Author: rodneylives

Mission: Impossible for CP/M

Set Side B’s mission statement is to cover three categories of gaming: retro, which let’s be honest is most of what we do; indie, often the province of blogmate Josh Bycer; and niche, which is usually what all the Nintendo stuff gets filed under.

Well, you don’t get much more niche than the category of CP/M gaming. CP/M, or “Control Program for Microcomputers,” is an ancient OS for 8-bit Z80 computers that recently turned 50. Half a century old! While CP/M was very popular in its era and had a lot of software made for it, much of it is obscure and hard to find now, and in histories of home computing tends to get largely overshadowed by Apple and Commodore. It’s a huge vanished scene, but it can be thought of as the DOS before DOS: the OS that would become PC-DOS, then later MS-DOS, was made as a recreation of CP/M’s API for the 8086 family of processors.

If you think MS-DOS software looks primitive then CP/M will appear to you like the freaking Stone Age. MS-DOS had early adapters like CGA and EGA for graphics, but CP/M had none of those. The point of CP/M was that it ran on a plethora of systems, from manufacturers like Kaypro and Osbourne. Many big microcomputers from the age, like the Commodore 64, TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit line, had add-on cartridges with Z80 processors in them so they could take advantage of the huge CP/M software library. Since the point of CP/M, as would be for MS-DOS later, then Windows after that, was cross-compatibility, it had to run on all those systems. But it didn’t have the IBM PC’s standardized graphics hardware, so little, if any, CP/M software took advantage of special graphics functionality. It’s all terminal gaming.

A beneficiary of the limited prospects for games on the CP/M was Infocom, which released a number of their early titles, including the Zork trilogy, on CP/M, which wouldn’t be held back by the lack of graphics. But other games were made. Many of these titles were reviewed by the ultra-niche blog TechTinkering, which has a Youtube channel, which uploaded video of a lot of CP/M software, including Mission: Impossible.

Mission: Impossible, by Richard Altman, is one of the category of terminal games, which are often played by printing information on the game state to the screen, then asking the player to enter options from a numbered list. In addition to only rarely having real-time play, because there are no visual or aural components to engage the senses, a lot of the weight has to be borne by the gameplay, which often means it’s pretty difficult. It’s of the class of games that can be found in David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games books, games like Star Trek, Lemonade Stand and Hammurabi.

Mission: Impossible is a fairly complex game that I don’t yet fully understand. Here, watch TechTinkering’s 19-minute video on it.

Mission: Impossible (TechTinkering)

Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

It might not seem like it, but in the 8- and 16-bit era, text in a game was rather expensive.

The expressive power of an English sentence is great, but in a way, that of an equal number of bytes of assembly is greater, due to it living and working in the machine, and not just in the head of the player. A page of text is about 700 words; at an average of five characters each, uncompressed that’s 3,500 bytes, or 3.5 kilobytes. By contrast,the whole OS of the Commodore 64, Kernel and BASIC ROMs combined, is 8K.

Most JRPGs are thought to have lots of text, but really they have less than you might think. Square used a few tricks to make a little text seem like more than it really was: like the use of larger fonts, and using graphics to put on little skits to illustrate scenes instead of just displaying them as plain old words. And of course there’s compression. A good compression scheme, while troublesome for fan translators, can still cut down the size of text by half.

But Earthbound is a unique game in many ways, and one of them is the amount of text it has. Creator Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter and essayist, and he wrote a ton of words for Mother 2, Earthbound’s Japanese version. Translator Marcus Lindblom gave it a localization that many regard as one of the greatest of all, that manages to get across much of the wit and charm of the original.

It was a huge task. The text dump on GameFAQs, compiled by someone going by the name “BlueberryButtface,” is 391 kilobytes; the size of the game’s ROM is a bit over 3 megabytes. A direct comparison isn’t really helpful because the dump on the page is uncompressed, but it’s still useful to get a sense of scale.

A lot of this text, as it turns out, is hidden. Not in the sense of being locked off from the player, unused in the game. The text is findable in the game, but much of it is obscure, available only at a specific part of the game, or easy to miss. And, this being Earthbound, much of the text is pretty funny!

