Wrapping up the month with a few odds-and-ends before getting back to work on some commission and then getting ready for the you-know-what in October.

Game Index:
– Crime Fighters: a bit of rewriting, plus extra outside confirmation that the game was the template for Konami’s later brawlers, thanks to a great interview Time Extension had with some Konami staff members who worked on it.

mini-logos:
– DC Comics: the 1976 DC Bullet (welcome back, best DC logo)

ToyBoss: a few new photos added, mostly of my newly-acquired 52Toys Mike Haggar figure.

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Arcade Quartermaster‘s update is live, too! Two new shrines: Data East’s ninja platformer Hangzo and Konami’s Jackal (a.k.a. Top Gunner)

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Reminder that Rob ‘Dire51’ Strangman (author and creator of the OPCFG, West Mansion Splatterhouse fan site, and more) has a Kickstarter campaign for four of his books about gaming and more, including updated versions of his previously released books. Please check it out, back it if you can, and spread the word about the campaign!

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Another game-related Kickstarter from a long-time site runner to check out is the NES Endings Compendium: Volume 2. This one is from Rey from the VGMuseum, one of the best screenshot and ending resources out there (and my first go-to site choice when I need to look at screenshots I haven’t taken yet).

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So… if you’ve been on social media you may have noticed that people have been trying to bring back goofy arguments from 2016 while the the world feels like it’s on the verge of falling apart for frighteningly real reasons. Really, some of them never stopped, checking in every few months to see if they could get any traction off the grifts again. A while back I’d joked that if this is what’s hot in the streets right now that I’d just start reposting my 2016 updates and acting like they’re new. Now that 2016 nostalgia is at its peak and more annoying than ever, I’ve made a decision about October: I’m going to bring back something dumb from 2016, too.

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates, Site News, Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Crime Fighters, dc comics, Final Fight
2 Comments »

Time to wrap up this year’s 1989 celebration with new sprites and a new video!

Custom Sprites:
– Final Fight: big update for my 2019 Rolento FF1 sprite
– Ninja Gaiden: new Bomberhead sprite added.
– Strider: new Strider Hiryu pose (based on the Famicom ad from the unrealeased game) and a new side-view idle sprite of the Grandmaster added
– Marvel Comics: Dazzler (heavily updated sprites + new separate and more accurate PotX and Konami outfits) and the Juggernaut (PotX) (appeared in the 1989 NES Uncanny X-Men game and 1989’Pryde of the X-Men’ cartoon pilot)

The new custom sprites were added to the Fight-size generator.

Bad news: the video is ALMOST ready. It’ll be added to the YouTube Channel and this post either later tonight or tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but I’ll try to make it worth the wait.
The video is now ready! Here’s the Revenge of 1989 Sprite Showcase video!

Technically I should’ve called it a Showcade (multiple showcases), but some aren’t even whole showcases, but… whatever, man.

This hasn’t been an easy month (for offline reasons), so a lot of items I’d planned just aren’t ready yet, but you’ll see previews of a few (especially the backgrounds) in the new video.

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The Arcade Quartermaster site just updated, too! New shrines of Battle Shark and Riding Fight have been added.

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates, Site News, Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Final Fight, Golden Axe, marvel comics, Ninja Gaiden, Strider, X-Men
3 Comments »

Today’s update has fighter-sized sprites of movie characters from 1989 and some new Kunio/RCR 8-Bit style sprites of 1989 game characters!

Custom Sprites:
– DC Comics: 1989 Batman and criminal from the opening scene, and a generic Joker gang member.
– Movies: Indiana Jones (Last Crusade style). Also, this gallery now has navigation near the top that takes you directly to a movie’s section by clicking on its mini-logo.
– Kunio-Kun/RCR 8-Bit style: Haggar, redone Poison and Roxy, and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) from Do the Right Thing (1989).

Mini-logos: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade added to movies.

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The bigger sprites and mini-logo were added to the Fight-size generator and the Kunio/RCR sprites were added to the Fakescreen generator.

Bonus 1989 content: my pre-ordered TMNT VHS April O’Neil figure by NECA just got here weeks ahead of the ship date. She’s in both the arcade and NES TMNT games that were released in 1989, so she’s theme-appropriate!

