luminesweeper: corner cases in game left

This page tracks known differences between the behavior of Lumines® and the behavior of luminesweeper game left.

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Under each build number is a list of behaviors that were corrected in that build of game left.

In 20050629, you can't make a square on top of the sweeper. In Lumines you can; it'll erase only the right half of it. This seems consistent with one of the secret tips for beating the 2x puzzles, found by Derek Kisman and published in gmasterflash's guide to Lumines on GameFAQs.
Lumines forms squares all the time, not just on eighth notes.
In at least the first couple skins, it takes roughly 3 seconds for a piece to start falling by itself, not 2 seconds as in 20050629.
The scoring in Lumines differs from that of 20050629. Soft-dropping a block is now worth 1 point per space, just as in Puyo or Tetris. Each square is now worth 40 points.
Multipliers apparently kick in starting at four squares on one pass, not at two squares as in 20050629. I did not play long enough to see the exact behavior of the multiplier. For now, i'll set the base score as 40*n for n <= 3 and 40*n*(n-2) for n>=4.
In Lumines, the deletes counter above the sweeper increases only at the end of a sweep group, that is, when the sweeper hits an empty row or the right side (sweep_finish() calls delete_swept() which erases swept blocks causing the blocks above them to fall), not immediately when it hits the upper left corner of a tile as in 20050629.

Pieces smoothly slide sideways.
or buttons now slam the piece against the side of the screen unless there are blocks in the way. This addresses complaints in at least one review of Lumines that it was too hard to move the pieces to one side of the screen.
According to one of the Lumines guides on GameFAQs.com, 'unicolor' is worth 1000 points.
Now there is music.

'Empty' bonus is now worth 10,000 points to match Kaikai's version. Kaikai tells me that this was tested against the PSP version.
Value of 'monochrome' or 'empty' bonus is briefly displayed on the playfield.
Non-trivial background image is now present.
After each piece lands, the speed of the next piece goes up slightly. The delay at the top is now equivalent to the time it takes for the piece to fall 6 rows.
I've changed the music, and I will do so for every new build until I get skins working.

Digits are bigger.
The point value of a 'monochrome' or 'empty' made of one or more squares in the two leftmost columns of the playfield is no longer hidden.
Every time you drop 100 pieces, the skin will change after the next pass of the sweeper. The skin controls the background, the playfield, the music, the digits, and the sweeper speed.
The third next piece slides in from the left side instead of just appearing at the bottom.

The skin fades out before the next one starts.
The destroyer is here! It is generated in the first piece and randomly in 1/32 of all pieces. Make a square containing a destroyer, and all connected blocks of the same color will light up.
Correct behavior confirmed at psp411.com: confirms that "half deletes" do not count towards scoring.
Sound effect pitch now varies per skin.
Ramping is now 10 times slower than in 20050904.

Correct behavior confirmed at itgfreak.com: 11 points for dropping piece from top to bottom.
This itgfreak.com post claims that Lumines uses 40*n for n <= 3 and 160*n for n >= 4, which is more similar to what Flare had used.
Also confirmed in the same itgfreak thread was the difficulty ramping speed. Ramping is now twice as fast as in 20050912, which is still 5 times slower than in 20050904.
Builds up through 20050912 didn't count deletes in the last column toward score for some reason. Fixed.

Whenever a square is formed in Lumines, a translucent outline is displayed momentarily, with the current number of squares on the screen above it.
When the player is about to top out, the game tries to nudge the piece one space to the right or left before declaring game over.
Lumines doesn't deal any detonators in the first 3 levels (75 blocks).
Lardarse says the spacing between detonators in Lumines might be more even than the "memoryless" behavior of game left.
Lumines has particle effects whenever a swept block is erased.
Lumines pops up a message box when there's a combo of 4 or more, a 'unicolor', or an 'all clear'.
Lumines has sound effects that vary per skin.
Lumines stops awarding points at 999,999 points but does not give "Game Over". Game left continues past 999,999 and then does something unpredictable at either 2.1 billion or 4.2 billion.
Lumines has a puzzle mode.
Lumines has a time attack mode, which can be set to any of several durations.
Lumines has profiles.
Lumines has more skins.
Game left starts the song a bit late because of extra audio buffering.

Lumines has no way to quickly move the piece to the side of the playfield.
Lumines doesn't hide the screen when you pause.
The profile system of Lumines has no guest account.
Lumines has a lot of lag between pushing the button and hearing a sound. It feels like mixer latency to the author. Someone claims that it is not in fact mixer latency, that the sound effects of Lumines are delayed until the next eighth note. Marked as wontfix because our play testers are already tired of the mixer latency in the VisualBoyAdvance emulator from the TOD M2 and M3 beta phase.
If the sweeper doesn't find any squares to delete within a pass, the last two bars of music repeat. Not only is this annoying, but it would also appear to infringe U.S. Patent 5,315,057 owned by Lucasarts.
Game left has significantly less loading time.
Lumines has a 2-player mode like that of Fantavision. However, reviewers have criticized that it relies too much on getting an early start.
Lumines has vs. CPU mode which follows the same rule as 2-player mode.
Lumines does not have a shuffle mode, on purpose. Game left will.

I'll have to wait until I find someone else with a PSP and Lumines before I can try again, paying more attention to the following:

How exactly are blocks swept as part of a destroyer fuse scored? Kaikai tells me that Lumines adds 10 points for each block swept. I don't know whether this is supposed to be multiplied by the "bonus" for 4 or more deletes. Currently game left doesn't give any points for them.
How fast do the falling pieces speed up in later levels? The delay before the piece begins to fall decrease, but does it decrease proportionally to play time?
In game left, when a piece slides under blocks that fell after being deleted, the blocks will fall past the piece, and if the piece locks into place, it will overwrite the blocks that fell. Ecch. What happens in Lumines?
In Lumines, the skin changes after every 4 or 5 "levels" depending on the skin. What causes the "level" to go up? Score? Time? Number of pieces? Number of deletes? Kaikai's version seems to go up every time 100 LU_SWEPT blocks are erased, which is equivalent to increasing the level once for every 25 new pieces or changing the skin once every 100 to 125 pieces.