Kineko II(FDS) FAQ/Walkthrough version 1.0.0 by schultw.andrez@sbcglobal.net(anitspam spoonerism) Please do not reproduce for profit without my consent. You won't be getting much profit anyway, but that's not the point. This took time and effort, and I just wanted to save a memory of an old game and the odd solutions any way I could. Please send me an email referring to me and this guide by name if you'd like to post it on your site. ================================ 1. INTRODUCTION 2. CONTROLS 3. STRATEGIES AND PICTURES 4. CHEATS 5. VERSIONS 6. CREDITS ================================ 1. INTRODUCTION Kineko was an innovative little puzzler where you have a moving picture broken into rectangular tiles, and your job is to reconstruct it based on what you can see. You can rearrange the possible tiles however you want in the puzzle above, and you may need to flip them vertically or horizontally. While this seems outrageously taxing the first time you play it, you will soon learn that there is evidence you can rely on to test what should go where. Kineko II is an extension of Kineko with the same engine but different puzzles. I'd say they are a bit harder, since some of them require you to recognize patterns among very similar drawings. For instance, one has identical boys walking around in formations, and different formations reveal if different squares are in the wrong place. The game has an hour in the "best time" list, and if your mind wanders or you get frustrated, it will be necessary. Still, if you keep your head and focus on one part of the puzzle at a time, you should do okay. The game also allows for if you oriented the puzzle incorrectly. 2. CONTROLS First, after you start the game on an emulator, you will need to switch sides. On fceuxd this is accomplished by hitting F8 F6 F8. You may need to wait a bit, and I would up doing so several times. Select is used to move through the menus, and A is used to choose an option. In the game proper, start pauses the game, and select and B are not used. You can move the hand around and push A to pick up and put down a piece. The pieces drop wherever your hand's finger points. You cannot place one piece on top of another. Touching the LR and/or UD arrows means you won't pick up a piece, but you will rotate it in the given direction(s). You can have both arrows going at once. You may also need to scroll the bottom left/right so that the pieces off the edges appear. It's probably best just to move to one edge, place a few pieces on that edge(4 in 4x4, 6 in 6x4 and 18 in 8x6) from one edge right away and move to the other so that you can see all the pieces at once. There's no penalty for being wrong at first. 3. STRATEGIES AND PICTURES If you really want a cheat sheet, you can screenshot the background and place it in MSPaint next to you. This is assuming you are using an emulator. Even that won't help if the background is standard, but it is a help. We'll start with the 16-picture versions of the puzzle. They are 4x4. If you want to avoid looking at the picture first, then you will give yourself some additional challenge, but if you look at the picture, you can tell roughly what goes in which row and what direction it should face. Then, when an object runs across that row, you can switch the order of the tiles if necessary. You should always leave one tile at the very bottom, and you should always start with the easiest row to pick off. That is usually the bottom one, and then you can move up. Don't try to solve the puzzle all at once. Use one pass to determine which pieces should fit on the bottom, then maybe use the next to determine what order they should be in, or which are oriented the wrong/right way. If you want to deviate from going bottom to top, then you may want to note which pieces are at the edge. You also want to make sure that you align everything the right way, if possible. If you have a good picture going left to right when it should go right to left, then you have to take every single row, flip each piece horizontally, open a square, and flip each piece opposite each other. This is not impossible, but it is arduous. You can again make one open square(near the center) and use that to flip everything. For 24/48 pieces you need to be even sharper about catching whatever floats from one square to the next, and for squares with plain backgrounds you may just need to get things in relative positions and move them later. Because 24 is 6x4 and 48 is 8x6 you may not have such clear connections between pieces. However, the basic principle is the same. Create a column or row depending on if the main movement is vertical or horizontal, then go ahead and fill other parts in. Picture 1: This is a submarine control panel. It is one of the easier pictures you will deal with, because a lot is stationary, and if you just look at the original picture, you should be able to figure what is going on. You may get some of the squares backwards, and it is not clear what parts of the panel go where, so I will mention that Kineco is 2nd from top on the right, there is a red square that overlaps the DR and the square left of it, and the printout is in the top left. The white line rotates clockwise. In the UR, the printout must go down with the lever on the right, as the speaker just left is not complete otherwise. Picture 2: Bubbles drop from the top and make splashes. For this you will want to detect which two squares together are the subject of a splash and then link them together, then fit others together. Vertically aligning everything shouldn't be bad because all the water falls down. Other than that, you want to keep a lookout for any possible bursts that go off the edge. If a circle of water should go to another square and doesn't, you know you've found an edge piece. You can also figure which are the top pieces based on which have drops of water that appear that weren't anywhere else before. Picture 3: Stars go from left to right as a big ship hurtles through the cosmos. It's a sort of airplane with little streamers attached to the side. The nose will be at the front, with the angled tail at the back, so you can determine what pieces belong on the sides, and you can also horizontally align everything correctly pretty easily. You may have to wait for the plane to go off the screen and back up/down to get it all done, but it should not be too hard. Picture 4: This level is a bit technical and dry and more about noticing a difference than being able to fill in a background. Red lines go across the screen and back, and yellow go up and down the screen. The reds wipe out the yellows, so when you can, try to align any yellows that form a diagonal into an orderly column. You can also determine the relative horizontal position of squares by watching how a red goes through, and you can determine edges by when a red disappears or reappears. Picture 5: The black stripe in the center is a bit above the center, or at the bottom of the row just above center, and you can use that to orient that bit correctly. Aligning