ChibiAkumas’ Many Assembly Tutorials

You wanna know something? I think everyone should learn to program. I don’t mean using some, the word I usually use is cockamamie, “AI,” that will produce brittle, inefficient, unmaintainable code if it doesn’t mess it up, but actually code. I think most of the difficulty with coding is actually in the languages. Woe betide the person trying to learn to program in C++ from scratch these days. C is much better, but still obtuse. Python is better, but also not great for systems or performance work.

The solution? Why, learn to code in assembly of course!

Aaaaand 90% of readers just clicked away. Hah.

But the funny thing is, for many languages, assembly is actually a little easier than them I’d say. When you’re working directly with the hardware, all the weird abstractions you have to learn fall away. It does mean you have to do everything, and I mean everything, yourself. But on the other hand, programming is largely the process of connecting building blocks together, tiny routines comprising larger ones. It takes longer to do it in assembly, and working with a lot of current-day hardware is trickier because you have to jump through more hoops to use it. But its difficulty, I think anyway, is a little overblown.

Have my farcical words somehow swayed you? Does it sound like something you might like to try? Would you at least like to see what you’d be in for? Then I have a website for you: ChibiAkuma’s Assembly Tutorials. They also have Youtube channel.

There’s a wealth of material to peruse, including videos walking you through coding a bunch of different architectures, including 6502, 8086, Z80, 6809, 68000, and even ARM, among others. Even if you have no interest in actually coding for these multifarious* chips, just knowing out they work may be very interesting to you, if not be actually useful someday.

Here, to get some idea of how understandable this will be to you, take a look at his series on assembly coding for the C64 (Youtube playlist, 13 videos, about 170 minutes in all), beginning here:

* That’s 17 points with no bonuses, but 67 if a bingo

ChibiAkuma’s Assembly Tutorials (chibiakumas.com)

A Tale of Commodore: the Chessmate

It was brought to my attention by <b>scruss</b> over on Metafilter (Mastodon) that Peter Jennings, not the newscaster but an oldschool hardwre guy, has a long and great page on the creation of a standalone chess-playing computer for Commodore in its early days, we’re talking between the creation of the KIM-1 and the VIC-20.

It’s a terrific article that covers far more than just Jennings’ experience making the device, covering among other things a pitch to Mattel, meeting with 6502 designer Chuck Peddle, a story of Bobby Fisher, and the unfortunate news that Jack Tramiel, then the boss of Commodore, rarely paid vendors what they were due. Seems about normal for the man.

There’s even a long list of interesting links about the Chessmate at the end. I can’t recommend it enough!

The Commodore CHESSmate (Peter Jennings at benlo.com)

Sundry Sunday: The Archives of Unskippable

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

There are few websites that have blown themselves up as often as The Escapist. They were once a respected market for insightful games writing, but between going all-in on Gamergate and alienating their video content creation arm, I’m surprised their domain name doesn’t 404 by this point. I don’t mean this as speaking ill of anyone currently working there, as someone who’s almost never had what I’d call a steady job in games media I know you get the work where you can find it.

One of the casualties of The Escapists’ multiple destructions was a terrific series from Graham and Paul, two of the scrappy minds behind Loading Ready Run, who I’m shocked I haven’t mentioned more often in these electronic pages. The Escapist was a long-lived sequence that riffed, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, the richly deserving category of video game cutscenes, especially those at the starts of games. As cutscenes are video intended to be consumed by an extremely broad audience of young, internet-saturated males, it contains some of the most bizarrely ridiculous animation ever stuffed into MP4 files, and during its time Unskippable mocked over 300 examples of it.

For a while Unskippable was only available in The Escapist’s archives. Then those disappeared, and they vanished from the internet, a victim of bitrot. But lately many (all?) of them have been uploaded to Youtube via the channel LRR Videogames, and a welcome revival it is!

Here are three selections from the list, just a taste of what you can find there.

The Darkness (Unskippable #7, 5 minutes) is an early classic from their work, a game I’ve never heard of (it doesn’t seem to be my kind of thing), but apparently got a sequel, which has also been riffed on Unskippable. It’s the source of a long-running in-joke in the series, “and that was the nth time I died,” of which all of the instances have been categorized here by some obsessive worthy.

