Author: rodneylives

Score Keeping on the NES

Sometimes I feel like I should put a content warning here when the technical level of a post is higher than usual. This one would probably be a five out of five for geekery. It’s a video from NESHacker on counting score on the Nintendo Entertainment System. But I don’t want to discourage you from watching it! It’s nine minutes long, and it contains a definition of the term double dabble.

Human-readable numbers are tracked by computers in a number of different ways. Nowadays we basically just do a printf or some version of it, but on a 1 megahertz platform, optimization really matters. It’s easy to think of computers as being impossibly fast, but in truth speed only ever counts relative to the efficiency of the algorithm you use. Computers are fast, but they aren’t all that fast.

One of the big tradeoffs in processor design is, fewer complex instructions that do a lot but take a lot of cycles, and processor complexity, to execute, or many simple instructions, each doing little and being relatively simple, and not needing a complex processor design to implement.

The 6502 microprocessor generally follows the latter design philosophy. It made some important tradeoffs to keep costs down. For example, it doesn’t have hardware that can multiply arbitrary numbers together. It relies on the programmer, or else a library author, to use the instructions given to code their own multiplication algorithm, if they need one. The result is going to be slower, probably, that if the chip had the circuits to do this automatically in silicon, but it reduced the cost of the chip, basically allowing more to be made, or else increasing the profits for the manufacturer.

Personally I’m a fan of just storing the score as a series of digits that match up to their positions in the character set. Gain 1,000 points? Just bump the 1000s-place up by one, and if it goes past 9, subtract 10 and bump the 10,000s place. That’s a tried-and-true system that many games use, and works well if all you ever have to do is add numbers. Comparing values, like for detecting extra life award levels, make things slightly more complex, but not by much. There’s sometimes other factors involved though, and that may explain why Super Mario Bros. uses different systems for its counters, as explained by NESHacker.

Sundry Sunday: DK Rap Remixed by Kirkhope and Substantial

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

People remember the DK Rap, the theme song from Donkey Kong 64 back on the Nintendo 64. It’s certainly memorable, and arguably iconic, although most would agree it’s not great as a rap? It was written by George Andreas (who wrote and sang the lyrics) and Grant Kirkhope (who composed the music).

We’re referred to it before here in a Sunday Sundry about brentalfloss’ excellent (but very dark) 2018 parody version, which kept most of the music the same. Well here’s an update that’s changes the music and lyrics, with the music from original composer Kirkhope, and the words written and sung by rapper Substantial, and by all rights it’s a much better song. Hear for yourself (3 minutes), it’s (puts on monocle) remarkably funky:

Ridiculous Tetris Piece Spinning

Modern-day Tetris contains some weird techniques. Some time back they regularized the ruleset of Tetris, using a confidential, yet mostly deduced, system called the Tetris Guideline. Although there are some games that go outside the guideline in some ways, modes that are called standard Tetris, or just plain “Tetris,” must stick to the guideline as a condition of their license agreement.

The Tetris Guideline, by now, has been part of the game for longer than it’s existed without it, but the most popular versions of the game, the Gameboy and NES ports, existed before the Guideline became a thing, so many people who mostly played that version may not be aware of how the game has changed since those days.

Some aspects of the Guideline are a bit controversial, like allowing infinite spin. Others have to do with regularizing how pieces move when rotated, which has some unexpected consequences.

These two short videos contain demonstrations of Tetris piece spinning. Now, I know for a fact that some of these spins are not part of the Tetris Guideline, especially those that involve spinning the “O” piece, the 2×2 square. Apparently a couple versions of Tetris support spinning this piece, even if it doesn’t make sense, and it has the potential to behave in odd ways. It’s interesting to speculate on the exact kind of drugs the spin algorithm is using when they allow pieces to warp into completely enclosed regions.

Here are the videos. Tetris Spins From Satisfying to Cursed (2 1/2 minutes):

And an “All Spins Tutorial” (6 minutes):

While some of the spins are not possible in standard Tetris modes, many of these are. Some games even reward you for pulling them off.

Legends of Localization Shows Signs of Activity

Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin, translator and localizer of video games, including especially of the fan translation of Mother 3, has a website and blog called Legends of Localization. It had been sleeping for a couple of years, but recently has sprung to life again with two posts this year. A few days ago he linked to a 2017 live playthrough and translation in a series of Youtube videos he made of a Sega Saturn JRPG called Tengai Makyō: The Apocalypse IV, a satirical game that pokes fun at Western culture, that he refers to as kind of a cousin of Earthbound. At 31 videos, each about two hours long, it takes quite a while to get through the whole thing, but it sounds like fun. Here is the 62-hour epic:

On the same day, he posted a history and timeline of fan’s waiting for news about an official localization of Mother 3.

