REV 04 is an actual overhaul of Miniplanets instead of just a patch. I'm
not gonna revert revision number to 00 because it's still essentially the
same game.

So, I had realized that Miniplanets had never *properly* released in Japan
and Arkagis Revolution had showed it's a significant market so I may as well
go and do it (lol), especially with all the issues I've been having with
Arkagis Escape. But honestly the game wasn't in any presentable shape at all
(even back then, sorry PlayOnRetro) so I decided to overhaul it quickly. In
the end it still isn't much of a noticeable impact though... At least I think
that over there for most customers it'll be the first time they see it anyway.

The original idea for Miniplanets REMIX was to include a level editor to make
it *actually* worth it, but besides not having much time to get it done (and
all this was written with a mouse and an on-screen keyboard...) there's the
problem of how to save and share the levels. The only cartridges with saving
readily available use batteries and I don't want cartridges with corroded
boards once people forget about them in a drawer, not to mention being a fire
hazard which could restrict shipping (for good reason). Self-writing the
cartridge memory is an option but it's entirely unexplored so far so I'm not
sure if it's worth the risk yet. Flashcart solutions only would work for ROM
downloads and every model has its own poorly documented interface (when they
even expose it). There's still some barebones editor code (albeit disabled)
written in about an hour or so.

I guess some day there could be a release built entirely around editing, but
triple dipping may be a bit too much :P There's a reason why modern platforms
are moving away from physical distribution.

Another "fun" fact: Miniplanets originally would fit in 256KB but this
version needs 512KB. Part of the issue is that making the miniplanets rounder
involved making every tile 9x as large (each tile drawn in different angles)
which obviously eats up way more space. This in turn made the way rafts
worked not scale up anymore so they had to be redone to work like most other
objects (thankfully sprite limits turned out to be less of a problem than I
originally expected back then), but they'd look like they were floating so I
had to make another projection table *just* for them... On that note, making
objects appear behind the horizon required making the table larger to make it
look correct so that contributed to the size too (though it can be probably
made leaner). The thunder sound (see stage 4) also eats up over 22KB, though
trying to shorten it didn't really sound good...

Not like any of this matters much when available cartridges are 4MB, but it's
annoying when 512KB gives you something like Sonic 1.

Redoing the music was kinda important (ESPECIALLY stage 4's) so I decided to
switch the sound driver to Sona altogether. Biggest difference is support for
mixing two PCM channels. This was never a big issue with Miniplanets (where
the only PCM sound effect is bombs exploding) so I decided to let tracks take
over both channels. This is most noticeable in stages 3 and 4 where drums can
play alongside the ambience sound. By the way, the thunder is the bomb
explosion slowed down to 25% speed lol (then shortened to try to save space).

There's an attract mode now showcasing the different planelagos... Remember
how I mentioned the on-screen keyboard earlier? Well, I can't press multiple
buttons with that, so recording was a no-go. I resorted to manually entering
the inputs instead.