On Youtube (again), Cybershell has put together a 28-minute video that uncovers much of this hard-to find text. I already knew about much of it, because I’m weird like that, but it’s nice to have someone present a guide to what’s there and how to find it. A lot of it is the text of the Hint Guy, who, as in the style of Nintendo’s games at the time, will give you a pointer to whatever you have to do next in the story if you pay him a fee. All the hotels in the game have newspaper text appropriate to the point of the story you’re in, even the one way back in Onett, the starting town. Items have interesting descriptions if you think to ask for them. And of course, after you win the game, you can go back in and talk to the NPCs on the way back home, and frog help me, Shigesato Itoi wrote, and Marcus Lindblom translated, congratulatory text for nearly everyone in the game. And there’s more, even than that.

Here’s the video. It’s a fun use of half an hour, if you have any interest in Earthbound.

Rare and Obscure Dialogue in Earthbound (Youtube, 28 minutes)

The Flicky Blog

It’s a whole blog devoted to Sega’s arcade hit, and inspiration for some of the animals that Sonic rescues: Flicky! It doesn’t post frequently, but it doesn’t have to!

Flicky is a wonderful little game, if you’ve never played it. It’s sort of like Mappy meets City Connection. You guide a bluebird through a horizontally-scrolling level to rescue baby chicks from cats. Weirdly, the cats can’t actually hurt the chicks, but they can hurt you.

The standout post on the blog is a discussion of Flicky’s place in Sega’s history, which mentions that the game was created by Youji Ishii, who would go on to create Fantasy Zone! There really should be more games like Flicky and Fantasy Zone, I think. And I’m right!

www.flicky1984.com (Blog)

Sundry Sunday: NES Blades of Steel, Sung A Cappella

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

On Youtube, Triforcefilms has made it their niche to sing music from various game and other media properties a cappella, that is, entirely with voice doing the music.

They have lots of videos, and are still going today, but the one I’m choosing to call out is from nine years ago, their rendition of music from one of the lesser-known NES efforts: Konami’s Blades of Steel, which despite the name isn’t a fantasy hack-and-slash game, but a hockey game, actually a conversion of an arcade game of the same name, both with unexpectedly atmospheric visuals and music.

Here’s a link to a playlist of the NES soundtrack. The highlight I think is the game setup menu. While a zamboni resurfaces the ice for the upcoming match, one of the better menu tracks in the NES library plays in the background. It’s the first of three pieces in Triforcefilms’ video (2 minutes), which are the menu theme, the match start theme, and the intermission. They don’t adapt the triumphant victory theme, but I’ll take what we get.

Note, if you’re confused by the unexpected appearance of Gradius towards the end, that’s from NES Blades of Steel! As a minigame, sometimes you get to shoot at the Big Core during intermission. Win or lose, it doesn’t affect the match, and you still get the advertisement for other Konami properties.

As a minor extra, here’s a stereo separation of the soundtrack made by 8BitStereo. It’s mostly the same as the straight NES version, but in stereo, and will a little more echo.

If I’m presenting Konami sports music that rocks unexpectedly hard, I have to also link the menu theme from NES Double Dribble, and that game’s victory theme. Why did they put so much musical effort into their sports games?

Blades of Steel – Acappella (Youtube, 2 minutes)

A Complete Playthrough of the Original Zork Games

Three videos of a Youtuber called SwimYBO going through all three of Infocom’s classic Zork games. Zork was originally made for the PDP-10 by a number of students at MIT as a larger and funnier version of Colossal Cave, and was made all as one game. When remade for a variety of home microcomputers at the time, it was written in a special language, ZIL, for a virtual machine called the Z Machine. So, the game writers wrote their games once for ZIL, which had a Z Machine written for each of the target platforms. This explains how they were able to relatively easily port for every platform under the sun, back when there were over a dozen, and also why most of their games looked like they were the output of a simple terminal emulator.

Infocom was bought by Activision, used as a brand for a number of weird titles like an NES game, and eventually the Zork name would be applied to a pair of Windows graphic adventures. The property currently lies dormant in the hands of an uncarring megacorp, along with many other old computer game settings, characters and properties from over the proliferating decades of time since Pong.

Anyway. SwimYBO’s playthroughs go through the entire game and reveal all the puzzles and solutions, but they do leave some of the descriptions and game lore unrevealed for a player who might come to them later.