I thought I missed my chance to get this earlier, so I feel lucky here. I’ll try to get some photos of her and the green machine (I have all four VHS box-release Turtles, too) before the month is through.

Reminder: The Revenge of 1989 – (35th anniversary edition) Sprite Showcase hits at the end of the month and I’m mostly working on that. Here’s a few teases of what else I was working on this week:

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates, Site News, Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Batman 1989, Do the Right Thing, Final Fight, Indiana Jones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
1 Comment »

Street Fighter Alpha 3: All of the standard Vs. portraits have been added from the arcade, Playstation, and SFA3 Max PSP versions. I can’t guarantee the PSP rips 100% because I had to fill them in with ripped tiles.

“So what did you do all month?”

Some of it was spent working on things you’ll see through the rest of this year.

I also spent a lot of time trying to get better at using Blender. A background you may recognize from this site’s image generators is coming to life in 3D and I’m taking the chance to get used to doing real UV textures.

It takes a lot of time to find reference for just the toy packaging fronts when I do the 2D version, and it’s much more trying to map out 3D versions, but I don’t have the words to describe how cool it is see that in motion. There’s an unlisted test video on my YouTube account if you want to see it in motion, but I’ll have a better example in a video you’ll see next month (maybe even before the anniversary update) and you’ll probably see it again this September. The obvious problem is that makes me want to get back to an earlier background I wanted to remake in 3D.

So here’s the thing. I made a quick Marvel vs. Capcom video to celebrate the news of the upcoming collection and posted it to Twitter and Instagram. I was going to upload a slightly better version to YouTube but didn’t want to risk it with the copyrighted song and used the MvC1 end credits when I posted it there. Chicken? Maybe. Still, here’s that version:

I had way more ideas for a longer version, so maybe I’ll save the R&B classic soundtrack for that instead.

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Mr. Q just put up another combo-heavy preview for the “Fight Forever” project!

You can tell Mr. Q is really having fun with these promo intros! I did the pencil and pixel work for the big select screen portraits, but I’d be hype for this game even if I didn’t, because you know how I feel about Final Fight!

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Speaking of Final Fight, I’ve seen pics going around of insane scalping of 52Toys’ Final Fight action figures, including someone trying to sell all 3 for over $300! Don’t feed the scalpers! Two places I’ve bought from before still have them for pre-order.
– BigBadToyStore has all three for $34 each and a shipping minimum of $4.
– AliExpress has them straight from 52Toys where they’re $35 each, $99 if all bought at the same time, and free shipping.

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Stay tuned for July 19, the birthday of this website!

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates, Site News, Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Final Fight, Marvel vs. Capcom, Street Fighter Alpha 3
4 Comments »

Comic Books: Ace Harlem, the first recorded Black hero to star in a comic book story (part of an anthology book) in 1947. He’s been on my to-sprite list ever since I first heard about him a few years ago, so I’m glad he’s also the first public domain character I’ve sprited (and won’t be the last).
Marvel Comics: a redrawn Konami stance for Storm.
Final Fight: Damnd gets a new standing laugh frame added to the site.

Is that not enough Storm for you? You’re in luck then, because Storm is star of the brand-new Superhero Sprite Showcase video!

That other new pose you saw in the video will hit the site at a later date, I still want to make some adjustments to it.

This is the first real Superhero Showcase I’ve done since finishing the new computer in early 2021, so I had to hunt down and re-render some of the series’ files and streamline how the main videos are assembled. This should make future videos easier, which is a good thing because you’ll be seeing the Superhero Showcase happen more often. My current plan is to make one all-new episode followed by one update until the all four original episodes (Wolverine, Superman, Iron Man, Bat-Man) get remade.

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BTW: There was another mandatory PHP update by the hosting company yesterday, so please let me know if you run into any errors. I did some basic checking, along with trying those partial palette choice characters in the image generators and didn’t see any problems. I’ll look around some more this weekend. There will be yet another of these later this year (didn’t seem like this happened that often until recently), so I want to make sure things are alright before all that.