Back in April he curated a collection of articles about bad game translations, including games like Twinkle Star Sprites and Breath of Fire II, but also has a collection of iffy translations of English games into Japanese. It turns out that Atari Games was notorious for them, inspiring a couple of long-lasting Japanlish memes.

At the top of the screen: “koin ikko ireru,” an awkward way of saying “Insert Coin.” (image from the Legends of Localization site)

I hope these posts are an indication of further writing from Tomato in 2025!

Aftermath Looks Back On One Year of Operation

Two whole days in a row of non-Youtube links? Who’d have thought it possible! Shame yesterday was on Nintendo-related things, the other over-frequent subject of our little blogmachine, but I guess you can’t have it all.

Aftermath is composed of just five webugees (original word plz steal) from various other bigcorp contentboxes, and is one of a whole wave of similar creator-owned outfits that also includes Second Wind, 404 Media and Defector. All seem to be doing pretty well… for now… but we’re hoping all the best for all of them, at least until they grow into Kotakus, Escapists or Washingtons Post of their own, and come to oppress an entirely new generation of writer. But that’s the future, and there’s still time to avoid it, at least according to my good friend, the Ghost of Collective Ownership Future.

Aftermath’s principals have an article up describing their experiences, and its variously enlightening and illuminating. Running a small business is a process rife with pitfalls, and when you’re just five people, most working part-time and not able to afford to just pay others to take care of the hard parts, it can be difficult, especially when at your last jobs you could just focus on doing the thing you’re good at, the thing you like doing. Another problem that being only five people creates is fragility. Not intending to jinx them at all, but if one of them were to suddenly pass away, could the remaining four keep the banner held aloft?

But they are doing it. It’s working! And they have plans to expand next year. If you want to follow them and help keep them afloat, they have a trial subscription going where you can read them for one month for just $1. And their monthly rate is just $7 anyway, $10 for commenting privileges and Discord access.

Reading the article, especially the bit about how sites like this tend to slowly bleed subscribers over time just as a fact of their existence, as life happens to their readers in the aggregate, but gain them in lumps as new features are introduced or bursts of publicity occur. It feels like we could all stand to recognize this, and remember these sites need subscribers to survive. Aftermath’s rates are quite reasonable I think, considering that the New York Times charges $25 a month for their output, and as a bonus Aftermath doesn’t even publish frequent transphobic op-eds from right-wing jerks. Huh!

The Ringer on Funny Mario RPGs

Joshua Rivera on The Ringer reminds us of the history of comedy RPGs involving Mario, beginning with Super Mario RPG, then branching into the twin threads of the Paper Mario games and the Mario & Luigi series. They all share the common aspect of making Mario pretty boring, the archetype of the silent protagonist, and instead focusing on the world he inhabits.

Mario & Luigi (image from mariowiki)

In particular, the article mentions how the two of the principals behind Super Mario RPG went on to work on Mario and Luigi, and how Nintendo hasn’t made developing the series any easier with increasingly strict guidelines on how the characters can be used, like how modified versions of iconic, yet generic, types like Toads and Goombas can’t be created, possibly for fear of diluting their brands.

Zess T., a classic Thousand Year Door character who couldn’t be created today, because she’s not a bog-standard, mint-in-box Toad. (Image from mariowiki.)

The article also notes that both subseries have undergone revivals lately, with Origami King and Thousand Year Door in the Paper Mario series, and the new Brothership in the Mario & Luigi line, despite the shutting down of AlphaDream, who made them. But it’s not getting easier to make new games in either series, with Nintendo’s growing strictness over outside use of their characters and the serieses painting themselves further into a corner with each installment consuming more of the feasible possibility space.

Oh Fawful. Will we ever see your like again? (image from mariowiki)

Sega to Delist Classic Games From Online Storefronts

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

(I decided to get some use out of the old news roundup post template for this item.)

News comes from Ars Technica‘s Kevin Purdy, and was announced on Sega’s website, a large number of items will be removed from Steam and all the major console storefronts with the end of the year, although as Ars points out, the Playstation and Switch storefronts are only seeing the Sega Classics Collection removed. Steam is seeing the most removals. Items on the Nintendo Switch online compilation will not be affected. Nothing removed will disappear from your library of online purchases (unlike what happened with Oxenfree on itch.io when it was picked up by Netflix), so if you want to play these items, in this form, later, buy them now, and you’ll “always” be able to download them again later. (Always deserves scare quotes because nothing online is forever, but you’ll be able to play them some while later at least.)

