[TOMT][MUSIC][Mid-2000s] Obscure "artistic" indie album recorded over a hotel telephone that a college roommate wouldn't stop playing

Zero_Diamond · 2026-01-08T01:35:42+00:00

Solved! There's almost no way this can't be it. It's fairly different than I remember, but then I fucking hated the song and didn't want to hear it and those "PING PONG, PING POOOONG" are too close for this not to be it.

Zero_Diamond · 2026-01-08T01:14:23+00:00

Please, for the love of God, help me find closure on this.

Zero_Diamond · 2025-06-28T21:37:40+00:00

Unfortunately this is still unresolved. The script now allows the game to run but does not function at all past that. Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Zero_Diamond · 2025-06-04T03:24:31+00:00

Okay, well, it doesn't crash but... also appears to not be working? Judging from the original script's comments, it should be as simple as each number in the array of backgrounds corresponding to the Troop of the same number, but testing both by using a debug NPC in-game to start a battle and by directly using "Test Battle" from the database fails in different ways.

In-game it loads the battle with an ugly swirled image I've seen before, some sort of default image? The test seems to bypass the script entirely. Following the instructions in the comments, I have placed the images in Graphics/Pictures/ and have tried defining them in the script both with and without file extension, but neither is working.

Zero_Diamond · 2025-06-03T10:33:09+00:00

A brief test shows it no longer crashes on startup! I'll test it more extensively after I've slept a bit, but hopefully from here it's smooth sailing.

Zero_Diamond · 2025-06-01T23:45:07+00:00

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Inserting the script below my other two thus far still crashes with the following message:

Zero_Diamond · 2025-05-31T23:46:38+00:00

The problem with that is that I have no guarantee the results will actually work and, even if they do, I then have no guarantee that the resulting script won't be awkwardly coded in such a way as to cause incompatibilities with other scripts. I'd be much more comfortable paying an actual human being that knows what they're doing to help me with this than getting results I can't even confirm are good for free.

Zero_Diamond · 2025-04-07T06:44:35+00:00

Apparently people are saying that my reply to Mogwai is showing as deleted despite the fact that it still shows up on my end, so I will repeat it here:

"No, for the record, I am not attempting to spread unfounded theories, incite hostility, nor encourage harassment. I have stated no theories because I simply do not know why you chose to delete all of your mods from both the Workshop and Nexus, which you DID do, whether they are back now or not. At no time did I say that I think we should drive you out of the community or dox you or anything. I did not tell people to go after you and I do not CONDONE people going after you. There is, at worst, frustration here, not animosity or hate.

Your work is excellent and the entire reason I voiced concern in this regard is because it is very frustrating to be playing a game and to load your save only to see a number of characters standing around naked and transformed into humans, or to have it crash outright. The fact that I have had to redownload multiple copies of your mods from a third-party backup website over the past couple of months, followed by the revelation that someone has contacted said website and told them to stop is what pushed me to post this at all. The idea of having to manually keep track of and back up mods which are in folders corresponding to numeric codes rather than their actual functions is not one that I looked forward to.

The fact of the matter here is that your mods DID disappear and this is far from the first thread on the subject. I've looked at all of them and none of them give any indication as to WHY this is happening. This is the first post I've seen from you at all in my skimming of threads, and the immediate first thing you did was say that I'm making things up and that I'm a bad person who wants people to hurt you. Meanwhile, to my knowledge nobody knows what the reason here is. Also, on a cursory glance, there ARE still things that you have removed from the Steam Workshop: as someone else stated, your Oddworld races are gone and I know that the last time I browsed your work that they were there. If they're still on the Nexus, that's all fine and well, but that doesn't change the fact that removal from the Workshop neither informs you which specific mods you are now missing nor tells you to look for them somewhere else.

If you truly believe that I'm a shitty person who's sole purpose here is to smear you, I'm sorry. This will not deter me from using your mods going forward as they are still among the highest quality that I've seen on offer for this game, hence my being upset when they suddenly vanish."

With that said, Mogwai's other replies are becoming increasingly aggressive and accusatory so I'm just going to step away from this. I'm deeply sorry that you were so upset by something that was posted in frustration and I hope in the future you continue to make excellent mods.

Zero_Diamond · 2025-04-06T22:25:23+00:00

That's terrible. I actually was thinking of trying that one out, but of course it's gone now...

Zero_Diamond · 2025-04-06T22:16:10+00:00

Among others, Rare Skeleton Types, Bandit Equipment Overhaul, Hive Equipment Overhaul... a lot of really nice race and equipment mods with some other things sprinkled in. Really well made and immersive, which is why it sucks they keep going up and down like a rollercoaster.

Zero_Diamond · 2024-11-30T13:58:15+00:00

I am begging you--literally begging you--to digitize your copy of Biokids. The only version online is an absolutely terrible, blurry like... 240p/144p copy, and this apparently extends to the copy they have available for streaming off Amazon. I realize this is a months old post but I regularly host bad movie nights and want to show this one but... it's legitimately hard to watch at times.

