It’s not the usual Sunday silliness, no it’s a different kind of Sunday silliness, but hey it’s April Fools Day! Wait, you’re saying it isn’t April Fool’s Day any more? It’s even May now? Crap.
The Commodore Amiga has quite nice digital sound output. The Commodore 64 has the SID chip, well-regarded in 8-bit computing circles. The Commodore PET, on the other hand….
I’ve seen people call the PET the first home computer. This is false. There were computers before it, but they were sold in the form of kits. One of them, the KIM-1, was sold by MOS Technology before they were bought by Commodore. The PET was released the following year as an all-in-one unit, even with an integrated monitor.
Some PETs had a basic speaker included. The speaker had to be driven directly. With the later SID, you wrote data into registers and the chip’s circuitry handled the sound generation over time, freeing up the process for other things. On the PET, the processor has to push bits into the register itself, or else use a shift register set up to do the bit pushing. That means, if you get the data in fast enough, that you actually have a fair bit of flexibility over what the speaker does, but it also means you spend a lot of CPU cycles in doing in.
58 minutes is a bit of a time imposition. And there is some hardcore hackery going on, with them writing assembly code on camera and testing it over and over in an emulator until it works, as well as both harsh hiss and very high-pitched beeping. To avoid those fine examples of audio torture, you can jump here to hear the final result, at around the 56 minute mark. By the way, the sound being played is the Windows 95 start up noise, the one composed by Brian Eno.
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”
Mr. Goof on Youtube made a video with some cool and relatively unknown things that can be done in Super Mario Galaxy. Like the ground pound move in that game has a homing function, you can hold crouch to skate backwards on ice, and there is a secret button press that can give you a speed boost at the start of Cosmic Mario races. But none of those things are what they claim is the most obscure thing in the game.
The video is titled “Super Mario Galaxy’s Most Obscure Mechanic,” which is a bit wrong. It’s not a mechanic, or mechanism, it’s just a move with no real gameplay purpose. If you stand near water and jump, Mario will dive into the water with a special animation. That’s it. It’s cool, but pretty useless. Still, it’s nice to see it in action.
Here’s the video (7 minutes). Now, go forth and win Mario-related trivia contests, if they happen to ask a question about this extremely specific behavior.
I’ve been working a lot on compiling lists of programs that appeared in Loadstar, and it’s taking a lot of time. So here’s a quick item for today: a visit by the news team of CBS 8 in San Diego to Atari’s headquarters. 12 minutes from the company heyday in 1982, when they were riding high off the success of the Atari VCS/2600 and their many beloved arcade titles.
If you explore the internet long enough, you find wonders and horrors, but you also find very weird and obsessive things. One such thing is sm-json-data, a project to not only comprehensive catalog all of the tricks in Super Metroid and the situations they apply to and their uses, but to express it in a machine-readable fashion, so randomizers can use it.
I don’t even really know how to read it, but just the level of detail present here kind of makes me think it’s worthy of presentation here. It also sets off my allergies against obsession, it makes me itch like I’ve got hives, so I won’t be spending much time here. But maybe it’s the kind of thing you might find interesting?
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”
