Below are the answers to some frequently asked questions. Please read through this list before sending an email.

1. I don't like dance games. Why should I buy yours? / Why should I buy your game when there are other "dance simulators" out there? / etc

Feet of Fury is not just a dance game! It definitely does have the capability to be one, but that's not its only purpose. Think of it more as a musical beat game with a dance mode. Feet of Fury (FoF for short) is also not a copy or clone of other popular dance games, it is a wholly new game that builds on the previous concepts and introduces entirely new gameplay modes.

FoF's Item Battle mode (perhaps what most people have seen most) uses a "dance game" setup as its basis, but it is more complex than that, and involves much more interaction between the two players. Most dance games only allow you to compare your scores at the end, while FoF allows you to directly battle eachother. It's not just taking what the computer gives you, either -- you can choose to purposefully skip an item arrow without penalty, and this brings about strategy. These items can include effects such as adding arrows to your opponent's screen, causing their arrows to wave around wildly, speeding up their arrows, adding health to your meter, etc.

Item Battle mode and Practice mode may both be played with just a standard control pad as well, using the D-Pad and A/B/X/Y as two sets of arrows for your "feet".

Furthermore, FoF provides Typing of Fury, which is a wholly original musical beat game based on the keyboard. In this mode you type words to the music's beat, which is not as easy as it sounds! It's especially challenging if you are used to typing about a million miles per hour, like Dan. :)

Finally there is Practice mode which allows anything from training for Item Battle mode to playing something resembling traditional dance games.

So even if you dislike the current dance games out on the market, FoF may have something for you. Many people bought it just to support indie games and found out they really liked it after they tried it for a bit.

(Added June 24, 2003)

2. Where did the preview/beta go??

It's still out there, we haven't gone on a purging campaign, if that would even be possible. :) However, we are focusing all of our efforts on the release version now. You can still find it for download if you search a few places, like DC Emulation.

Update: I've gone ahead and re-posted the download page, linked off the menu on the left. Note that a lot of mirror sites have gone down by now, so we don't have a source for the DVD covers or SBI packs anymore. Sorry! A big thanks to all the mirrors that have stayed up this long!

(Updated December 17, 2003

3. My copy boots up, puts on a VMU logo, and then hangs. Do I have a mis-pressed CD?

Probably not. This is generally caused by an incompatibility with a third party peripheral plugged into the DC's controller ports. One common culprit seems to be old-version GameShark dongle/memory cards (the big black one they tell you to put into slot 2). Newer version GS dongles (3.3) have been tested to work fine with FoF.

Reports have said that even some official DC software (like Ooga Booga) has trouble with these peripherals.

Another common question regarding mis-pressed CDs (they are pressed and not burned) is that some copies have a small bubble towards the outer rim of the disc, on the bottom side. This bubble is not located over any data on the CD and does not cause any problems with its operation.

(Added June 24, 2003)

4. I thought this game had 22 songs, but I only see 13! Where the heck did you guys get 22 from? Why can I only play 4 characters?

Feet of Fury, like many games today, requires you to play through the game to "unlock" everything that's available. When you start off, you'll have access to 13 songs of various genres and artists. As you play the game, you earn "unlock points". These can be spent in the unlock store in the Extras/Options menu. Some of the unlockables are new playable songs. There are also playable characters, various art pics (design notes and such), random sound files, and musical extras that can be listened to in the sound check menu.

Every round of gameplay you play will earn you at least a few points. The number of points you earn depends on your score, which is affected by the difficulty of the song, whether you are playing a battle or practice mode (practice mode is worth fewer points for obvious reasons), and whether you win the round in battle mode or not. For the maximum unlock points, play the hardest songs on the hardest difficulty in one of the battle modes.

5. The game dropped me back to the ROM menu unexpectedly. What should I do?

In reality, we've not actually had this question come up except during an incorrect burn (with the preview/beta) or while testing Swap CDs. But it's here just in case. Note that there's a whole section on Swap CD issues below.