X-Blades (Unskippable #14, 6 minutes) is the story of an extremely underdressed and annoying young lady, a treasure hunter who runs afoul of a magical artifact. But instead of being turned into a frog or killed outright she gets to have an adventure fighting monsters and stuff. On the cover of the game box she basically moons the observer, which should indicate the game’s intended audience. The game is named after her weapons, which are knives that are also guns. I guess that was enough to title a game after in that distant misty year of 2007.

Sonic the Hedgehog (Unskippable #133, 5½ minuites) is not the Genesis/Mega Drive classic 2D platformer, but one of Sega’s many attempts to present its trademark super fast gameplay in 3D. It was presented as a reboot of the series, with a backstory involving some kingdom and its princess, but it didn’t work out too well. Our hosts remark more than once that it seems to want to be a Final Fantasy game. This observer wonders why they haven’t tried making a 3D game with the kind of abstractified geometric terrain that makes the 2D games so much fun to watch. Maybe they have and I haven’t noticed. I also wonder why the movies have done so well. The world is full of mystery.

Unskippable from the Archives (Youtube playlist, 326 items, approximately 38 hours)

Self-Promotion: We Love Mystery Dungeon

Once in a while we have something that one of us has done to promote, and so is the care today. It’s been a while in coming, but at last my second print book, a greatly expanded version of We Love Mystery Dungeon, is now out through Limited Run Press!

It’s just $25, but it’s packed with information, from the original Torneko through to Shiren 6: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, with absolutely no generative “AI” (always use the scare quotes) used in its creation. This edition has stuff on Shiren 6 and a huge new section on the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games! Thanks to Jeremy Parish for helping edit this monster into existence!

And since it’s unofficial we don’t toe any company lines in making this. This does mean some idiosyncratic terminology, sure (I call monsters advancements “promotions,” which I think I got from the Nethack source code?), but it also means I’m not coy about which games I think are good and which aren’t. And I try to at least mention every game, including weird ones like Nightmare of Druaga and the Japan-only Etrian Odyssey II. There’s also Rainbow Labyrinth, a free-to-play mobile game which I only know about from a page from a Mystery Dungeon wiki, and which never left beta!

Someone’s Working on a TTRPG Hexcrawl Map of Donkey Kong Island

This is the kind of project where I’m split evenly between derision, admiration and respect. Someone is actually doing this thing, with as much accuracy to the 16-bit games (and DK64 too) as is merited, however much that may be. And they’re doing it, not as some D&D adjunct, but I would say as an accessory to an unproduced (as yet?) Donkey Kong RPG.

If you don’t know what that is, and I’d admit it’s meaning is sorta inside baseball…. A hexcrawl is a kind of RPG adventure that’s either partly or totally undirected. A large expanse of terrain is marked out on a hexagonal grid, secretly on a gamemaster’s sheet. The players of his game may have their own hexagonal grid, either completely unmarked or with only the most obvious features pre-inscribed upon it.

D&D hexcrawl example, from The Alexandrian

In the GM’s notes, some, many or possibly even all the hexes are keyed to a list of contents, waiting for an unsuspecting party of adventures to wander through/blunder into it. There might be deadly monsters, friendly allies, neutral NPCs, dungeons, lairs or treasures to find there, or some combination of these things. Just walking into a hex doesn’t guarantee finding what’s hiding there, if hiding something is, it may require a concerted search; or, the party might find it easily. It’s inherently a sandbox style of play, but the randomness of finding adventure, and the possibility that whatever might be there could be missed, multiplies the sense of possibility in the game world. A group might travel through a hex many times before a well-hidden encounter might get noticed.

This is the style of gameplay that the inspired creator seeks to bring to Donkey Kong Island, site of the 16-bit SNES classic Donkey Kong Country and its sequels. The inspiration is the same kind that craftsdwarfs in Dwarf Fortress get, referred there as a strange mood. Those moods can turn out well or badly, but if successful they produce wonders.

It’s an amazing idea, and a bit awe-inspiring, and at least a little bit ridiculous. But lots of things that I thought were ridiculous became immensely popular, Kingdom Hearts is proof enough of that. Actually, I still think Kingdom Hearts is ridiculous, and more ridiculous than this.

