With the dump of the demo of the Japanese exclusive phone port of Door to Phantomile (https://twitter.com/RockmanCosmo/status/1775894870093353178), our dreams of playing this awesome game has suddenly become tangible ! Huge thanks and congrats for this breakthrough to these computer gentlemen ! Also huge thanks to the geniuses responsible for programming these emulators. It’s scary how easy it is for our brain to completely forget about the existence of these formidable souls.
To learn more about the port itself : https://lostmediawiki.com/Klonoa:Door_to_Phantomile(lost_mobile_port_of_PlayStation_2.5D_platformer;_2008)#Gallery
To make running the demo possible, and to anticipate a future dump of the full game (assuming it does… god, that would be one of the biggest Klonoa gaming piece of news ever), here’s to this leaderboard.
And as for its first category, it shall be on the demo (what do we prefer, between calling it demo or trial ???). Here’s how it could look like :
Run would be timed RTA (given it’s so short, we would most likely time it in milliseconds). To make things simple for now, and because the demo is bare-bones for other goals (you don’t have 1-2, and they scrapped even the second half of 1-1 ! And Rongo-Lango only takes 2 hits), let’s only focus on any% for now.
As for the run timing points :
- beginning point : knowing that you have to go through a bunch of menus, including saying “no” (”いいえ”) at one of them to disable tutorials which would otherwise slow us down, I suggest that we start once 1-1 has actually loaded. So, upon seeing the stage view, like in PS1 DtP.
There’s technically nothing wrong with choosing to start the run once you’re past the title screen instead. I’m not a huge fan of it myself, because I’d rather not want to deal with clearing all the various pre-game screens everytime I do a run. Especially because you have to use your mouse to click on a button that’s unbindable to skip them. It’s not really part of the gameplay. And it’s a demo, so menus are even more irrelevant. But that's just me.
- ending point : upon the screen turning white by delivering the final blow ? Or, upon the end "push any key" message ? Ehh, I think it’s slightly better to do it as the boss is defeated. Again, it’s a demo, and this is more like a IL type beat category. Better have it end when the objective is accomplished than to delay it. Again though, my take.
(to be clear, it's as soon as the screen starts getting white. Not once it fully is.)
(oh god, SRC has put a character limit on posts, and I just crossed it... and my message wasn't that large... help)
Now for side topics :
Although the MEXA emulator is quite different to the other emulators we’re been using for Klonoa (a window comprised of multiple smaller windows), you’d still only need to show the game screen for the run to be valid. To get the game and to set it up, please check out @inconsistent’s guide.
As far as I know, and according to inconsistent, this is the only emulator who's able to run the game for now : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giOneeHSBd0
In the future, J2ME Loader may be able to run the game after it develops SoftBank support (which is what this demo runs on). To be exact, the JL-Mod (a fork of this first one) also allows emulation of the game… but we’re not going to allow it in all likelihood, as this video illustrates perfectly why :
Even then, these two would be Android phone only. I guess we’ll have to investigate how the J2ME Loader one works before allowing it to be used for the leaderboard, once it comes. But as it is PC, the MEXA emulator still seems like the obvious choice here.
There lastly is MahoLator, a Windows emulator of the game. Once it has SoftBank support, it may also be used.
It’s also important to clarify that the game does have a widescreen “version”. I’ll be honest, I have no idea how these things work at all or how they're categorized. The fact is, we can currently run the game through the MEXA emulator, and it does so in widescreen mode. I’m not able to tell if the program has a settings where you can change that, I haven't heard of anything of the like anywhere at least. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but as of right now, that’s what we know we have for sure. (This is how the game normally looks like : )
I am also wondering about the potential gameplay/ run difference of playing on either modes. It probably won’t matter for this demo, but I feel like it has a high chance of impacting the full game. But, no point speculating until we get our hands on it.
Given this emulator key layout is all over the place and the program doesn’t allow rebinds, I think it’d be only fair to allow input binders. Like reWASD.
I also need to change the name of the overall leaderboard. “930” is the name of one of the phone that supports the game, but there would be others… so it’s not truly indicative.
At first, I was leaning towards changing it to “java”, since it’s technically what it runs on. And I thought, there would be little risk of a new Klonoa game dropping out that’s also being on a java based platform.