Please send me an email (dpotter@cagames.com) with any relevent info you can think of -- what you were doing when the problem occured, whether you were using a Swap CD, etc. We are unlikely to issue patches for the game, but the problem may be fixable in a future batch of CDs or any potential sequels. There may also be a simple workaround if it's a persistent problem.

Note that this may also be caused by a faulty CD. If you get the problem while working with a Swap CD, it is almost assuredly caused by the Swap CD, but in all other cases check back here to see if others have had similar problems. If not, we may need to exchange the disc.

6. I'm trying to use a Swap CD and the game drops me back to the ROM menu unexpectedly while testing it.

This shouldn't happen as much as with the preview/beta version, because in the release the texture loader failures will fall through and load a default texture. However, it's here just in case...

Generally what this means in practical terms is that FoF can't find a texture on the Swap CD that it needs to find in order to function properly with it, or your texture is unpalatable to the loaders. This could be caused by a variety of issues:

• Bad color format (e.g., paletted)
• Non power-of-2 size (e.g., 150x150)
• ...other things we don't know about!

Basically while we can strictly control and thoroughly QA all the data that is included with Feet of Fury itself, we can't guarantee that it will work with things that are introduced by others.

For our texture preparation, we use The Gimp in RGB color mode and save as a PNG (for most textures) or JPG (for song backgrounds). For textures which need transparency (like CD thumbnails), you'll want to make sure the image has an alpha channel (RGBA, aka 32-bit) and for everything else it should not have one (RGB, aka 24-bit).

A similar problem may occur when you enter the song selection screen and half a second later, the game boots you. This is generally caused by using an old OggVorbis encoder. We recommend that you upgrade your encoder to one using the release version of liboggvorbis (many use a "release candidate" version), and encode with variable bitrate, 96Kbps nominal.

Several people have also reported issues when not using the "genromfs" method of making Swap CDs.

Also if you burned your CD without Joliet or Rock Ridge extensions then the game may not see the right filenames.

The bottom line here is that if you're having a lot of troubles, you may want to just wait until we've got the nice tool set out that takes care of all this stuff for you. Once that's ready, it'll simply be a matter of dropping your pictures/steps/oggs in place and burning the results.

7. My DDR pad/PSX converter/VMU/etc doesn't seem to work. Can I fix it?

Maybe. If you have any settings on your PSX converter box, try tinkering with that and see if it produces any change. I also sometimes find that the physical connector on my PSX converter is flaky.

Note that you should not play with the converter while the DC is on -- there have been numerous reports of burning out the maple interface board in the DC if you do things like hot-swap these PSX converters because they were not built to Sega(tm) specs.

You may also want to try it with a standard PSX controller just to see if it's something weird with the interface to the DDR mat.

FYI, I am testing over here with a "CCL SmartJoy" adapter attached to a used Red Octane Ignition Pad. FoF seems quite playable with that arrangement, no weird behaviors. They're a bit pricey, but probably the best DDR soft pad you can get and you can use 'em with the official DDRs as well.

For general peripheral compatability testing, you can try out this peripheral tester app for this purpose:

Raw files
Nero image

It contains a portion of Feet of Fury's code from our internal source tree, so it will be a more accurate assessment of the compatability of the game than the preview/beta was. It also tests out our region checking and 50/60Hz code, for European users. If you have any troubles with it or you find anything that looks weird, please drop us an email!

8. Can I change around the songs on the FoF CD itself so I don't have to keep swapping out?

Nope. This wouldn't normally bother us so much, but there is a distinct possibility for someone to build a clandestine copy of FoF which has a hundred DDR songs on it and release it that way. The game was really built in "no user servicable parts inside" mode.

If you extract songs from the release version of the game (we're not silly, we know you can do it :), we'd like for you to refrain from distributing them. Many of them are created by third-parties and they requested that the songs only be distributed with FoF.