Why are they being removed? Purdy speculates that, like how Sonic the Hedgehog titles were removed in advance of the release of Sonic Origins, there’s probably some new collection of Sega classics in the works that these items will be a part of, or maybe they plan on bundling a bunch of them with a Yakuza game or something.

Sega’s website lists them all, but the great majority of them are Genesis titles, along with Nights Into Dreams for Saturn, and Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and the Dreamcast Collection, originally for Dreamcast of course. I personally recommend Crazy Taxi, of course.

Sundry Sunday: Link is Tired

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I don’t like heaping more views on a video that’s already got 2.6 million, but it’s not always easy finding new ones, so here (33 seconds). I know how Link feels.

The End-Level Signposts in Sonic Games

Will we ever run out of weirdly obsessive video game details to learn? I can’t rightly say, but for today at least there is a video from Bobby Bionic’s investigation into weird behavior by the signs at the end of Sonic the Hedgehog levels. (16 minutes)

Blaster Master & Wing of Madoola’s Lost Arcade Versions

Blaster Master, Sunsoft’s English localization of Japan’s Metafight, turns out to have an unreleased arcade version for the Vs. Unisystem. The Unisystem was substantially Famicom/NES hardware with some changes, so it makes sense that there were once plans to make an arcade version.

No known public copies exist, and I don’t think any ROM dumps have been released. The sole record of its existence may be a video (8 minutes) on the Youtube channel of higenekodo:

They have more videos on their channel than this one, including one of another possibly-unreleased Unisystem adaption of a Sunsoft Famicom game, the Wing of Madoola (16 minutes):

Both games have added scoring systems and other changes to adapt them for arcade play. Without ROM dumps though, we can’t know the full extent of the changes. Wing of Madoola seems to have been given an English localization, and had Gauntlet-ish timed health loss added to prevent player stalling, but it’s not known what changes were made to Blaster Master’s play to keep them moving. Blaster Master was also made less free-roaming: once you defeat the boss of an area and collect the powerup, the player is taken directly to the entrance of the next area, and each area begins with a map screen giving an overview of the area. And collected vehicle weapons appear in the corner of the screen, which suggests that the pause screen was removed.

I love hearing about games being adapted in design to meet different needs, like arcade play, and I’d love to try these modified versions some day to see what other changes were planned. Maybe they’ll come to light, eventually. I can only hope.

Super Mario All-Stars Random Debug Mode

We are told by The Cutting Room Floor this interesting fact. Super Mario Bros. 3 has a debug mode that activates when a specific memory location contains 80 hex, that allows the user to grant Mario any powerup. In normal play this never activates because the cartridge initializes all of RAM to 0 as part of initialization. But the version of the game included in SNES Super Mario All-Stars, while it closely follows the original’s logic in many ways including including debug mode and its criteria for activation, doesn’t initialize memory when starting up. When the console boots up, its RAM contains random voltages that can be interpreted as nearly any value, and there’s a chance that there’ll be 80 hex in memory location 7E0160, and enable the debug mode for Super Mario Bros. 3.

While ordinarily this would be a 1-in-256 chance, some consoles are prone to favoring specific values, so some units will turn on debug mode more often. As a result a legend developed that certain Super Mario All-Star cartridges are special debug versions that accidentally got put into retail boxes and sold.

Supper Mario Broth made a short video (about 1 1/2 minutes) explaining how it works in crudely animated form:

As it turns out, Mario All-Stars has its own debug modes for each game in the compilation, but the one for Mario 3 is different, and buggier. Meanwhile the original debug mode for Mario 3 remains, intact, buried in the code, waiting for the value 80 hex to appear in its magic location to unveil itself.

Sundry Sunday: Ganon Complains About People Spelling His Name With Two ‘N’s

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

BitFinity, aka Matthew Taranto, the guy who made the long-running webcomic Brawl in the Family, has kept busy since with making Youtube songs. In addition a number featuring Waluigi, and one with Aeris from Final Fantasy VI, most recently he’s made one starring Ganondorf complaining about people who spell his name wrong, and who also takes the opportunity to dress down peoples’ issues with game language and pronunciation more generally. (3 minute)