The nom de net of the creator of this is Farmer Gadda, and they have both a Neocities blog and a Bluesky presence, which is where I found out about this. A project like this, I’d have it pegged for a Mastodon announcement, but at least I found out about it somewhere.

There are two posts so far, an introduction and a page of system considerations. They’ve thought about it at least that hard, and I can respect that kind of maddened obsession, since after all have I not harbored a not-very-secret Rampart obsession for decades, since before Donkey Kong Country’s release even? (Checking facts: Rampart was 1990; DKC was 1994.)

Screenshot of the first post. Imagining having the task of what to hide in that giant bust’s nostrils?

So I say, shine on you improbable diamond! Keep on doing what no one’s done before! We eagerly await word of your efforts, and if you the reader would like to help support this crazy endeavor, you can hear evidence of its progress a week early by contributing to their Patreon.

Time Extension Talks Starflight

Starflight is an amazing game. First for the PC, but then with ports for the C64 and, of all things, the Genesis/Mega Drive. It was the first game to really nail the sense of being a kind of Star Trek simulator, with its combination of open-ended exploration and alien interaction.

PC Starflight (image from the article)

It’s possible to think of Starflight as being a trilogy, with itself, its sequel, and the quite similar Star Control II. Greg Johnson, one of my favorite people working in games, was a major mover on all three. Johnson went on to be one of the people behind ToeJam & Earl and a number of other projects, including some terrific music, and is currently working on the eagerly-awaited Dancing With Ghosts.

Time Extension translated an interview with four of the people who made the original Starflight, including Greg Johnson, from a German podcast. The story of the game’s creation is a bit rocky, with some of the principals having to put in their own money or take out loans to live on during its creation. It’s also a tale of the final moments of the good days of Electronic Arts, right before they discovered there was a lot more money running series into the ground and tying up the rights to multiple big-league sports than their original mandate of nurturing independent creators and making possible unique software visions.

But don’t weep for what could have been; instead, rejoice that it happened at all. Remember that Tarn Adams, half of the duo who make the literally incredible Dwarf Fortress, credits Starflight as a major inspiration. The path to the future, and the long-delayed realization of video games as a transcendent art form, runs through many different people, but the thread holds firm. The coming decades will see great things, and Starflight is but one brick in their foundation.

Gamefinds: Violarium

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.

(EDIT: I put the wrong banner on this post on first publishing! It’s fixed now.)

Violarium is another of that prolific genre of puzzle game, the grid- and turn-based series of progressively-harder problems where you learn the rules as you go, and new complications turn up periodically, until suddenly they’re all done and you’re looking at the credits.

At the beginning

Often this style of game takes the form of a block-pusher, but not this time. Each puzzle here is made of a number of dice blocks, their pips representing digits up to six. You must trigger each of the blocks in order: the 1, the 2, the 3 and then the 4 (and the 5 and 6 too, if they’re present). Each must be triggered once, and not more than once, or they all reset and you have to start it over.

You trigger a block partly by standing next to it, but that’s not the only requirement. Your facing matters too, but your character can only face left or right, and can’t turn in place unless you move into a wall. You can also trigger dice by moving next to them vertically, but the rules are subtly different. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how they’re different, but as you might expect, by the end you’ll have to have completely mastered the implications of this system, and some other devices too, before your purple pixel person can retire to his petite pixel pad.

Slightly later

Of note: I have noticed that the combination of Linux (and Wayland?), Vivaldi and this game is a bit unstable, I figure maybe due to the Unity browser runtime. That’s just a guess, but the game screen continually freezes up for me when running in that browser. I’ve not tried it in Chrome, but Firefox is okay, so try using that.

Violarium ($0, by EasyYogi on itch.io)

Beyond the Scanlines Presents A Few Accessible EGGCONSOLE Games

There is a universe of Japanese home computer games that are largely unknown in Western territories, especially the US which never got a local MSX machine. Some of these games can be played officially with emulation via Project EGG, and some of those are even available on Switch as part of EGGCONSOLE.

