22 Year Long Cringe Compilation

Stay with me.

We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.

I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.

It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.

(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)

Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.

My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.

When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.

We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.

Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.

The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.

I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.

Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”

Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.

The plate must be clearly and openly displayed in a place of great prominence whenever it is in your possession. When it is not in your possession, the display piece must remain in place. This is where you would put your gay pirate plate, IF YOU HAD ONE.

No active steps may be taken to prevent the theft of the Gay Pirate Plate. That goes against the spirit of the game, as does attempting to hide it.

The plate MUST be stolen and cannot be gifted or removed with permission. Should you witness attempted theft of the Gay Pirate Plate you are required to intervene and return it to its place.

But you can also copy from one to the other, at the expense of lower framerate. So some games that do stuff like render 3D on both screens do it by having the main GPU (which has the 3D graphics functionality) render both screens, which means the framerate has two be half, as you're doing twice the renders.

So here's House MD DS, with all layers enabled:

And here it is with the 1st background layer of the main GPU turned off:

I thought it just might be the dialog screens, and the other gameplay sections use layers and sprites and such...

all the images are just PNGs. They implemented a PNG loader on the DS and just load them at runtime.

MOTHERFUCKER!

this image is labeled "bottom.png".

each one has a group of polygons defined in it, and the <layout> element has an attribute called "num_ploys".

but then I realized something:

these two shades do not match. This font is SEMI-TRANSPARENT. oh no...

* Automated Visual Font Extraction, my patented** method for extracting fonts from games

Look at this background. Look at how it's got, like, smooth gradients and shit.

Now let's compare to the actual game:

It looks like shit.

You can especially see on the ground between the medical thingy and the bed. It's because the DS has a limited number of colors and is converting this file at runtime. That's right, the first image is the actual texture that the game is loading... it then has to down-convert it to be able to display it at all.

annoyingly they didn't define the shadow-color with a distinct color. They just used a specific palette index. So I can modify it to make it useful... but then I have to somehow do dynamic palette manipulation on 142 PNG files which have different palettes.