Starmen.Net

…404 not found… Am I the only one getting this error message?

Tried to run it and it told me the program stopped working. I’ve got Vista, so that might be the problem.

I’m not sure about DirectX, so I’m downloading the latest version because that’s probably the problem.

Poe: Yeah, that could be it. I really just slapped this together in a matter of hours, and I didn’t bother to actually do much error checking in the DirectX stuff, so if your version isn’t up-to-date it will probably just crash instead of producing a useful error message.

Spyden: you’re probably just seeing the EB backgrounds that are similar to ones in Mother 3. All the backgrounds in Kraken are being read directly from a dump of the background data from EarthBound.

Really?

Perhaps I’m mistaking one (298 and 302 specifically) for being similar to the background used in the the final battle of M3. Man that just tells you how intense that final fight was, I remember the words, music, the strategy, AND the background…and am getting them confused with real life…

Okay, gotta report it: Vista, .NET framework 2.0, and DirectX 9.0

Hope you can get it working for me, but take your time.

Alright, I’ve uploaded a slightly more robust version. This one should give you a more useful message if something fails, instead of just crashing. I’m guessing it probably is DirectX compatibility issues. I haven’t really tried redistributing DirectX applications before, so I think I’m going to try to find out exactly what version this thing is really dependent upon.

Redownload here

If this version halts with an error message for you, please let me know what the error message says. If it’s something about DirectX, try downloading the latest version from http://www.microsoft.com/directx.

Hm, odd. There should be some additional exception information below the “Error initializing Direct3D” message. Could you post that too?

I got “This is not a valid Win32 app. HRESULT: Exception at 0×800700c1” or something similar.

I’ve apparently got the appropriate .NET framework according to an installer I tried to run, and I just got DX9 because I’ve tried VBA-M recently.

It’s probably because I have Vista 64-bit.

EDIT: Yes, in fact, that’s probably it. Is there any way you can provide some compatibility for my version, Mr. A?

I’m trying to install it on windows xp, and i’m getting the same exact error message as poe. I have directX 9, but i have a microsoft .NET framework version 3.0. Does it work with that?

Okay, I think I’ve fixed all the problems now.

1. 64-bit Windows: it turns out that this is an issue with Managed DirectX 9.0c on 64-bit systems. Since this is a .NET application built to run on any CPU, it will try to load 64-bit Managed DirectX 9c libraries on Win64. So, I’ve rebuilt it specifically targeting x86 only, so it should work fine on 64-bit Windows now.
2. The other problem was apparently that I was trying to initialize a Direct3D Device object using hardware vertex processing, which I guess would fail on any system that doesn’t support hardware vertex processing. I’ve corrected that assumption, so now it should work even if you have lower-end graphics hardware.

Download here, again

I wish so bad there was a version of this for mac

So awesome.

By any chance could you make like a “playlist” for it, so that it can cycle through different ones every so often? If you could also include a list of presets based on actual BGs from EB, that would be awesome too

PoeTrader:

[errors]

Looks like a video card issue. I’m used to ’em, my life is plagued with computers with antiquated/just plain crappy video cards.

EDIT: I read back in the thread and it looks like I was right. No hardware vertex support. I feel special.

It doesn’t work for me. The configuration screen works just fine, but when I try to do a preview, it gives the following errors:

1: Could not create hardware device… attempting to create software device
[click ok]

2: Couldn’t create D3D device!
[click ok]

3: Rendering error. (title bar says, “Object reference not set to an instance of an obj…”)

From here, if I click ok, it’ll proceed one frame of animation and display error 3 again, thus negating its use as a screen saver.

Also, I don’t know how in-depth you plan on getting with this (I’d love for you to get it to match the game perfectly, but I expect that’d take a whole lot of tweaking) but I’ve been noticing a few errors in some of the animations.

43 and 320 should be shifting until all the lines form perfect squares, and then reversing and returning back to the way it started, but here, once they form perfect squares, it instantly jumps back to the start position.

225 also doesn’t loop properly, it starts from a very high amplitude wave, reduces to virtually no wave, and then the amplitude should gradually increase, but instead it instantly jumps back to high amplitude.

221, 223 and 224 also seem to be missing the vertical compressions, in addition to not looping properly.

248-253 don’t seem to animate at all.

Many backgrounds also seem to be some missing effects, like palette changes (especially noticeable on backgrounds like #116 – also may be a possible cause of so many backgrounds appearing to be pure black) and movement (not just the fluctuation, but the actual pattern shifting around the screen). There are a number of backgrounds that simply don’t animate because these are missing.

And this is not so much a problem as an interesting thing to note, as I actually remember discovering this a long time when I was helping Tomato with something, but 263 and 264 are the screens when you eat the Magic Cake, not a battle background.

Even without these things getting fixed, this is still super sweet, and I’m looking forward to actually getting this thing working on my machine.

*this is, of course, assuming these errors are common to both the preview window and the actual working screensaver, which I am unable to view at this time for some unknown reason.

Update to previous issue: DO NOT RUN THIS SCREEN SAVER ON MULTIPLE MONITORS. Once I disabled my second monitor, it started working just fine.

However, the animation issues I noticed were still present.

This is indeed awesome.

Mr A, do you have the battle background animations in a less esoteric format by chance? Like an image sequence or something?

…mine is quite a problem. When I install it, it takes me to my Screensaver window in my properties thing, but even though it appears to have placed “Kraken” as the new screensaver, it doesn’t preview it and i can’t preview it at all. No error message whatsoever, just flat-out no-cigar.

I run XP, by the way.

thickfreakness:

…mine is quite a problem. When I install it, it takes me to my Screensaver window in my properties thing, but even though it appears to have placed "Kraken" as the new screensaver, it doesn’t preview it and i can’t preview it at all. No error message whatsoever, just flat-out no-cigar.

I run XP, by the way.

Try right-clicking on the .scr file and clicking “Configure” or “Test.” Does anything happen then?

TriForceLink: heh, yeah, it looks like AutoCAD registers the .scr file extension for some of its script files, and associates it with Notepad. A side effect of this is that the default context menu options for screensavers (“Install,” “Test,” and "Configure") that are provided by Windows get overridden.

You can either get rid of AutoCAD’s extension registration (I think you can do that through Tools->Folder Options->File Types in Explorer on Windows XP), or you can just install the screensaver manually. To do that, all you have to do is copy Kraken.scr into your Windows directory (e.g., C:\WINDOWS). After that, you should be able to select it as a screensaver via display properties.

Oops double post, pretend this doesn’t exist.

Ah, looks like you either don’t have DirectX, or you don’t have a recent version. Download DirectX 9 from http://www.microsoft.com/directx and see if that fixes things.

tfn: do you have the .NET Framework 2.0 or later?