Still working on various other things, but fortunately I found out today about remix.kwed.org, which is kind of a version of OCRemix that focuses (but I don’t think is exclusive to) Commodore 64 music remixes. These aren’t also not all played by a C64, but are remixes of songs from them, so, not all chiptunes. If you need a jam to get you started, try this remix of M.U.L.E.
One of those things I mentioned is, I’m getting a table at Vintage Computing Festival Southeast 2026 in Atlanta! And they said they wouldn’t mind if I did another presentation on the history of Loadstar, so it looks like I’ll be doing that again too! If anyone reading this is in Atlanta July 31, or on August 1-2, please drop by and say hello!
It’s a weird thing to change, but there is a slight difference between the version of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! in the Playchoice-10 version than any other version of the program. As explained on the NES/Famicom game’s page at The Cutting Room Floor, when you start a game in Playchoice Punch-Out, it asks you to enter your initials.
Image from The Cutting Room Floor
It does this because of a couple of other changes: the player is identified by their initials before each fight, and it saves a high score table for each fight that’s displayed when the game comes up in attract mode.
While we’re on the subject of Playchoice differences, on dual-screen Playchoice-10 machines, the top screen is used as a simple UI for selecting games and tracking how much playtime you have left, but it also displays instructions for the game. The instruction screen for Metroid contains a simple map of the first area. (Cutting Room Floor article with image)
Just a minor thing today, as I’ve been splitting my time between other projects. I may have mentioned the Punch-Out fact here before, but if I have it’s been awhile.
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.
We dusted off the image editor and made the first new page header in years! It’s about time too, for it’s time to shorten our list of pages before they threaten to overwhelm our nonexistent offices.
1. Seminal official D&D blobber Eye of The Beholder got a C64 port three years ago. That’s how long this link’s been laying at the bottom of our barrel. Here’s a demonstration video. (37 minutes) If you play it on a C128 in C128 mode, it uses the 80-column screen to display a map! Something to try out in VICE.
2. Also from around that time LowSpecGamer did a video exploring the origins of the ARM processor. (18 minutes) It was created by people new to processor construction for British Acorn microcomputers, and from there expanded and grew until now it’s the most popular processor style in the whole world, backing both Apple and Android devices, by a long shot. It’s beginning to make inroads into desktop use even; I’m currently writing this on an ARM-powered Raspberry Pi 500+.
3. onaretrotip shows off cancelled arcade games in two videos, Part 1 (18 minutes) and Part 2 (32 minutes).
4. I’ve been having a distracting amount of fun on a kind of public Unix/Linux machine called a tilde lately. I plan on writing a lot more on my experiences, but in the meantime you can find out what they’re about, including finding one to sign up for yourself, at tildeverse.org.
6. A late-breaking development, the 25-year-old forums of classic gaming site Digital Press have been destroyed, apparently due to miscommunication between owners, in order to save a little bit of cash every month. As Time Extension reports, this is a gigantic blow to the retro gaming community, there was a huge amount of information that was contained there, and the Wayback Machine’s preservation of these forums is scattershot.
7. To throw in another last-second inclusion, Nintendo’s “My Nintendo” store is changing its name to just the “Nintendo Store.” This is their web shop, not their console-based digital game sales service called eShop, although you can buy downloadable games from the site too. I’d link to the announcement, but they stupidly only made it via Twitter. Get with the times, Nintendo!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
May 22nd is the launch date of the remarkably anticipated Bubsy 4D, the most looked-forward-to Bubsy game since, well, since Bubsy 1. The franchise has been on a steady downward slope since the SNES/Genesis original, so it’s nice to see the character do good for a change, unlike literally every other original take the character had.
The original Bubsy had instant deaths, leaps of faith and gameplay so frustrating that the nine lives Bubsy started with seemed insufficient. Its designers gave Bubsy Sonic-style speed but without his spin attack. Bubsy’s only means of attack was to jump on enemies but which were often off the screen when descending from jumps. I tried playing a bit of the original Bubsy a couple of weeks ago and it turns out the game was worse than I remembered.
Bubsy wasn’t entirely a failure in the marketplace so he got four sequels, not counting the one happening later this month. One was so terrible that it became a meme.
It was on the strength of that questionable success that Bubsy got a pilot for his own cartoon show. So let’s take a moment, or 28 minutes, to look back on it: the Bubsy that once was and could have been.
It was a time when lots of properties were getting one-episode days in the sun in the hopes of landing a series on Saturday mornings. They tried it with Battletoads and it failed a deserved failure. They tried it with Earthworm Jim and succeeded to the degree that it went to series, with an effort that many agree was pretty okay! Now it was Bubsy’s turn. What could possibly go wrong?
This, this is what could go wrong. With original commercials too.
I don’t want to heap too much scorn on the back of a 30-year-old pilot for a failed cartoon show. Its flaws now should be more than evident. Jokes are fired off much too quickly and have no room to breathe, and the sound design is confusing and hyperactive. Compare the Bubsy But lots of shows had problems like those. Earthworm Jim among them, but strong writing saved it. Compare either show to some classic Looney Tunes to get a sense of how far cartoons had fallen. No one expected SatMorn cartoons to measure up to the lushness of the Termite Terrace animators, but they could have slowed themselves down and had more faith in their gags.