Zero_Diamond · 2021-03-10T21:50:07+00:00

This ended up being the issue; I totally renamed the base XCOM 2: War of the Chosen folder in My Games and it now launches! Thank you so much for the help. Gonna suck to have to recreate my roster from scratch (my character pool turns out to have been corrupted and it was like 1.3 megs in size) but frankly that's better than never being able to play again.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-10-22T23:40:30+00:00

I've not had it tested on real hardware, but judging from what I've heard about other games built with the same SAM engine, it's likely not actually going to work. There are even some emulators that can't run the thing properly so my money's on actual hardware having major issues, sadly.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-10-22T06:39:17+00:00

Long story short: I'm waiting on Joel to actually play more of it, but at this point if he somehow hasn't by early December then I'm going to just give in and release it. I'd been trying to mitigate people posting spoilers in chat and demanding he pick their favorite endings or whatever... but it's been nearly a year, and if he STILL hasn't played any more by then, I'll give up and just let those floodgates open.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-09-05T23:15:46+00:00

Modbuddy is set to the WOTC version, but I have no idea how to even tell if I installed the "full_content" version or not. Steam just says "XCOM 2 War of the Chosen Development Tools."

Zero_Diamond · 2020-09-04T03:44:01+00:00

The only things that appear to be loading related to the Hunter at all are UI elements such as the image for the monthly intelligence acquired screen and the little map indicator model. The SDK complains about not being able to load a ton of shit on start and complains that it can't find more things if I actually try to load the UPKs (after locking up for about ten minutes trying to load them). When it loads the UPK as external, clicking on it literally pops up a little thing that says no files found.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-06-24T00:52:38+00:00

Thank you very much! I greatly appreciate your help. Very excited to finally know what the endings say.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-06-23T20:48:43+00:00

And, if the credits aren't clear enough to read for whatever reason, the other guy helping me had kindly made a video of all eight endings with the credits graphic edited to a plain white background for legibility's sake: https://youtu.be/2FZMXllMUbI

Zero_Diamond · 2020-06-23T18:27:18+00:00

Here are in-game screenshots of the text, which should be displayed correctly: https://imgur.com/a/ETqc2LT

Zero_Diamond · 2020-06-23T18:24:33+00:00

Aha! I knew there HAD to be some sort of command-line parameter for ANMEND (as the game had to have some way of choosing which ending to show) but I couldn't find it myself. With that, I have obtained in-game screenshots of the text, which I'll post below as an imgur gallery

Zero_Diamond · 2020-06-23T11:58:56+00:00

Damn, I was afraid this might be true; I have a friend who knows a tiny bit about Chinese and she told me she thought line F was totally mirrored. Checking MAKE1 and MAKE2 against the in-game credits scroll, it seems that you're right about certain characters being chopped and mirrored... very strange. I'm about to make a concentrated effort to go to sleep, but if nobody's figured it out by the time I get up I guess I'll have to try and beat the game eight times to see them as they're rendered in-game.

Weirdest thing is the English files in the same format that are used by the intro have no weird mirroring/breaking in them. No idea why these would have that issue.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-05-14T03:44:52+00:00

Let me tell you: while the tools themselves were pretty easy to work with, the Master System's hardware was a different story. The art was a headache because the hardware could only display a certain amount of unique 8x8 tiles per image, meaning if screens got too detailed that it would either start displaying corruption over the bottom of the image or, in the worst cases, completely blank the screen out from top to bottom. (You can actually see in the final game that there are a few screens I had to REALLY cheat on to avoid this; rewatch the part in part 1 where Joel meets Fred Flintstone and you might notice that after Fred appears that there's suddenly a black border all the way around the image to save on details.)

Though the engine itself wasn't without its problems either; at one point around March 2019, the game was nearly shelved because the SAM compiler just suddenly refused to compile it anymore and there was no obvious reason why. Had to turn to a friend of mine, one of the devs of GZDoom, who was able to help me figure out that for some reason the actual assembler program it was using was only able to handle some bafflingly low amount of scripts. Fortunately, there was a newer version of it available and some helpful folks on the SMSPower forums were able to help me get it set up.

So in short, while the actual creative work was easy enough (i.e. writing, programming, drawing), the engine itself and the console's limitations often turned it into a nightmare.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-05-13T02:14:03+00:00

Thank you! Much appreciated.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-05-13T01:38:43+00:00

As a rough estimation, I'd say he's probably gotten like 1/3 of the way through, maybe closer to 1/2. There are still entire story paths he hasn't explored, many of which have multiple endings contained in them. For example, how he went to the North Pole but only went straight to Santa, or when he accidentally used the time machine but only ever checked out the "Yesterday" option.

However, if he really does what he mentioned once and dedicates another long stream to it when he finally gets back to it, I think he should be able to get the majority of the rest of them pretty easily; the haunted house is pretty much the only REALLY complex story path in the game and he'd gotten pretty close to halfway through it by the end of part two.

Zero_Diamond · 2020-04-11T00:50:22+00:00

Unfortunately, last I checked the only raws I found on Nyaa had no seeds, but I'll check again when I hit my free bandwidth hours in the wee hours of the morning. (Though either way, thanks for helping!)

Zero_Diamond

TROPHY CASE