Set Side B

Formatting a C64 Disk In 15 Seconds

Recently Commodore History investigated just how Commodore 1541 disk drives format disks, and why it took them over a minute. It was also an explanation of just what it means to format a floppy disk. We linked that last week.

Well, yesterday they posted a second video on matters involving formatting disks. (16½ minutes) This time they went over a routine written, for the same drives, that can format a disk in 15 seconds.

So, how can this new formatting method be more than four times faster? In a few ways. The drive’s normal format routine writes 1 bits throughout each entire track; the 15 second formatter doesn’t do anything like that. The stock routine attempts to size the between-sector zones differently depending on how far from the center the track is, and to make that work better it performs a measurement of how fast the drive motor runs. The quick format just uses a same-sized gap throughout the disk. It still reads okay because the drive uses the sync marks to find sectors, it doesn’t try to time the length of gaps when reading, it just looks for a sequence of 10 1 bits in a row. And Commodore’s format routine verifies each track as it’s recorded to the drive; the 15 second format simply moves on, assuming everything worked out.

The result is, the quick formatter does a worse job of setting up the disk, skipping some of the niceties of Commodore’s routine. I wonder if there are some cases where the quick format produces a non-working disk? The video notes that, because there could have been data on the disk before, it could result in cases where the drive gets confused when that leftover data resembles a sync mark or other essential drive structure. Commodore History mentioned at the end of the video that they tried to create such a disk, to see if it caused issues, but was unable to make it happen.

Gamefinds: Trees Hate You

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Another one, so soon! I feel like I should post these as I find out about them, or else they’ll fade in memory, and in importance. I want to get them out to you immediately, while the bytes are hot.

Yet also, with this one, I sort of want you to discover what it’s about, the promise of that title, Trees Hate You, for yourself. That’s not how these descriptions work though. If I just say “play it, trust me,” some of you will, but most won’t, which will be something of a shame for this very silly game.

Basically, you’re trying to find your way home after a picnic, but for some reason (littering maybe?), the trees on the way back have decided to stop you. The ways in which they display their vegetative ire are the humor of the game. The ways you must discover to evade it are the game of the humor.

This is just a free demo, a preview of what developer tykenn hopes will be a longer game. I’m not sure how long they can sustain the joke honestly, but at least the demo is entertaining, if you can handle a bit of frustration. I look forward to seeing if they can sustain the premise.

No spoilers, but… be prepared to be stuck at this checkpoint for a long time.

Trees Hate You (itch.io demo by tykenn, $0)

Gamefinds: Snekburd

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

One of the best puzzle games out there is Noumenon Games’ colorful, fun, and challenging Snakebird, its easier sequel Snakebird Primer, and their combined version on Switch Snakebird Complete.

But even Snakebird Complete costs $15. What if you just want to dip your toe in and find out why the snakebirds are the snakeword(s)?

Try Snekburd, on itch.io.

Created by a Pico-8 dev called Werxzy, they’ve made a “demake” of Snakebird that is essentially just the original but with different levels and pixel graphics, which can even be tried out on the web. And if you’re already a certified serpent-falconeer, it even has some new tricks for you to learn.

The first level. Even this one is challenging!

You control up to four colorful adorable snakebirds, who you can switch between freely. Their mission is to consume all of the fruit on each level, and then escape to the next island. They all move, one turn at a time, like the snake in Snake, but in a side-view, gravity-burdened world with unexpected implications.

It’s a good idea to spend some time at the start getting used to how the SBs operate. Despite being nominal birds they cannot fly. It’s easy to get a longer one trapped against a wall, but you’re allowed infinite undo levels, and you’ll need all of them.

An early level with multiple birds. Your first instinct may be to share the fruit, but sometimes the greed of one bird is necessary if they all are to escape.

A snakebird that eats a piece of fruit grows one space longer. In multibird levels it doesn’t matter to completion which feathery slitherer eachs which fruit, but sometimes the design of a level means a specific bird will ultimately need to be a certain length.

Some levels have no fruit, and reaching the exit is all you have to do. “All” you have to do.

To complete a level, not only must all the fruit be eaten, but all birds must make it to the goal portal. This will often be the hardest part of the puzzle. The ease with which one birdbrain can get stranded unless their snavian colleagues help them to the exit will confound you, but they should be applauded for not leaving anyone behind. (They can’t applaud themselves—no hands.)

Hey kids, it’s your favorite, Big [Snake] Bird, just arrived from Snesame Sneet!

