homebrew and romhacker developer, Iván Delgado, known through social media and forum sites as "toruzz".

Iván Delgado (toruzz) is famously known for working on incredible colorization projects for Game Boy titles that never had a coloured version, like both Super Mario Land DX and Super Mario Land 2: The Golden Coins DX. Limited Run Games contracted him to take on the official colorization of the original Game Boy release of Trip World, giving it the proper DX treatment for this re-release and localization of the original title to make it a fully fledged coloured version of the original, properly naming it Trip World DX and giving it proper Game Boy Colour Support. The colour choices and palettes used for the colorization were designed directly by the game's director, Yuichi ueda, and implemented by Iván Delgado through romhacking to make the game fully compatible with Game Boy Colour hardware.

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The game will release with an officially licensed Game Boy Colour cartridge of Trip World DX, fully compatible with the Game Boy Colour.
The pre-orders for Trip World DX will start on April 28th and will close up on June 11th, and will be available for the original Game Boy (non-DX Trip World) and Game Boy Color (Trip World DX) on cartridge format, and also on modern mediums like PC, PS4, PS5 and Switch.

Source

 

[RAHelllord]

While that's neat and all, why isn't the GBC version part of the GB cartridge as well? There's definitely enough space for both and having it switch would be trivial.

 

[AdenTheThird]

That's honestly really neat.

 

[Bladexdsl]

see nintendo this is how you treat your fans

 

[TheStonedModder]

Good luck receiving the game anytime soon though. Limited run are notoriously slow with sending out orders

In most cases it’s actually faster to wait for them to also send stock to a retail store like Best Buy and get your copy from them either online or in store

 

[SDA]

Toruzz is back? I can't believe it.

 

[ShadowOne333]

While that's neat and all, why isn't the GBC version part of the GB cartridge as well? There's definitely enough space for both and having it switch would be trivial.

There's a multitude of reason as to why this is the case. The way it was done back then is completely different as to how romhackers are doing it now.

Current colourization romhacking is dependant on a lot of things, like entirely new sprites compared to the original monochrome version (you can see this in the example images for Trip World, check the clouds themselves), sprite overlays (meaning overlapping two sprites, one over the other, in order to achieve multiple colours in sprites, like Megaman World 5 DX did for Megaman's body and head), the Game Boy Colour also allows the game to take advantage of the GB Colour's speed mode (which makes games run faster), and perhaps some other reasons that the more adept person developing these hacks might have stumbled into.

Aside from the original Pokemon Gold and Silver releases, what other games had GB and GBC support in the same cart?

 

[MFDC12]

Aside from the original Pokemon Gold and Silver releases, what other games had GB and GBC support in the same cart?

Links Awakening DX

 

[PopcornSweetie]

Wasn't this game rare??

Collectors gonna be mad is my guess

 

[RAHelllord]

There's a multitude of reason as to why this is the case. The way it was done back then is completely different as to how romhackers are doing it now.

Current colourization romhacking is dependant on a lot of things, like entirely new sprites compared to the original monochrome version (you can see this in the example images for Trip World, check the clouds themselves), sprite overlays (meaning overlapping two sprites, one over the other, in order to achieve multiple colours in sprites, like Megaman World 5 DX did for Megaman's body and head), the Game Boy Colour also allows the game to take advantage of the GB Colour's speed mode (which makes games run faster), and perhaps some other reasons that the more adept person developing these hacks might have stumbled into.

Those things should still be able to be triggered in software on boot, particularly since the OG rom takes up only 256k and would leave over 3MB on a regular 4MB cart.

Aside from the original Pokemon Gold and Silver releases, what other games had GB and GBC support in the same cart?

Pokemon Yellow (also has SGB support), DK 2 and 3, as well as all black cartridges.
Wario Land 2 for example warns you that the save game is not compatible between GB and GBC modes.

 

[Chaoticus]

what other games had GB and GBC support in the same cart?

Megaman Xtreme

 

[ShadowOne333]

Wasn't this game rare??

Collectors gonna be mad is my guess

That's actually one thing they mentioned in the video. Aside from Shantae, they said Trip World was 2nd closest to being the highest in price when it comes to GB titles, and that was one reason they wanted to tackle that game specifically.

Those things should still be able to be triggered in software on boot, particularly since the OG rom takes up only 256k and would leave over 3MB on a regular 4MB cart.

