Month: September 2025

The Ultimate Gameboy Talk

It’s a busy day for me coming up, so here’s one from my list of Youtube links: the Ultimate Gameboy Talk (1 hour 1 minute) by Michael Steil, but you don’t have to watch it on YT, as it’s also hosted on the website of Chaos Computer Club in various formats. The embed below is from Youtube though, since they usually have pretty good embedding:

This “ultimate” talk is ultimately about the hardware, its internals and quirks, and tricks that can be pulled off in it. Sure, it’s very technical and extremely geeks, but that’s pretty much the standard around these parts. Enjoy!

MADE’s Fundraiser

MADE is the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, a San Francisco-based video game museum loaded with playable examples. They’re trying to raise $500,000 to secure operations funding for the next three years. I’ve never been to it, but I’ve had at least one worthy person recommend them to me today, and so I decided to help spread the word. (Info link, fundraiser link)

AD_4nXcQpQDep7_rM204rzd_IB1qXLKGqeadx9rYdEUWtgemIG7AfhJPB3bNP-IJy4XMZaoIZ3_dzDXDXCasyTZ1I-2iTYMX-nLzhYqXpKQBBt93nJMv9T8I9NygJ1Sp2R_z6YXuCSFm7A?key=KgRVySaWENirMuy71pHzbQ
You gotta love a museum with a sign out front reading “Play Retro Games Here.” If I was in San Fran, I’d probably never leave the place.

The fundraising seems to be going slowly at the moment, which is a shame. They’re at just 2% of their goal. Please, if you have some spare change, you could probably do worse than to throw it their way. And spread the word if you can!

“Children love our classes!” Well I’d expect so, they’re a video game museum!

Crazy Bugged Balatro Seeds

There’s this Youtube video (SHOCKING, I know) about “The Only Impossible Seed in Balatro*.” (49 minutes) The asterisk is their way of saying, “It’s not really impossible, but that wouldn’t have nearly as much impact as a title.” Yeah, unfair.

The video is interesting, if you sift through it, for an interesting fact: a bug in Balatro’s seed-based randomness generation code sometimes produces a situation where one of its many number sources will get bugged, and produce the same number over and over again. This is the cause of the now-infamous seeds where, if you’re playing the Erratic Deck, all your cards end up as the 10 of Spades, as well as seeds that affect which cards you draw, and one where all the Jokers generated are Rare. The video is most interesting, I think, for describing that mechanism, and that is why it is offered here:

To get to the meat, it turns out there is GitHub out there that explains much about these bugged seeds, here.

Luxocrates’ Project to Get C64 Commando Music Running On Arcade

I am back from DragonCon, but got hit by a staggering blow from life (which I will not mention the details of here) that’s going to take me a long time to recover from. So in the meantime, please enjoy this 19 minute video in which someone on Youtube describes his plan to get arcade Commando (a.k.a. “Wolf of the Battlefield”) to play Ron Hubbard’s excellent soundtrack from the C64 port.

Arcade Command didn’t have bad music at all, but Ron Hubbard’s score is generally regarded to outshine it. The two hardware platforms are really different: the C64 has a 6502-workalike and the legendary SID chip, while the arcade version used a custom platform. This is a first video in a projected series, so at this point we don’t even know if he’ll be successful. Let’s hope.

Best Games From Next Fest Part 6

This is part 6 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest June 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:25 Soulblaze
2:54 Randomice
5:48 Cleared Hot
7:12 Forgotten Fragments
8:44 Pigface
10:12 Dice Gambit
12:14 Astro Prospector