Year: 2025

Old Vintage Computing Research Presents Rare 2007 Talk On C64

This is one of the rare times where I won’t embed the video myself, because the blog Old Vintage Computing Research presented it as a link to their readers, and the video itself is unlisted on Youtube, so it won’t turn up in searches or through discovery features. So I hope I can help spread the word about this wonderful find.

Here is their post, and here is the video (1 hour 33 minutes). It’s a link to the Computer History Museum’s symposium on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, and has Steve Wozniak (creator of the Apple II), William Lowe (“father” of the IBM PC), Adam Chowaniec (Vice President of World Product Development at Commdore) and Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore and key to the success of the Commodore 64).

Since this talk was given, three of the four have passed away, leaving only Steve Wozniak, probably by virtue of his youth when he invented the Apple. Please enjoy!

Zelda Day 2025

“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.

Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.

They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:

In Minish Cap, there are certain names you can’t put on your save file due to a checksum bug. (11 minutes) The same bug can result in a valid save file being declared corrupted:

I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):

In early versions of Ocarina, holding down R while talking to King Zora when he gives you the Blue Tunic causes him to give you a different item instead (14 minutes):

Also in Ocarina of Time, in some areas there’s a mysterious square in the upper-left corner of the screen (6 minutes):

When fighting pairs of Stalfos enemies, the game starts to lag heavily when you defeat one of the two, before the other one is beaten (9 minutes):

Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):

And, finally, here are two strange commercials for the Zelda 1 on NES, the Zelda Rap, and whatever this is supposed to be (both ½ minutes):

Sonic on the Amiga: Mega Drive Sprite Pushing

It’s Christmas Day! So naturally the best thing to do is to settle in for a deep dive on programming sprites on an Amiga (20 minutes), from the guy who recently ported Outrun to the Amiga, reassembler.

The Amiga has hardware sprites, but they’re fairly limited. Most programmers prefer to use its powerful blitter hardware to simulate sprites, drawing them to screen memory much more rapidly than non-blitter hardware can. For more information, I refer you to the video.

That’s it for today, but there be something more substantial tomorrow….

Windows Joke Applications

It’s Christmas Eve, and at the moment I’m maintaining a Christmas video watch thingy for friends, so not a lot of time to post something deep today. Here’s a video that’s been hanging around my linklist for a long time, Nostalgia Tech Lounge on Youtube musing on the lost are of joke programs. (12 minutes)

Indie Showcase for 12/23/25

The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel (Game Wisdom). Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.

00:00 Intro
00:14 Death Tower
1:46 Up to Par
2:51 Ale Abbey
4:19 Tartaros
5:49 Awaken Astral Blade
7:19 Nightmare The Lunatic

Multilink Monday: 12/22/25

Slowly making headway against a year’s worth of accumulated links. Please enjoy whatever takes your interest.

1. Sega’s One-Sided History, from The History of How We Play, about the tensions between Sega’s Japanese and American management.

2. From Mugen Gaming, working on a translation of Japanese TTRPG Sword World, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin in 2026. Included here because Sword World is soaked in video game influences. It really is a case of back-and-forth around the world: Wizardry and Ultima inspired Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest inspired other JRPGs, and then those JRPGs influenced Sword World. And to go with it, a nearly-complete fan translation of a Super Famicom Sword World game.

3. Martin Piper takes a look at the 3D wireframe driving game Stunt Car Racer for the Commodore 64. (45 minutes) From 1989, it did a number of things that you wouldn’t have thought possible on an unmodified C64, and he pieces through its programming.

4. At Retroevolve, Mandy Odoerfer describes the charm of bootleg Pokemon games, games like 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle and Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.

Image from the article, up on Retroevolve

5. The Splatterhouse Homepage, an oldschool webshrine, is still updating, and has a new page on the recent dumping of an unreleased sequel to Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti, called Splatterworld, although I notice that one of its downloads is actually dated to 1993. Hmm, curious!

6. Userlandia exhaustively explored everything at VCFMW this year! (1 hour) I agree: there was a right ton of stuff there to explore!