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Huge congratulations to the Arcade Quartermaster site celebrating it’s 16-bit anniversary! The site celebrates with a giant update of four new shrines: Final Fight Revenge, the relatively-recently uncovered Danger Express, Lone Wolf and Cub, Steel Gunner 2. Be sure to take a second look at some of the other shrines there if you haven’t been there in a while, because the webmaster’s been updating some of the older sections and you’ll never know what you’ll find (or hear)!

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Final Fight, marvel comics, public domain
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I’ve mostly been chipping away at getting this site ready for the server upgrade, but I couldn’t let August 9th go by without a little Revenge of 1989 recognition to honor a year that brought a lot of the games (and other things) that led to the creation of this site. That’s a literal statement, because the first version of this site were Sega Smash Pack shots of Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, and Altered Beast for the Sega Genesis, all games that hit the U.S. in 1989. So here’s the newness:

Custom Sprites:
– Final Fight: Andore (Final Fight wait pose)
– Gang Wars: new gallery, starting with the heroes Mike and Jackie.
– Shinobi: all-new Kasumi (the Revenge of Shinobi)
– TMNT: NES 1989 game stance (with and without weapons) for Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

All new custom sprites were also added to the the main GFX Generators, where you can assemble your own fake screenshots and group pics.

The Revenge of 1989: A new timeline page was added, various adjustments were made to the articles, including the confirmation (thanks to an interview with Time Extension magazine) that Konami’s Crime Fighters was indeed their template for later games like Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons.

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As I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m working on an all-around behind-the-scenes update of this site, using a hard drive copy of it that simulates the server update. I’ve got a lot of the site working and even the image generators are over 70% working before I stopped to do this update. This is some heavy work, and it’s costing me extra site host fees to run on the older server, so I won’t be doing much other than that until it’s done, trying to finish it (and fixes to my other sites) before the site hosting charge hits my wallet again in September. I started a separate post about that in this link to keep track of where I am in the upgrade project.

Despite that, there will be an update to the ToyBoss section this month because I’ve got that main page working with new code that works on its own and I’ve got some roster pics to update (especially since I got that new camera).

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates, Site News, Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Final Fight, Gang Wars, Shinobi series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Revenge of 1989, The Revenge of Shinobi
4 Comments »

Street Fighter Alpha/Zero 3 portraits: Andore/Hugo (Final Fight/SF), Captain Commando, Harley Quinn (DC Comics), Spider-Man (Marvel), Black Widow (Marvel Comics)

Four of these were requests that I already wanted to make, but for various reasons (I had a Hugo/Andore sketched years ago, but didn’t like it) didn’t get done until now. Harley Quinn is just one I just had an itch to make.

Seeing my custom portraits in fake screenshots is one thing, but did you ever wonder how they’d look in the game? Using a new rendering technique, I made a short video using some of the older portraits I made from scratch:

What’s that rendering technique? I’ll tell you at the end of this post.

GFX Generator: The engine itself got some minor fixes, including a fix to some reflection effects. Also
– a “ScrollTech pattern background (added by request) added to the main generator

– The new portraits were added to the GFX Generators, mainly the SFA3 generator

(more…)

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates, Site News, Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Captain Commando, dc comics, Final Fight, marvel comics, Street Fighter
5 Comments »

I’m still on “break” but I had to add a little something to the site to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Capcom’s Street Fighter series:

GFX Generators
– Street Fighter Alpha 3: SFA3 Max portraits added to Maki, Yun, Eagle, made from PPSSPP VRAM rips, as perfect as I could get them. “Where’s Ingrid?” I’ll get hers eventually. Characters who were mistakenly left off the “guest characters” list have been added: Geese Howard, Mai Shiranui, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

edit 2022 August 31st: HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!

Ingrid from Street Fighter 3 Max & Capcom Fighting Evolution/Jam (and the sadly canceled Capcom Fighting All-Stars) is added to the SFA3 and fighter-scale generator.

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I’m getting ready to work on some paid projects, but I also made some progress on the Guy vs. Mad Gear video.

guy-vs-madgear_postwave2preview_fullsize.pngguy-vs-madgear_postwave2preview_fullsize.png

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Final Fight, Street Fighter
2 Comments »

This update has new and updated Capcom sprites, some fixes and additions to earlier updates, and a new video!