True, but I think it all boils down to how much effort there's willing to be put into making the entirety of the original game compatible with the GBC release.
Tbh, it's way too much to take into consideration aside from already colouring the entirety of the game with all the technical stuff it entails to also consider adding back all the monochrome stuff and also play-test it to be sure it works as the original on GBC hardware.
I could probably say that making the whole GB monochrome scheme available in the same GBC cart/ROM would probably add a few months of programming just for that aspect.

 

[lordelan]

Aside from the original Pokemon Gold and Silver releases, what other games had GB and GBC support in the same cart?

While everything else you wrote is absolutely true, the answer to this particular question would be: Literally every single black cartridge.

Now back on topic: This is f*cking amazing. Love that toruzz is now getting paid for doing this as a professional. Its the second time he does this btw, the first being Ninja JajaMaru: The Great World Adventure which I pre-ordered. Will probably pre-order his one as well next month although the rom can be pulled out of the Switch release with a hex editor.
The only downside to this is, that these official projects are holding toruzz back from finishing For the Frog the Bell Tolls DX which I'm desperately waiting for.

 

[RAHelllord]

True, but I think it all boils down to how much effort there's willing to be put into making the entirety of the original game compatible with the GBC release.
Tbh, it's way too much to take into consideration aside from already colouring the entirety of the game with all the technical stuff it entails to also consider adding back all the monochrome stuff and also play-test it to be sure it works as the original on GBC hardware.
I could probably say that making the whole GB monochrome scheme available in the same GBC cart/ROM would probably add a few months of programming just for that aspect.

Honestly I don't think so, there are already multiple Multi-Game bootloader's available, and some of those can load entirely different menus depending on which console they're inserted into. All you'd need to do is make sure the banks are correctly allocated and then have it automatically pick the correct rom based on the flags read from the hardware.

Of course this is highly simplified and it's a lot more complex than that, but it should be pretty trivial for people like MVG to figure out, and would be a neat party trick for future releases as well.

Hell, if you watch the latest Did You Know Gaming video on YouTube about game Boy Games, and skip to the section about Pokemon Puzzle Challenge they show how to access a completed GB only game contained inside the rom via cheat codes, both on GB and GBC.

EDIT: What might also be interesting, I own an official GB Memory Cartridge which is a grey flash cart released by Nintendo itself in Japan for the Nintendo Power service (Wikipedia Article) and offers up to 7 "slots" for games that could be written to it at kiosks in Japan. I can flash that cartridge with GBC games that fit and they will work like proper, regular GBC games on all hardware (meaning they won't boot on DMG / Pocket but will boot on GBC). There is no hardware difference between GB and GBC cartridges, it's all just a few flags and code in the rom itself to show the error screen, booting around into separate roms, or just having them more "interwoven" would be entirely feasible, albeit consume development time.
Would still prefer a more expensive release that contains both versions over two separate releases.

 

[WiiHomebrew+Snes]

I am honestly *much* more excited at the possibility of a mr gimmick! Rerelease, especially if they manage a famicom rerelease with the extra audio- but a modern console release would be just as nice. Still wonderful to see this game get such a nice upgrade and release!

 

[SylverReZ]

Can't wait to pirate this rarity when it comes out.

 

[Silterpy]

I'll try to get a gbc copy of it

 

[pustal]

While everything else you wrote is absolutely true, the answer to this particular question would be: Literally every single black cartridge.

Now back on topic: This is f*cking amazing. Love that toruzz is now getting paid for doing this as a professional. Its the second time he does this btw, the first being Ninja JajaMaru: The Great World Adventure which I pre-ordered. Will probably pre-order his one as well next month although the rom can be pulled out of the Switch release with a hex editor.
The only downside to this is, that these official projects are holding toruzz back from finishing For the Frog the Bell Tolls DX which I'm desperately waiting for.

Same here for For the Frog the Bell Tolls DX.

 

[NinStar]

Wasn't this game rare??

Collectors gonna be mad is my guess

To be honest, I don't think a re-release would make the original one less valuable among collectors.
Also, fuck Limited Run.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Aside from the original Pokemon Gold and Silver releases, what other games had GB and GBC support in the same cart?

1. Mega man Xtreme
2. Game & watch Gallery 2&3
3. Wario land 2
4. Tetris DX
5. Blaster Master Enemy Below
6. Dragon Warrior Monsters
7. Looney Tunes
8. Pocket Bomberman
9. Bomberman Quest
10. Power Quest
11. Quest Brian's Journey
12. Quest for Camelot
13. Toy Story 2
14. Star Ocean Blue sphere
15. Survival Kids

Surprisingly, there is a decent amount. Might I also add, super gameboy was also supported in some of these as well, so that was also a option if you didn't have gameboy color.