But I grew okay with using “i-appli”, since that is the service you'd get the game from.
We may still colloquially use java to easily refer to it (like in the Discord), but I think this would be an optimal name now. Again though, that's just this post's take.
As usual, if there are no replies, I’ll add all of this next week.
Category has been added ! I named it "Any% (Demo)".
I'll have to get around changing the leaderboard name to "i-appli". It doesn't look like I can just change it like that, I may have to ask a site admin. Either way, won't be done today.
Oh, and @TwoSpacesSG pointed out that the "KEmulator" emulator, on windows, has recently just started supporting SoftBank. But apparently it's far from functioning well just yet. According to him on Discord : "it's even less ready so far, with various graphical issues and no jumping [...]. But the next release is planned for the middle of next month so we will see."
Leaderboard update :
-
About the KEmulator. Which I called wrong earlier, it’s called “KEmulator nnmod". It’s a modded version of the “KEmulator”, an old emulator from 2000s. Well, we’re gonna need to wait for updates, because it’s (c-l-e-a-r-l-y) not ready yet :
-
Interesting info about the “MEXA emulator” (which should also be called this way, and not just “MEXA”. This term only refers to a set of APIs from SoftBank. This emulator, that they developed, is called after it).
It turns out there really was a keyboard access to the softkeys that skip cutscenes (the buttons next to the “clear” button). We don't need the mouse for them anymore. It’s F2 and F3 for the left and right button respectively.
Oh, and this should’ve been mentioned : there is a menu to remap keys. But it only allows you to rebind jump and shoot. So it still doesn't fix the issue of the directional keys being all over the place, requiring you to use a remapping software if you want to stay sane while playing this. Good news though, as it means we can duplicate these actions at least.
To access this menu, you first have to press the softkeys in order to open the option menu.
You go to “キー配置変更”(Change key mapping). You move the cursor with the arrow keys, and press enter (center phone button) to make the changes. Finally, you have to press the left softkey, (決定 on the bottom left of the screen) which saves the changes. The right softkey, which triggers “キーリセット» on the top left, will reset them.
- If you’re not having sound when playing the game, first make sure that it’s turned on at all, pressing the "*" button. If you’re still not having sound, there is one potential troubleshoot :
right click on the emulator, go into properties, enter the compatibility tab. You have to change compatibility mode to that of Windows XP.
Apparently, the audio DLL file is incorrectly programmed, and it fails with versions of Windows New Technology that are too high.
- (change done) Final development about the naming of this leaderboard. We’ll ultimately change it to "mobile version". It’s apparently a convention when it comes to that sort of thing, hence why "phone port" does a little less.
Everyone will know what it refers to, and won’t ever mistake it with a future Klonoa phone game release… because let’s not forget the game is still named « Door to Phantomile » (yes Balneor, trust me on this). Sorry for the ruckus everyone. It really shouldn't have dragged on for this long.
I'll also change the leaderboard link to it.
- I’ve since come to understand that there is a trend for these Japanese phone games to have many versions across many phone models. Not to mention taking emulators into account. It's a huge maze.
I realize that managing all these playing setups from a speedrunning standpoint is an unprecendented challenge for the Klonoa series. The only saving grace is that right now, we only have this one dump, on Parasonic phones originally(x). That means there is only one way to play this game right now. That’s easy enough to handle.
In order to make things easier to manage for the leaderboard in the long run, and to help with knowing what gameplay comes from what setup, I think we should enforce players to show their emulator in the footage video.
For the MEXA emulator, luckily, it’s very simple. Just capture the main emulator windows itself.
The other emulators are banned because of emulation quality. But if this were to change, the player would have to show clear footage of what emulator they’re using. This will be specified in the rules.
I was also considering making a distinction over emulator versions, but I think things would go way too out of hand if we did that.
Of course, if you’re playing a dump of the game no one has access to, the run can’t be verified until it’s publicly available to play on.
(x) not SoftBank, unlike what I previously said many times. SoftBank apparently only is the carrier. The phone itself has been manufactured by Panasonic. Yea it’s such a mess...)
That should be it to now. Changes.
Clarified the end run point writing as it ended up being misleading. Run doesn't end as the screen becomes fully white, but as soon as it begins being white.
Added @inconsistent as verifier.