There’s even a level editor for making puzzles to challenge your friends, or maybe even yourself if you’re really forgetful. Progress is saved between sessions on the same browser. And it’s a good thing, for the game lives up to the original’s reputation for difficulty.

So please, give these fluffy beakworms a place in your heart. I’m told that as parasites they’re completely benign!

Snekburd (from Werxzy on itch.io, $0, based on Noumenon Games’ Snakebird series)

Sundry Sunday: WANDA WANDA (from Katamari Damacy) Animation

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

The Katamari Damacy games have such a wonderful soundtrack, every tune in each of them is (adjusts glasses, looks at Urban Dictionary page) “a banger.”

One of these numerous and multifarious bangers, from the first game but sadly absent from its Reroll remake, is WANDA WANDA, the music from its tutorial.

Giving it some overdue recognition is nathorz, in this 2½ minute animation that interprets its title as referring to a grandmother drafted into saving a bunch of aliens. Here ’tis:

We linked to multiple videos made by nathorz in the past, our favorite being a cartoon based on a Splatoon 3 song called Bang Bing.

The KIM-1 Programmer’s Guide to the MOS 6502

The KIM-1, 50 years old as of 2026, was the first 6502-based home computer, designed by the legendary Chuck Peddle and sold by MOS Technologies themselves. (Well, we’re not sure if the Apple I or the KIM-1 was first. Or maybe it was the JOLT? As I’ve said before, there’s always something you’ve never heard of before out there, waiting to make you look like a fool.)

Someone on Mastodon (I can’t find the post now) mentioned that the KIM-1 had excellent programming guides, as it rightfully must have had, considering a freshly-assembled KIM had to have been programmed in raw machine code, and coming from an era before the World Wide Web. I had a look and, lo, it did!

Have a look for yourself, from a copy hosted by Rich’s Classic Computer Pages (PDF). Explained in an early chapter is how to properly add together numbers of arbitrary sizes, something that I had to find out from random sources. I wish I had this book when I was programming on the Commodore 64; I did have the famous Programmer’s Reference Guide, but that’s just it. It’s a reference work, and very difficult to learn the principles of assembly coding through it directly. (That said, there are pages in the C64 PRG that will look very familiar to someone flipping through the KIM-1 Programmer’s Guide.)

If you sat down and read this all the way through, and it’s quite readable for a programming manual, you’d be well placed to write code for, not just the KIM-1, but any 6502 computer. While for other machines you would need more information, like memory maps and hardware documentation, and you might like to have an assembler too, you’d still have a great foundation for whatever crazy programming adventure you were about to embark upon. I love it.

The Video Game History Foundation Examines a Famicom Punch-Out Prototype

Frank Cifaldi presents a look at a mysterious prototype of NES Punch-Out!! that’s turned up. It’s only got four working boxers, with Bald Bull missing key moves, but it also has quite a few working features, including the password system. It’s completely silent though. The game that is, not the video (5 minutes).

The weirdnesses continue…. The cartridge has mock-up art on it that looks like the “black-box” trade dress early NES games had. The chips on the cart are mask ROMs, not EPROMs. In the attract more scroll, arcade names are used for some of the fighters, like Pizza Pasta, Piston Hurricane and Vodka Drunkinski.

The Bard’s Tale Diaries

Have you ever wondered what the appeal of a rock-hard, old-school, Wizardry-style, first-person, overly-hyphenated classic CRPG is?

The original Bard’s Tale, not the PS2 action RPG reboot, and not the more-recent continuation either, created by Michael Cranford, is not as harsh as Wizardry, but is still a tough game, and one that demands that you map it out as you go. Instead of a menu-based town like in Wizardry, you have to actually explore the town of Skara Brae to find important locations within it like Garth’s Equipment Shop, Roscoe’s Magic Emporium or even the Review Board where you gain experience levels, and surviving the town’s random monsters long enough to do those things is your first major challenge. Yet despite, or maybe because of, that difficulty, the series sold more than a million copies, and was an important early hit for both developer Interplay and publisher Electronic Arts.

The C64 Appreciation Society is working through the original Bard’s Tale in an in-progress series of videos, ranging from 10 to 15 minutes in length, and they’re excellent both for an introduction to the classic series, and for understanding what made the game so popular.

The playlist is in reversed order, so if you watched it from that you’d start with the episode 4 and then watch 3, 2 then 1, and it’s really for the best to watch them in the correct sequence, so here those are: Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4. Embedded here is the first of those episodes:

Identifying Samples From Sonic CD’s Soundtrack

With the exception of two or three musicians (They Might Be Giants among them), for the most part I’ve agreed with what Marge Simpson once said: “Music is none of my business.” (Not counting that one episode where it was revealed she had been fangirl at the height of Beatlemania.)

Because of this, I just have to assume that this 16½-minute video from Cat’s Eye and Cybershell finding many (although they admit not all) of the songs that the musicians behind the Japanese version of Sonic CD drew samples from is on the up and up. The Japanese version’s soundtrack was by (looking up spelling on Sonic Retro) Naofumi Hataya and Masafumi Ogata. They mostly don’t seem to touch the US version, which had mostly different music by Spencer Nilsen and David Young, maybe because of those many musical references. Whichever you prefer is mostly a matter of taste, and how well you can handle an intro track for a game about a cartoon hedgehog with lyrics about “leather and lace” and “toot toot sonic warrior.” (Didn’t I make a post about that at one time? A search suggests no, but I was sure I had….)

Lots of names and bands that I’ve never heard of, and songs that I’ve never heard! Look, I know, it’s a huge area to be ignorant of, but at this point I don’t feel like I could possibly do it any justice, so I guess I’ll just go back to my CD of Flood. (Starts absentmindedly singing the lyrics to Particle Man for the hundredth time….)

Extra: this Sonic Retro forum post where The Sunshine Feeler dove into figuring out who did the vocals on the Japanese version, which reveals the amazing fact that the artist who did the rap portion of the intro song, Casey Rankin, also sang the remix of the DK Rap for Smash Bros. Melee!

Weird CC Values in Mario Kart 7

Interesting fact about Mario Kart 7 (the one for 3DS). You might expect the CC values for the traditional three speeds/difficulties in Mario Kart games to be more of a name than a value the game tries to actually simulate, and usually you’d be right.

But MK7 actually means them. The vehicle speeds are actually derived from the CC number in that game. 100 CC is actually twice as fast as 50 CC, because the acceleration multiplier is double, and 150 CC is triple.

Meaning, if you hacked the game, or else made a mod, like CTGP-7, that let you set the CC number, by changing that one value you could affect the whole game, and try ridiculously fast, or slow, game speeds never intended by the designers.

But there is no need to stop there. CC is just a float. PabloMK7 hacked the hack and tried weird floating-point values for CC that shouldn’t rightfully work, like infinity, and NaN (“Not A Number”) , just to see what would happen. (5½ minutes) And then very high finite CC values, and infinitesimally small CC values, like point-lots-of-zeros-then-one CC, causing the engine to break in amusing, and somewhat frightening, ways.

So then, what would happen? Take a look for yourself:

How the C64’s Disk Drives Formatted Disks

The 1541 disk drive was infamously slow, probably the slowest of the 8-bit floppy disk drives, the result of a VIC-20 Kernal bug that was inexplicably kept in the C64 for the sake of backwards compatibility. The problem could be fixed by writing your own disk routines, which is why so many games used fastloaders.

But the bug isn’t always at fault. The 1541 disk drive takes over a minute and a half to format a disk, but as it turns out it had good reason to, and the time consumed had nothing to do with the C64’s code because the drive does all the work itself; the Commodore 64 just waits throughout the process.

Commodore History goes into considerable detail on the process here (16½ minutes). During formatting the drive wipes out all the data that had been on the disk, lays down syncing structures, writes the disk ID to every sector, puts down the directory track and sets up the Block Allocation Map (BAM), and more. It’s an interesting, if not too useful these days, exploration of what disk drives at the time had to do to make the disk’s magnetic surface usable for data storage.

Set Side B is Four Years Old

Set Side B began on April 5th, 2022, a new daily text blog in a world where pivot to video had come and gone, a blog that supports RSS and posts to Mastodon, a blog that serves the most catered (not to mention pandered) to subcultures of all, the video game player person, and is thus one among thousands. Yikes!

How are we different? Although we’re given to the occasional frivolity, we’ve never tried to insult your intelligence here. If it seems like we post randomly from across the whole breadth of gaming (notably excepting the standard AAA production) that is not an accident, even if we do, admittedly, veer off to Nintendo-related topics frequently.