Mega Man – Roll (Classic)
Street Fighter – Chun-Li (in her brand-new Street Fighter 6 outfit), Street Fighter 2010’s Kevin Straker
Final Fight – Mike Haggar Final Fight 2
G.I.JOE – updated Cover-Girl, Doc, Quick Kick (made taller). Also added some section links at the top of the gallery so you can get to the sections more quickly.

Mini-Logos:
– Capcom: Street Fighter 2010
– DC Comics: Wonder Twins

As usual, all these new things have been added to the main Image Generator, where you can make (and right-click save) your own images like the one at the top of this news post!

I also made a video that recaps what I’ve posted and made during the first half of 2022. This includes some things I haven’t shown until now, including animations and video project previews (though I’m still holding back a bit here). This just might turn out to be a yearly thing, so I gave it the name of HalfTime.

BTW: the video uses the SMB regular reconstructed font by TheWolfBunny. It’s mad solid and has a lot of characters other pixel art-based fonts lack. Here’s where you can get it for yourself:
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructors/1258630/thewolfbunny
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10bCAxc4-PxVnD5lqDZFi7POS8YNhQpI1/view

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Those G.I. Joe sprite updates and that G.I.JOE HQ clip you saw in the HalfTime video’s “lab” are prep work for the “Yo Joe June” update later this month, which will include a few more G.I. JOE sprites! Currently working on more replacements of the old Capcom sprite edits and more “Original 13” (the original 13 members of the G.I.JOE line-up). Stay tuned!

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There’s currently a Kickstarter campaign for a Ninja Baseball Spirits comic book! Yes, the Ninja Baseball Bat Man beat ’em up legend is fighting get it’s due right now, but the campaign still needs help to reach its goal. The comic has an all-star line-up of people who appreciate beat ’em ups, including Drew Maniscalco (the original creator of Ninja Baseball Bat Man), writer Dave Cook (“Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to Side-Scrolling Beat ‘Em Ups”), and artist Steve Gregson (BPM: Beatdowns Per Minute). The comic will be available in digital and physical forms and there’s a wide array of extras for higher tiers, some including the beat ’em up-based BPM comic as a bonus. There are sample pages and artwork on the Kickstarter page, so check it out and give ’em a pledge if you’re interested (yes, I’ve got my pledge in already)!

Filed under: MugenBoss Updates, ScrollBoss Updates, Site News, Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: dc comics, Final Fight, g.i. joe, HalfTime, Mega Man, Ninja Baseball Bat Man, Street Fighter, video
2 Comments »

My commission work isn’t done yet (see bottom of post for details), so it’ll still be a while before I can post a full site update. But here’s something

Mini-logos:
– Marvel: Black Knight, White Queen.

Custom Sprite Downloads:
– name graphics for Darkstalkers 3 (link fixed, sorry about that!) and X-Men Children of the Atom. These were made from WinKawaks screenshots of the original names and includes the names from the game lineups and a lot of customized names from their respective universes and some crossovers. These are the exact same files I use in this site’s image generators, including characters who aren’t even in the generator yet.

Custom Sprite galleries: All of the Kunio-Kun-related galleries are now connected by a hub at the bottom of the gallery, the “cabinet art” Pac-Man sprite is no longer missing from the Pac-Man gallery, Rick Taylor has a sub-gallery within the Splatterhouse gallery.

The ToyBoss section was updated with new group shots for the heroes (playable) and villains for Captain America and the Avengers by Data East. The heroes pic only has 3 out 4 four accurate figures, because I still need to replace the retro/vintage Iron Man (the Neo-classic armor) I lost in ’20. The pic features the brand-new Marvel Legends 20 Years version of Cap, easily the best figure of him I’ve ever owned. The custom Red Skull I made late last year is front and center of the updated villains pic that also adds the long-awaited ML classic Ultron that hit the Marvel Legends line last year.

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I can finally reveal that the commissions I’m working on are for Fight Forever, a beat ’em up fan game by the legendary Mr. Q! Two of the portraits I’ve made are in this preview video where the REAL star is that select screen music, which should make any Final Fight fan feel right at home:

I’m not sure when I’ll be done with everything, but I’ll try to at least get a small update together for May, and I’ll share links about the Fight Forever project and any other work I get into until I can get back to working on the site again.

Filed under: ScrollBoss Updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Final Fight, toyboss
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