9. I saw a copy of this game up for download / I saw this game for sale on a bootleg list / etc. How uncool is that? What can I do about it?

It's very uncool. Very. We hate to have to bring this topic up but it's unfortunately probably going to be necessary. All the *AAs now are in the process of starting a "stick" campaign. We'd rather use a "carrot" campaign:

Before anyone thinks about placing an image of our game online, selling it as a bootleg, downloading or buying such a bootleg, etc, put yourselves in our shoes. We've spent the last almost two years pouring our time, our creative energy, and our money into this project. We haven't done it because some big corporation paid us to; we've done it because we like to make games and we think the DC deserves to have some more games made for it. Selling our game is our way of validating that what we've been doing all this time was worth all that effort.

In the long run though, the only people the "pir8s" will hurt will be themselves (and the rest of you) because if we don't think people want the things we're making, we probably won't make more of them. It will hurt the rest of the DC community too because we give so much of our code back to the community for use in their own projects.

So please, even if you downloaded an ISO image of the game, ask yourself honestly if you'd really pay for it if you weren't getting it for free, and if you would, please do so. As a bonus, you get a shiny physical CD, small manual insert, and cover art for it. Plus you get that fuzzy feeling that you're supporting independent game developers so that maybe you can have some games to play besides the sequel tripe a lot of the rest of the industry is pumping out now.

As an aside, "making a backup" is no excuse since we're explicitly allowing you one backup copy for personal use! :)

All that said (*phew*) you can ask the person / site in question to stop distributing the image if you feel comfortable doing that; in any case please drop us an email to let us know what you saw.

10. I thought only licensed developers could develop for a console. How'd you do this?

This is gonna be a long one, bear with me.

Traditionally a console manufacturer makes a special trick for booting media on their console which is either patented or kept as a close trade secret. Additionally there is no available documentation for how to access the hardware in a console, even if you were able to make your own bootable media. Finally the manufacturers are usually large corporations with enough lawyers to make the idea unpalatable even if it's technically legal. When you sign up as an official developer, you are getting a media creation right (subject to the QA of the manufacturer) as well as a development kit, technical support, publishing assistance, etc.

In the case of the Dreamcast(tm), a backdoor of sorts was left in the boot rom (the menu you see when you turn on the system). This allows anyone who can burn CDRs or press CDs to make bootable media. Once this was discovered (in 2000 or so), various programmers around the world set out to figure out how all the hardware worked. At this point, we have a very functional development kit that is available completely free of licensing or restrictions, called KallistiOS. Sega was very cooperative with us (rather than confrontational) back before they discontinued the system, and they have disavowed all interest in the system at this point to various inquiring parties.

Feet of Fury was written in basically the same way as any unauthorized commercial products you see in the stores for the Dreamcast, such as DC-X, DC-MP3, Bleem!, GameShark, etc. One or two late-model systems in Japan removed the backdoor, but the third-party code continues to work on the vast majority of systems.

All of the data contained in the Feet of Fury disc is written from scratch (and generally licensed under a free software / open source license). KallistiOS was used as a base toolkit for the game; all of the game code is written by Cryptic Allusion's Dan Potter. All of our music and graphics were also created specifically for Feet of Fury.

Hopefully that answers the question. If you have any other questions on this topic, feel free to email me.

(Added December 17, 2003)

11. You guys are awesome! Anything else I can buy?

Yes, as a matter of fact... These things won't support us nearly as much as buying copies of the game, but you can feel free to do so. Every little bit helps. Anyhow, visit our CafePress shop:

CafePress Shop

We've heard that Rand from Bleem! once said when asked if people could donate to them to support their efforts, no, just buy several copies and give them to friends. This both gets us the money from the CDs and it also spreads the word. We whole-heartedly support this idea!

12. You guys suck!

We've actually not gotten this one (thankfully!) :) but if you do have suggestions for improvements then please feel free to email!

Dan Potter (dpotter@cagames.com)
Last Updated December 17, 2003