The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Why does Bowser set up race track courses in his castles? Does he have that many to spare? It’s a question with a simple answer, that he answers in 50 seconds. It’s also pretty good animation on Bowser, done in Blender by GleanieBOI!
At Microsoft Build 2024, Jon Peppers described his experience converting .NET bytecode so it can run on the NES’s 6502-like. It’s 43 minutes:
Running .NET on the NES (Youtube, 43 minutes)
Here is a very short video from Seedy, only a minute long, explaining an interesting bug in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
OoT handles fiery environments without the Red Tunic, and being held underwater by wearing Iron Boots without the Blue Tunic, in an unusual away. You might expect them to return Link to the last safe place he had been, like when falling into a void, or else maybe kill him instantly, or at least cause periodic damage. Instead, for whatever reason, the designers chose a unique way to implement the danger Link is in.
While in hot places or stuck underwater without the proper tunic, the game starts a timer, with time relative to the amount of health that Link has. If Link leaves the area or puts on the right tunic before time runs out, the timer goes away and Link takes no damage regardless of how much time was left on it. However, if the timer expires before Link reaches safety, he just dies instantly, “getting a game over” in the clumsy parlance of video games. You’d think it’d be better just to inflict some damage on Link every few seconds, but that’s not how they chose to do it.
Link gets eight seconds on the clock for every full heart he has. Fractions of a heart grant proportional time. While the game only displays health in quarter-hearts, Ocarina of Time actually tracks hearts in 16ths (each full heart is effectively 16 hit points), and each 8th of a heart grants Link one second on the timer.
So, what happens if Link has exactly 1/16th of a heart? The display rounds up, so it looks like Link has a quarter of a heart left, but he’s considerably closer to kicking the bucket than that. He has less health than what’s needed to get a one-second timer. How does the game cope with that?
It does it by just not starting a timer at all! If Link is almost dead, paradoxically, he becomes immune to fire and drowning timers. He’s still in great danger, for any attack on him in this state will kill him immediately, but it makes tunic-less challenge runs a bit more interesting.
Break Timers With Low Health (Youtube, 1 minute)
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
We’ve not done Romhack Thursday for a while. As the winds of the ‘net, and my attention, blow around randomly, sometimes there’s more things that seem worthy of posting than others. This one definitely fits the bill though.
We’ve posted about 10yard’s intriguing Donkey Kong hacks Galakong and Vector Kong before. I don’t think they’re actually hacks in the classic sense of the term, modifications of a game’s software intended to run on its original hardware, or at least an emulation or simulation of it. Galakong might, and Vector Kong definitely does, rely on Lua support in MAME to produce, respectively, a version of Donkey Kong where Mario teams up with the ship from Galaga, and another version of Donkey Kong limited to the Girders stage, a.k.a. Ramps, but with sharp colorful line-drawn artwork akin to that produced by Atari’s later Vectorscan monitors.
10yard let us know that they have produced a front-end to a variety of Donkey Kong romhacks, 90 in total. It runs on Windows an Raspberry Pi, although if it runs on the latter I suppose it must also be possible to get it to work on Linux? Maybe?
It’s not just a front end though. It presents all of its mods through an interface that itself plays like Donkey Kong! You move Mario around the levels of the classic arcade game (they’re connected vertically), and each is littered with arcade machines. You can play them with coins collected them as DK rolls them through the boards, and also earned by getting good scores in each game. Collecting more coins not only gives you more chances to play, but it unlocks further games in the collection.
You download the package from the Github page linked above. You must also provide the MAME-compatible romsets for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. (It might work without without all of them, but fewer games will be available.) Of course, it’s up to you to rip, or otherwise provide, those files. If you provide them, it’ll handle all the patching for you automatically. It even includes its own custom version of MAME to play them.
Both Galakong and Vector Kong are among the hacks provided, but there’s so much more to see and play besides those, including Halloween, Christmas and Doctor Who themes hacks. There’s really too many to mention here, and I’ve only started unlocking games myself. I’ll leave you with the closing link, and some screenshots of the hacks included that I’ve managed to unlock so far.
DKAFE (by 10yard, for Windows and Raspberry Pi, on Github)
Each indie showcase highlights the many games we play here on stream, and if you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Curse of Eternity
01:35 WizardChess
3:43 Ardenfall
5:11 Sippin Hot Blickety Block…
6:34 Crafty Survivors
8:27 Bad Writer
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
In 24 minutes, Bismuth on Youtube explains how Super Mario 64 was beaten without a single A button press, on actual hardware by someone who’s nom de net is Marbler. The run was performed over five days. Video of the feat isn’t up yet, but should appear on Marbler’s channel when uploaded and encoded. Here is the video embed:
I have some commentary on this. First, if you’ve been following PannenKoek all this time like I have you know they’ve done many videos over the internals of SM64, many with the end goal of getting the A Button Challenge as low as it can go. The answer is, he doesn’t get all the stars, and it’s been a long iterative process of routing, and figuring out how to do formerly TAS-only techniques on with a controller. After a long period of improvement, finally, the dam broke.
What does this mean for PannenKoek? I think their most interesting videos lately have been those that are more about Mario 64’s internals, like that terrific explainer about invisible walls. And completing every star without A button presses is still a ways off. I think they’ll be fine.
How Super Mario 64 was beaten without the A button (Youtube, 24 minutes)
It’s only two episodes in, but this series from the Youtube channel What’s Ken Making is already really interesting, with episodes averaging at around 16 minutes each. The first part is titled “The Design of a Legend,” which doesn’t really grab me much, but the second is about the main processor, “The 6502 CPU,” which Ken admits near the start isn’t exactly accurate. The Famicom/NES’s processor isn’t precisely a MOS 6502; it’s a Ricoh 2A03 in NTSC territories, and a 2A07 in others. The 2A03 is licensed from MOS, but lacks the original’s Binary-Coded Decimal mode, and includes the Famicom/NES’s sound hardware on-die.
Episode 1 (15 minutes):
Episode 2 (17 minutes):
That removed BCD feature. Why? The video notes that the circuits are right there within the chip, but have been disabled by having five necessary traces severed. The video notes that the 6502’s BCD functionality was actually patented by MOS, and asks, was the feature disabled because of patent issues? Was Ricoh trying to avoid paying royalties?