But the problem remains, most of them are in Japanese, a difficult language to pick up if you didn’t grow up with it. Well the Youtube channel Beyond the Scanlines has selected a few of them that are playable without any Japanese language knowledge (14 minutes).

Guardic is a strategic exploratory shooter from Compile that’s both an interesting game in its own right and the predecessor of the NES classic The Guardian Legend (Guardic Gaiden on Famicom).

Hydlide is a game that’s available on NES and is pretty infamous there, but it does play a bit better in its original version.

Slipheed is a classic shooter with 3D graphics that still hold up pretty well today.

The Scheme is a platform that I honestly don’t know much about, except from this video!

And of course Zanac is another classic Compile shooter. I think the Famicom/NES version is mostly better, but don’t sell this version short.

Please consider enjoying, if that is something you are able to enjoy. That is to say, to you, it’s enjoyable. If it isn’t, if it’s enjoy-not-able, maybe tomorrow’s post will meet your inscrutable fancy. (That is to day, sour fancy is able to be inscruted.)

Sundry Sunday: The Wii Play Tanks as Anime Girls

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

When I put it like that in the title it sounds like it’s going to be salacious but it really isn’t, it’s just anthropomorphized representations of the various enemies in Wii Play Tanks.

Okay… you don’t know what that is…. I’ll explain.

Wii Play was a mini-game collection on the Wii natch, a burgeoning genre on that system. It was an excuse to release a bunch of Wiimote experiments as an inexpensive package. As often happens with Nintendo, some of them were better than you’d expect. Three of them had some real longevity to them. Table Tennis was like a faster version of Wii Sports Tennis; Billiards was an excellent pool simulation; and then there was Tanks.

Tanks put you through a series of 20 single-screen levels where you piloted a tiny tank around destroying various other enemy tanks set around each board. As you passed level after level the game would introduce new tanks with various personalities and powers, like laying land mines, firing rocks, aiming bank shots off of walls and, eventually, invisibility.

If you were playing along you had limited lives, but it also had a two-player co-op mode, where each player only had one life, but destroyed players got revived so long as the other player survived to finish the level.

After you finished the 20-level version you unlocked a 100-level version, which threw in a couple of new tank types. There’s some nice grace notes in the design, like how the background music adds different tracks depending on which kinds of enemies are in play. It was a lot of fun, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the best game in Wii Play. Here’s a marathon playthrough of the whole thing. It’s a surprising hour and 22 minutes long, but just a couple of minutes of it will suffice to give you the idea.

This week’s find is a much shorter, 3½ minute animation presenting cartoon representations of all the enemy tanks in the game, by NCHProductions.

Splicing Speedruns in Super Monkey Ball

I don’t know if any game series has a higher ratio of difficulty to simplicity as the Monkey Ball titles. Just use the analog joystick to tilt a 3D landscape to use physics and gravity to steer a plastic ball containing a money into a goal tape. But within that simple premise is some of the most devilishly hard gaming of all.

Especially in the original game, Super Monkey Ball. (Okay, the original original was Monkey Ball, but that was only released in Japanese arcades, and is pretty similar to the arcade mode of Super anyway.) To truly beat S.M.B. you have to complete 50 stages of Expert, then the secret 10 stages of Expert Extra which only appear if you finish Expert without using a continue. This means doing it in three lives, plus whatever additionals you can scratch together by collecting 100 bananas, while completing levels like this:

It isn’t the focus of this post, but here’s a run through all of SMB1’s Expert, Expert Extra and Master stages. The thing about Super Monkey Ball is it’s very hard, but it looks even harder. Check out this utter insanity (34 minutes):

Being separated into discrete levels like this and being so exacting in execution, one might think that the incentive to cheat at this, by splicing together footage of different runs, would be high, but due to some interesting factors it’s not as easy to do this like one might

think. Goober13MD made a video (13 minutes) explaining why you can’t just edit together your best plays in Shotcut and present that as a world record run:

But that video is from eight years ago, and since then some people have, indeed, tried to cheat, and for quite some time succeeded at getting away with cheating at speedrunning this most ludicrous of games. Here’s GooberMD13’s exposé from four years ago at uncovering a cheater (48 minutes):

And two years ago they put together this epic 1 hour-6 minute video about ancient records revealed to be the probable work of cheaters: