The video refers to a shorter video (19 minutes) by Zarithya, who solved some particular technical issues that made the 16-player game possible. If you’re in the mood for the full journey watch the above video; if you want less of your day consumed, try this one:
The gist: Faceball 2000 was a console (and portable) recreation of an Atari ST game called Midi Maze. Midi Maze was probably the first true FPS. Faceball 2000 got releases for multiple platforms, but the first, and most impressive technically, is probably the Gameboy version.
Developer Xanth Software F/X had a 16-player version of Gameboy Faceball working internally with special cables. Nintendo wanted them to support their new four-player adapter, but the mode that allowed for 16 players with the rigged cables was left in (it still works with an ordinary Gameboy link cable, jut limited to two players), although the devs noted in a 2005 interview that they had only managed to test it with up to 10 players.
Zarithya managed to figure out a way to play it with higher player counts with minimal extra hardware, and also discovered, and fixed, a bug that made 16-player games impossible with the code as released. It’s a pretty accessible explanation, you can probably understand it without much of a technical background.
That’s the main point; for the full story, the videos above are available. Enjoy, if you have the time!
For this podcast, I spoke with Dominic O’ Reilly from Krunchy Fried Games who is working on the adventure game Five Day Detective. We spoke about adventure game design and writing along with the challenges of creating the story alongside the puzzles.
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”
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Another romhack! There’s lots of hacks and it’s not always easy to find one I consider notable enough to present. This week’s definitely has technical skill on its side.
Mario Adventure 2 might sound like a successor to Mario Adventure, a 2001 hack of Super Mario Bros. 3 that remakes it into an almost entirely different game. That would be great, but that’s not what this is. (And neither, I think, are related to this Mario Adventure 2.)
Mario Adventure 2 gets its name from Sonic Adventure 2. It’s a port of that game’s levels, fairly closely, into the Mario 64 engine, with some chances to Mario’s handling to accommodate 3D Mario and 3D Sonic (and his 3D friends) differences. That’s a pretty tall order!
The hack is not complete (its creators call it a demo), but unlike many WIP hacks that modify a level or two and then remain in limbo forever, Mario Adventure 2 has already converted around half the levels, the whole “Hero Side” story, starring Sonic, Knuckles and Tails. The “Dark Side” story, centering around Shadow, Rogue and Dr. Eggman, is not yet ported, but even if nothing is ever released from that, there’s a great deal to play.
Now if you know anything about these two games, your curiosity is probably piqued, not so much by how the levels from Sonic Adventure 2 were made completable by Mario, but how Mario 64’s engine could handle them at all. Sonic Adventure 2 is a Dreamcast game, but Mario 64 was made for the Nintendo 64! And it doesn’t pull emulator tricks to make them work: the game works on actual N64 hardware!
I don’t know for sure, but it seems like the game splits Sonic Adventure 2’s large levels into sections, that are loaded in as separate maps. And while the main sections of SA2’s maps are rendered in full, the many areas off the main route, that can’t be entered, are missing a lot of polygons (one of my screenshots shows this).
Replacing the emblem goals in SA2, Stars have been placed throughout each levels. The levels have far more than Mario 64’s eight Stars each, and the early levels, at least, have at least 25 of them. Some short sections of map have three stars to collect, visible at once. The remakes of Knuckle’s stages, which I remind you are non-linear and exploreable, are dense with them. Collecting a Star doesn’t kick you out of the level either, so it’s possible, though difficult, to get all the Stars in one go.
Mario 64’s engine has been changed to remove fall damage, and to allow for grinding on rails, which you’ll remember was a pretty big selling point of SA2. It hasn’t been changed to allow for rolling up steep slopes though, and Sonic’s loops had to be cheated in various ways, although you’ll also remember, I’m sure, that SA2 did some cheating of its own. Mario Adventure 2’s handling of them is probably a little less janky.
Those who’ve played Sonic Adventure 2 will remember a considerable amount of jank, and its Mario-focused counterpart reflects that. The first level, City Escape, is one of the most janky, with invisible walls blocking side-streets, and even some places that you’d assume could be passed. It’s still playable, for the most part, but there are a couple of places in Tails’ first level, Prison Lane, that rely on specific jumps to get through. Tails’ levels involved shooting enemies to open gates to progress. That aspect has been kept in Mario Adventure 2, but Mario doesn’t have missiles, sometimes the enemies are difficult to reach, and you’ll have to find an alternate way through. You’ll get stuck near the beginning of the third level unless you take advantage of a lifting platform to make a jump that doesn’t quite look possible.
If those sticking points can be fixed, then this could easily become a romhack for the ages. Let’s hope that its makers can get enough playtesters to find them all, and have enough energy to fix them. Until then it’s worth a try, but you might want to refer to a video that plays through Level 3 (like this one, two hours long) to find a way across that gap without killing all the bats.
Skawo reports on an odd bug in both the Capcom-made Gameboy Advance releases of Zelda games A Link to the Past and The Minish Cap. It’s explained, as is frequently the fashion, in a ten minute Youtube video, here:
The video’s a bit padded with injokes and gimmicks, but beneath it all the bug is really interesting. Many games have checks to ensure the validity of save data, but the developers of both games implemented theirs in an odd way, calculating a 16-bit checksum for the file data twice, once by adding and once by subtracting, saving them both, and them when the File Select screen is setting up adding them to each other and checking for zero with the negative bit set (the high-order bit). It usually works, except when the checksum is exactly zero, which happens one in 65,536 times.
When that occurs, the total will be zero without the negative sign, which will be detected falsely as corrupted save data. As luck would have it, naming your character “God” in the European version of GBA Link to the Past will trigger the bug, and make it so you can’t create the file. But the 1-in-65536 chance comes up every time you save and exit. (The file check is made upon loading the File Select screen, so just saving with a checksum of 0 won’t trigger it; if the player saves later in the same play session, non-zero checksums will be written over the bad ones.)
1-in-65536 is a rare event, but it’s not extremely rare, and it’s absolutely the case that over the years many players have had their games declared corrupted and made unloadable. If a player saves their game, say, 20 times through a playthrough, then that’s about a 1-in-3250 chance of losing all their progress, and both games sold much more than 3,250 copies.
While the original Mac isn’t often considered a top gaming platform, there were neverthless some very nice games for it. One of those was John Calhoun’s classic shareware title Glider. (Glider can be played on Infinite Mac’s emulation of System 6—look in the Games folder in the Infinite Mac disk on the Desktop. The source code is on GitHub.)
Glider 4.0 (B&W mode)
Calhoun had a lot of fun just making prototypes for new Mac games, and so while he didn’t release many there are a number of half-made ones that he’s now put up in their own GitHub repository. Elite-inspired space exploration games, a computer version of the classic Black Box puzzle, a computer aquarium and other ideas are among the presented experiments.
The title of the repo is Unfinished Tales Vol. 1, and there’s already a Volume 2. There really has never been a game playing or development platform like the classic Macintoshes, it’s a window into a lost era of both computing and entertainment. Cameron Talley on Youtube made a 13 minute examination of some of their contents. This is it:
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”