We already did a 2025 recap post, and a full blog recap should wait another year for the 5th anniversary, but I figured it was worth looking back on how far we’ve come, and where we are now in terms of visitor stats. All of these figures are from WP Statistics.

On the average, Set Side B gets about 435 visitors a day. Our most frequent search referral is still Google at 27,954 over the last month. We got 1,108 from DuckDuckGo, and 750 from the poor saps using Bing. Speaking of saps, Brave search brought us 93 links. Facebook brought 36, odd considering I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned SSB on Facebook. I try to avoid it generally when I can.

Device usage breakdown: Desktops at 10.4K (hooray!), Smartphones at 3.5K (eh), Tablets at 137 (huh), “Phablets” at 14 (wha), and “other” at 6. What is other supposed to mean? Game consoles? Fones? Wristtops? Cyberglasses? Compuhats? Supposiputers?

OSes. Windows at 8.8K; Android at 1.9K; iOS at 1.7K; Mac at 1.2K and others at 531. I’d like to think the Wii’s and 3DS’s old versions of Opera are in there somewhere. (The Wii-U’s browser is hopelessly modern by our standards.)

WP Statistic’s map-of-the-world showing visitor ranks through color. Gray must be places that have never visited us at all whenever. That’s us. Set Side B: unknown in Greenland!

Most visits from countries are, in order: U.S., Viet Nam (second place somehow), China (third place, I’m guessing from AI training), then Brazil (we really need to do that retrospective on the Sega Master System and the Monica games eventually), the UK, India, Singapore, Canada (why so low, canucks?), Iraq(??) and Germany rounding out the top ten. The top city, inexplicably, is Hanoi in Viet Nam. Tokyo is 4th place. The top US city for visits is Ashburn, Virginia, down in 8th place.

Four years is a long time to do anything, but we don’t plan on quitting in the near future. Of course, as happened with our friend Matthew Green and Press The Buttons, all blogs fall silent someday. I hope that, when my day comes, if Set Side B is still around, that someone will take it over and keep it going as long as possible, so long as it stays true to its three categories of Retro, Niche and Indie gaming. So long as it’s true to those focii I think it won’t soon lose its way.

We love you! Please love us back, and spread the word about us! And of course, thanks for reading.

Gamefinds: Conservation of Bass

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of quirky little games and things on itch.io. Lots of them are worthless, some are mere cash-ins, and a few are really nice, but good luck finding them with the towering piles of meh blocking view of the horizon, or indeed anything else.

So it’s nice when you find something through the browse feature that’s a joy to play, and such a game is Emlise’s Conservation of Bass. At first glance it looks like it’s going to be another game of the type that bitsy makes it easy to construct. Nothing against bitsy or its games, but most of them are pretty simple, leaning more into the fun of exploring a little world than offering challenging gameplay.

Here’s an early example level, that relies on the fact you can swap both horizontally and vertically.

But as it turns out Conservation of Bass only looks like it’ll be an exercise in pure exploration. It’s actually a completely linear platform-puzzler, and it requires a surprising amount of skill to get far into it. Your walking fish protagonist can only jump one space high, and can’t move very quickly, so sharp jukes in the air won’t save you. As is the custom for these kinds of puzzle games now there’s no penalty for failure, it immediately resets the puzzle for another try.

The fish’s special trick is, it can swap spaces with blocks exactly two spaces away from it with the X button, if they’re the same size as it. It can do this in all for cardinal directions, by pressing that arrow key. These are the same keys that move the fish, and allow it to jump, and it can even do this in mid-air. That’s where the control skill comes in, even if you have a solid plan for how to solve the puzzle, putting it into effect may take you a few tries, as the timing window for swapping a falling fish with a block over safe ground is pretty demanding.

This one is very tricky! The fish can only jump one space high, and it can only swap with blocks two spaces away. To get a block into a place where you can use it to get up to the glass of water goal, it has to come from the bottom layer of the starting platform, but that’s directly over the void. How to solve it….

Helping out is a special property of that X button that’s unveiled to you a short way in: holding it down freezes time, and lets you then use the arrow keys to decide which direction you want to swap in at a bit without needing split-second accuracy, so long as you pressed X with that same accuracy to begin with.

This is another of those games where you’re introduced to its elements slowly, which is great because the puzzles get hard fast. I got to the early levels of Chapter 3 before my pending deadline forced me to set it aside and write it up. See if you can get beyond that.

This is the last level I got to before posting.

Conservation of Bass (itch.io, $0, playable on the web with optional download)