The New Future of CavE and the Full Unlock

Saturday, October 02, 2021

I said it, and I'm a man of my word. If I had a reason to be invested in the development of these projects... it would make a difference. I would be willing to un-cancel them. Thanks to the generous donation of ItzSka, I am now able to develop these projects for a device... that I own!

So both projects are back to being public again. But there is a difference. I will not be managing them at the old toxic forum anymore. This will be done purely out of my website, and the Discord (#nintendo-vc-cc-nso). I may make a subreddit or other page too. At the least for now, I have remade the setup guide on my website.

There will be some changes to how I pursue the projects too. I will be making it for myself, and just happening to make it public. I will maintain it for myself and supporters. User appreciation will of course be very welcome, but it wont be required even at a bare minimum like before.

That out of the way... I did make a couple minor updates to the app while it was publicly canceled. The idea was to only do database updates for supporters, but... one update I made just because I wanted it. And the other was to make things easier for the private releases, but helps for public releases too.

v1.2.1.0

• Added a feature that embeds the games name into the default box art image.
• Added support for reading from and merging multiple database .json's.
  

The first simply makes using the default generic box art viable, as the games will be more easily distinguishable in the switch app from each other. Having several box images in the list all looking the same, thus requiring you to inspect them just to know what game it is... sucks. I wanted to address this for a while, but figured it was harder than it actually was, so... I just added it because I wanted it.

The output is not pretty... but it works. You can even customize it a bit by editing the settings file. The entries called "*_label_info". The format is:

• "<FontName>,<FontSize>,<#Color>,<TextAlignment>,<StartPixelsFromLeft>,<StartPixelsFromTop>,<AreaWidth>"

Like:

• "Arial,32,#000000,Center,100,50,300"
  

The second addition is something I added so that, when there's a new Switch app update adding new games, but nothing else of note that requires me to otherwise update the CaVE exe... I can simply provide a database.json that contains ONLY the new games. It will be loaded along with the main database when CaVE starts, as if it was a single database file. I'll be providing these files when appropriate. Installation is easy. Just put the file in the "database" sub folder before running CaVE.

So, onto the other developments you would want to know about...

Yes. CaVE 1.3 will support creating N64 and Genesis databases. I've already worked on updating it as much as I can to do so ahead of the release of those apps. But... I can't make any promises on anyone being able to emulate custom games on those apps. The reason? The database is one thing, a full unlock type hack for those is a completely different thing. I have no idea right now if they will require a hack, and if they do... will it be within my skill range to develop? Further, official Nintendo N64 emulators have been notorious for being picky. I cant make games work that wouldn't otherwise. I can only change code that artificially prevents games from running. That said, I plan to try.

What can be expected for new features from CaVE going forward? Well, nothing... "expected". But there are a couple things I would be interested in looking into adding. Off the top of my head... UI modification support. This is something I was working on when the project ended before, and I would like to finish. What I was able to achieve was border/background art customization... including support for the SNESC borders. And... I was able to enable the special UI that only shows when using the official game pad for that console... but for everyone. I'm not sure how I would manage modding to make it easy for users, but I would like to try something. At the very least, I may end up with some guides to manually do it. As is, there's a problem with requiring users to have copies of the UI files that need to be modified... which is a hassle. Simply supplying a ips patch for those files just doesn't cut it for me, as is. Some I may be able to rewrite in my own way. It will be tedious, but...