everything in the proper row should be no problem, since you have all those blue and white stripes, and new colors push towards the outer edges, with stripes getting bigger as you move that way. You will need to coordinate which rows change which way, but you can start with the narrow strips and with the row with black in it. However, horizontal alignment and putting squares together may be a bit tougher. Just try to picture what two blocks may go together based on one of the spinners leaving one block and touching another, and you will start stringing them together in the right order quickly enough. I would start with the bottom row and work my way up with organizing things horizontally. Picture 6: A rather silly picture of a tomato dropping. You can determine the top row by what falls through with red first and the bottom by which pieces have the black sprouts. The sides are most likely to have the round sides of the tomato, though that can be adjusted. The tomato is about 2 squares wide, and that should give you an idea of which squares are relative to which once you have the top/bottom rows. I'd advise working vertically from above and below after you arrange them in correct horizontal order. Picture 7: Pool balls bounce around a green table here, and as before, you need to look for edge cases(when one rolls off, especially in a corner) and cases where two squares are linked. Try to focus on a ball with the reflection not rotating, and you will be able to tell not only when it jumps from one square to another but also if those squares' relative orientations are correct. Picture 8: The flashing triangles leave behind a trail, and if you can consistently put together squares that have recently had flashing triangles go over them, you should be able to string them together very quickly. You won't be able to rely on background stuff to stay that way for long, but if you see two colors meet on one tile boundary, chances are they meet on another, and if not, you have an edge square. This is a colorful sort of technical level and thus a bit easier to get your hands on. Picture 9: This is a weird little level with a lot of hints to help you find what needs to be done, but so much similarity that you will have a lot of alignments that look right but aren't. First of all, vertical orientation should not be a problem, because you can turn the kids right side up pretty easily. Second, horizontal is tricky until they change formation, and it is not clear what they will change formation to. So just see who flips where. Because several kids flip at once, you may find the wrong way to go about things. On 16 and 24 levels, you will have split rows which make it easy to get a semblance of what is right. Then you have to rely on the kids getting into formation--they can often walk off the board, and you can use that to look for ones on the edge--and they can make a checkerboard, which can tell you which squares need to be flipped. The kids may also make a rectangle or a thin line in the middle, and it is worth watching the introduction to see all the things they do, including walking in a circle. Different walks and different formations can expose things you don't quite have right yet, and you can gain a clue from each formation. Picture 10: This is a cute puzzle that may remind anyone who played Stargate of that game. You will have different mountain backgrounds that can be used to make the lower part, and while you can't tell anything from the stars, which keep changing, you can tell relative placement of pieces by how the smart bomb travels to destroy the ship, and how the fragments of the ship go all over the place. You'll then get a game over message(center of screen, easy to pick off) where enemies scroll left(another big hint) along with the background. The stars also scroll left here, another thing that can help you organize some of the upper pieces. The glowing squares may also go off the bottom of the screen to aid you in telling what is on the bottom. For vertical alignment, the triangular things should be pointing up. 4. CHEATS Don't read this if you don't want to force an easy puzzle solve, where the picture may well be messed up. However, it is possible that you can start yourself with a corner or something to make the puzzles more possible this way. If you want to solve the game, use this as a reference and set pieces in the right place and rotation accordingly. 0x442 = the start of the map for the main picture you are trying to make. It goes from the UL to the DR. Only 16 bytes are used for the 16, then 24 for the 24, and 48 for the 48, each denoting the next square's value. However, you should note that the pictures do not refresh when you change the values. You have to move each one individually for them to appear. 0xfe = no piece, 0x00 through 0x0f/0x17/0x2f = piece value. To put pieces in the right place in the map, start at 0x442 and type in 00 01 02 03 ... (last value) in the hex editor. But you have a bit more to do. 0x472 = pieces in the rows below. Values defined as above. The correct sequence of numbers to get the squares in position here is to change everything from 472 to 4a1 to FE after you've changed stuff above. If you forget to change a number above or below, there's a possibility you can have an incomplete puzzle or extra piece. 0x4a2 = rotations for each piece. However, this is not the rotation for the piece in position X. It is the rotation for piece number X. This doesn't make a difference if you've cheated the pieces in place. However, if you are just giving yourself a small boost, or fiddling around, here is what happens. 1) put piece 09 in the UL 2a) adjust byte 4a2, nothing happens to 09 2b) adjust byte 4a2+9=4ab, piece 09 is now rotated A piece rotated out of vertical position has the 2-bit turned on, and one rotated horizontally has the 1-bit turned on. So really all you have to do is turn everything to zero if you want to eliminate rotation from the equation for a puzzle. In order to solve the puzzle after doing all this cheating you may have to pick up and put down a square. 0x74 = tens seconds 0x75 = ones seconds 0x76 = tens minutes 0x77 = ones minutes 0x78 = tens hours 0x79 = ones hours End of FAQ Proper ================================ 5. VERSIONS 1.0.0: sent to GameFAQs 12/25/2007, complete 6. CREDITS Thanks to the usual GameFAQs gang, current and emeritus. They know who they are, and you should, too, because they get/got some SERIOUS writing done. Good people too--bloomer, falsehead, Sashanan, Masters, Retro, Snow Dragon/Brui5ed Ego, ZoopSoul, War Doc, Brian Sulpher, AdamL, odino, JDog and others I forgot. OK, even Hydrophant in his current not-yet-banned message board incarnation. I am not part of his gang, but I want him to be part of mine. Thanks to odino for suggesting this game to me. It was fun to play and analyze. Thanks to the NES completion project people for keeping it going strong enough that I could explore these side passages like the FDS and still know there was a project to go back to.