This game is a homebrew port of Matrix Attack on the PC. Unfortunately you can't find it on DigiPen anymore because it got lost during an update to the website.
If anyone can find the original game for the PC, please tell me.
Anyway, Matrix Advance is a puzzle game featuring anime-like characters. The controls are the same as before, 'cause it's the exact same game, but dolled-up.
I made a TAS demo that completes 25 puzzles, but I got stuck on the 26th. Here it is for your viewing pleasure: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/186746741/Matrix%20Advance.tasproj.bk2
Hey there! Thanks for putting this together!
I know this post is super old at this point, but hopefully you're still around to see my reply.
My name is Vince, I'm the guy who developed Matrix Advance for the GBA.
I was friends with some of the original developers of Matrix Attack on PC way back in the day, and back when I was learning game development on my own as a side hobby, one of them was super awesome and nice enough to send me the full source code to the original PC Matrix Attack game to look over. I still have all this content available, including all game assets, and their compiled binaries for the game too. Matrix Advance was when I was learning how to do player control with various event timers, and they helped me out a ton with this! (oh, and we had kick-ass LAN Parties back then too!)
The devs wanted to release the game on other platforms, but legally speaking, since they were students at DigiPen at the time, DigiPen holds the intellectual property rights to the game. However since DigiPen no longer hosts the game files anywhere (looks like everything pre-2008 was purged). I made the clone of the game under a slightly different name for GBA just as a learning exercise, and am happy that it has survived on the internet to this day without my direct involvement.
I think it might be best for me to dump all the Matrix Attack PC content up on GitHub for the sake of historical preservation. The folders on my system are a bit of a mess, untouched in two decades. So I'll get that cleaned up and write up some sort of README file explaining all of this and a bit of the history that I remember and try to get it all published.
I want all good TAS inside TASvideos, it's my motto.
TAS i'm interested:
Megaman series, specially the RPGs! Where is the mmbn1 all chips TAS we deserve? Where is the Command Mission TAS?
i'm slowly moving away from TASing fighting games for speed, maybe it's time to start finding some entertainment value in TASing.
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 301
Location: Stafford, NY
He's not a regular poster, but it looks like he still logs in every now and then (last time was two weeks ago). In any case, I'm seconding KusogeMan's comment about the files being preserved for posterity.
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
https://github.com/Matrix-Attack/Matrix-Attack
WALP, here it is. As far as I know, this was the final build of the game.
Please enjoy!
Oh, and I can also confirm that the binary works just fine on Windows 11 x64 without modification. But the screen is super small since it was never designed to scale!
I assume, neither PC nor GBA ports won't have an instruction of how to compile the source?
Also, including .exe files in repositories is not common even for officially freeware games. If you can split the retail files and the source, you'd better keep the retail as an archive.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Keeping the source and binaries together was actually common in the era this was developed in.
Compiling Matrix Advance: I honestly don't remember. It was a very long time ago and only a short period of time that I was developing GBA software before moving to newer platforms. It used DevKitAdv and includes a Makefile, but beyond that I don't really remember.
As far as Matrix Attack on PC is concerned: its the same as pretty much any Windows application of the era: Open the project file in Visual C++, and hit "compile" - things were honestly easier back in the day, instructions were not even needed, things "just worked"