Hi, I downloaded a Game.Com emulator a couple years ago and when I looked backed on the files I saw and ominous folder. It was titled "nbalive". So obviously it was an unreleased game for the thing but, I guess the source files were in the emulator itself, or maybe one of the subfolders. It contained a bunch of files, batch files and even some sound bites like the menu and such. Could anyone tell me what does it mean?
I don't know if I'm lucky or not to have this. Plus there are even some Assembly ASM files including the dreaded MEL.ASM .
The Gamecom SDK was pretty popular back in the days, nothing rare. I fixed the no-intro romset when the SDK was leaked, just a problem with headers, and it was somewhat popular in Underground Gamer. I have the first emulator videos in Youtube and the first Resident Evil 2 playthrough I dont know if NBA Live is complete, i doubt it since no one have compiled it.
Oh, Well what about the dreaded MEL.ASM? I see it in the source folders. And also when I was searching the Frogger folder, there was this sound file named Original mel dot asm.wav which sounds like a recording file since someone was speaking in the background. Who was this guy? And he sounds like he is testing a game.com game too.
Matt Scott is an audio designer with Byte Size Sound, a company contracted to produce music and audio effects for a few Tiger Game.com games in the late 90s. In 2006, Matt sold his Game.com dev kit and all of the files he had with it to a game developer by the name of Brandon Cobb, and from there the .zip file you're referring to (which contains the Game.com emulator and the source files to Frogger) eventually made it online in 2011. In addition to the Game.com emulator, the Frogger source files, and numerous miscellaneous development files, the audio files for the unreleased NBA Live for Game.com are also present (this was another Game.com title that Byte Size Sound/Matt Scott was doing the audio for. NBA Live was completed or nearly completed, but never released). However, the archive does not contain any source files for NBA Live itself. The MEL.asm file you've found contains the programming instructions for the music that would have been featured in NBA Live. Each note was written down as programming instructions in the Assembly programming language. Open up any of the .asm files you find in notepad and you can read through them yourself! As for the various .wav files in the Frogger directory, most of those are Matt Scott recording the audio from the original Frogger for his personal reference as he wrote the Tiger Game.com version of the music and sound effects (the voice you hear in the recordings is Matt speaking). Hope this clears up some things.
You shouldn't need MESS; you have the official development emulator for the system included in the files in that .zip From the Disassemble Window which opens with the emulator, select File->Load Bin File and select the Game.com ROM you'd like to run (select Address 0 from the window that will pop up once you select your ROM). Next, select File->Load Kernal->Full Kernal. Finally, hit the "Run" button. The Tiger Game.com OS menu will show up in the emulation window. Click "Cartridge" from the menu, and your game will launch. Here's a screenshot of the unreleased NBA Live for the Tiger Game.com while it was still in development: (Note how the player's heads aren't quite positioned correctly). The game was going to utilize an unreleased RAM expansion for the Game.com that would have allowed the system to have more characters on screen and more AI running at once.
The official emulator was ok. And as for NBA Live, looks almost ok to me. And you know if Tiger released the "cool" games first like ports of Doom, MGS, castlevania and C&C the system could be more successful and a great gameboy alternative. But no, instead they have to shove the crappier games first like Indy 500 and Jurassic Park and even insulted gamers to thinking that they were idiots even though the console itself only has like 20 or so games. Not a good decision.
I don't think the Game.com could have ever been successful. The hardware was just so poorly designed. Because of the abysmal screen, it's one of the few platforms where an emulator is almost required to get some enjoyment from its games. I think the gaming world would've been a better place had Tiger and Bandai partnered up for a global Wonderswan launch or something.
Hm.. Can't quite figure out who's camp you're in, jdog. :| The Game.com did a few things that were quite a bit ahead of its time (first touch screen handheld, two cartridge slots, a few pda-style apps built into the system OS), but it executed these features with such poor technology that the whole thing came off as rather lackluster. Still, the system is intriguing to me; due to its early demise, there are quite a few games that went unreleased. I'd love to track a few down.
If they did it like this: I think its more tolerable with Palm OS in it. oh well Tiger was a poor company anyway.
I had a brief fascination with the Game.com as well. I found Slight's Compendium to be a great resource. The site was live during the Game.com's life cycle, so it hosts live chats with Tiger employees, mirrors of newsgroup content and some documentation on a bunch of games that never saw the light of day.
If you're going to upload photos to the server, please edit them beforehand to a reasonable size. This is excessive: Yes, that's a 32 inch screen and yes, your image fills it! Other than annoying users with huge images making the page look odd, there's no need for a 2.5Mb picture on a forum - it just uses up more bandwidth. Ideally, use a proper image hosting service. They'll most likely have a link for forums that automatically resizes the uploaded image to a more reasonable size. Thanks!