By that point the writing was already on the wall for Saturday morning. A decades-long television tradition was on the way out, hurried on its way by cable channels that devoted themselves to showing cartoons all the time instead of just once a week. But at least it was allowed to linger a bit; a Saturday morning Bubsy show could have just killed it outright.
This post isn’t about any game specifically, but rather about an awesome Substack blog, Rings of Saturn, that examines the code of games from what they call the “32-bit era,” around the time of the Saturn to the Playstation 2, which includes the original Playstation, Dreamcast, and Gamecube, with a handful for the Nintendo 64, 3DO, Xbox and even the PSP along the way. They load them up in like Ghidra and search for unpublished codes, they look through demos and prototypes for ways to unlock features (sometimes ones that aren’t present in the finished game) and they make hacks to make unreleased features usable. All are very worthy activities that should be of interest for the kinds of people who would visit Set Side B. (You know who you are.)
In the past we’ve linked to Modern Vintage Gamer’s looks into how Mortal Kombat II and Street Fighter II CPU opponents utilize unfair advantages against their players. These games’ code react to player movements far faster than another human could, can activate special moves much faster than humans can because they aren’t limited by move input timing, and in the case of MKII have a random component in whether the player is allowed to do certain things to CPU fighters. It might be worth having a look at the MKII video from that post.
So then, what can the player do? Just because CPU opponents have unfair advantages no human player has doesn’t mean its AI can’t be exploited in certain specific ways. Danny Tsung06 has a 19-minute video demonstrating how to handle the various opponents:
A 6502 is not a bad little machine, but it does require efficient coding to get decent real-time results. NESHacker dives into basic Mario-style platformer movement in a 10-minute video
The main portion of the video goes into subpixel movement, a term you may have heard speedrunners use. Many NES platformer heroes don’t jump immediately to movement when a control is pressed, but instead increase acceleration, and that acceleration is measured, in the case of Mario, in 16ths of a pixel.
The process of conversion is pretty slick though. It doesn’t use floating point math but fixed point. Mario’s position isn’t stored just in hardware screen coordinates but in a number with four extra bits off the right side. This larger number is what acceleration math is performed on, and when it comes time to position Mario’s sprite matrix (he’s not properly a sprite because he’s made of several), the code divides by 16 by just rolling the bits to the right, which is a very time performant operation on a 6502.
Other useful tricks are explicated, like storing controller states in a single byte (easily done since NES controllers have precisely eight buttons) and jumping. It’s not a general guide into general platformer implementation, but that’s okay, as there already exists a terrific example of that.
For this interview, I (Josh Bycer) spoke with David Peters who is the designer of Disaster Arms and a lover of modern retro games to discuss the game, being inspired by Treasure, and what it’s like to make challenging action titles.
Oh we here at Set Side B try to make all kinds of posts, but among my personal favorite kind are finding some deep dive into some aspect of a game’s inner workings and presenting it. These days, for multiple reasons (such as ease of monetization) many of these dives turn out to be Youtube videos, but not always.
Christian Hammond (Bluesky) has begun a series of text articles looking into the specifics of the implementation of Famicom/NES game Faxanadu.
To explain its name, Faxanadu’s name comes from Xanadu, an early JRPG from Japanese computer game maker Nihon Falcom. Falcom didn’t make Famicom games themselves, but they did sometimes license their games to other developers to make Famicom ports of them, or spinoffs. Faxanadu, developed by Hudson Soft, is such a spinoff. It has nothing to do with Xanadu other than being a non-scrolling exploratory platformer. Its name is a combination of “Famicom” and “Xanadu,” you see. While it’s not at all as popular as a Dragon Quest/Warrior, it’s well remembered by many.
Christian disassembled the whole game, and found out that it has three separate binary scripting languages. His series to document and explain them so far has only Part 1, which is here, but the rest are forthcoming soon.
This first part explores what is possible using interaction scripts, or “IScripts,” which are run when the player runs into some object or speaks to an NPC. It’s quite easy to understand. If you have some interested in how these things are built and run, it’s worth it to take a look.
Basement Brothers is a great Youtube channel that finds and runs classic PC-98 games on original hardware. The PC-98 is a computer platform that was only sold in Japan, and was a home platform for Nihon Falcom, the long-lived JRPG publisher. Here they talk about Brandish, a unique style of dungeon crawl created for the PC-98. (38 minutes)
The first Brandish game did get an English port, released in the US on the SNES, but in Japan it got three sequels. It used sort of mixture between first-person and overhead view, with a bit of roguelike mixed in. You viewed the action from above, but your character was fixed to the bottom center of the screen, and the view was behind his back. He could move or jump forward, or strafe to either side, but if he turned 90 degrees the screen would be suddenly redrawn to the new facing. Enemies would attack you in the field in real time, that is to say, combat was not modal but took place on the same screen as exploration.
It was a bit disorienting; you might think that the SNES’s Mode 7 effects could be used there, but no it kept the same quirk. Smoothly rotating the view wouldn’t happen until the PS Vita remake years later.
Basement Brothers digs up lots of classic Japanese computer games that are still barely known in the US. Please check them out some time!