Zork I (“The Great Underground Empire,” 29 minutes):

Zork II (“The Wizard of Frobozz,” 30 minutes):

And Zork III (“The Dungeon Master,” 34 minutes):

What’s So Random About Ms. Pac-Man

I’m not going to say that famously Ms. Pac-Man is a more random game than Pac-Man, because who really knows things like that who isn’t a hardcore gamenerd. But among hardcore game nerds, it’s common knowledge. (If you didn’t know, A. congrats on your coolness, and B. sorry to now destroy your coolness.) Here a video about how randomness works in that game, from Retro Game Mechanics Explained (21 minutes):

Pac-Man is a game that is vulnerable to patterns: if you do exactly the same thing each time on the same level, the same results will occur. There is one pseudo-random element in Pac-Man though: when vulnerable ghosts reach an intersection, the code picks an arbitrary address from a range of memory addresses, then uses that value to pick a direction to decide which route to take. Two implications of this: vulnerable ghosts are most likely to head left at intersections and least likely to go up, and if any byte in that range changes the behavior of the game slightly changes too, even if it’s not an executable byte. Patterns still work in Pac-Man, despite this pseudo-random function, because the seed is reset at the start of every level, so if you do exactly the same thing, vulnerable ghosts will still have the same information fed to their movement routines.

Ms. Pac-Man has other sources of randomness: the ghosts, in Scatter mode, use a different source of pseudo-randomness to decide where to go, one that isn’t so easy to manipulate; and which fruit appears and which of four predefined routes (three for one of the mazes) it’ll take through the board.

Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have its ghosts scatter periodically through the level like they do in Pac-Man. They only scatter at the start of the board. It’s not much randomness, but it’s enough to upset rote pattern creation, since each ghost has the opportunity to make several decisions of which path to take during that period. The way the randomness is handled is interest itself. The ghosts pick one of the corners of the board, much like they would in original Pac-Man, but randomly, when making their choice of target to home in on.

So there! Now you can amaze your friends, if it were 40 years ago and your friends were then able to be impressed by your knowledge of Ms. Pac-Man! You’re retroactively welcome!

Random Elements of Ms. Pac-Man (Retro Game Mechanics Explained on youtube, 21 minutes)

Space Harrier Version Comparison

I’ve been visiting the Space Harrier series lately, mostly Planet Harriers, the 2000 arcade sequel that somehow escaped getting a Dreamcast port.

Google picked up on that (ugh) and pointed me to a 55 minute video comparison of home versions. I don’t think any of you will want to watch the whole thing, but I’ll embed it as a place to start from:

Space Harrier ports are interesting because of how impossible it was for home versions of the time to simulate it. It was a technical marvel in arcades, at a time when generally arcade hardware tended to be miles better than any ports. So, few of these versions have even a slight hope of matching up.

But that makes them interesting! Every one of them had to make a compromise between Space Harriers many different facets, and try to get as much of the arcade’s feeling through despite severe hardware limitations. The arcade beats most of them for quality, of course, with few exceptions.

Science Facts From No Man’s Sky

  • Hi-tech devices can easily be constructed right in your pants pocket, and out of common materials.
The secrets of space travel are contained within this plant.
  • You can make a warp fuel out of a Venus Fly Trap (Oxygen) and a really strong tree (Concentrated Carbon).
  • Venus Fly Traps are particularly dangerous, as their jaws are so powerful that they can harm beings sitting a good 50 feet out of their reach.
  • “Oxygen,” the element, is different than “oxygen,” the stuff you breathe under water.
  • Data is fungible: it doesn’t matter so much what it is, but that you have it. “Navigation data” works to bring your ship to you irrespective of where you got it or where you are, even if it’s the length of the galaxy away.
  • Planets are littered with junk and buildings that are useful to you personally. Drop pods are scattered among the wastes of a billion worlds, each broken in precisely the same way, each able, when fixed, to expand the capacity of the space suit of any visitor. When it is done, it’ll continue to sit there in place, repaired but useless, until the end of time, a mute monument to the fact that, at some point, a traveller needed their pocket expanded.
  • If a mission calls for culling a herd of creatures that are getting out hand, it doesn’t matter which creatures get culled, or which planet it happens on, or it could indeed be anywhere. They’ll be satisfied if you slaughter tiny helpless beasties, T-rexes, or any combination.
  • “Low atmosphere” means exactly the same thing as “low gravity.” They are synonyms.
  • The surface of a planet may be too hot, too cold, too toxic or too radioactive, but caves on it are room-temperature and cozy.
  • Don’t believe what Kerbal Space Program told you. Orbits are a fiction invented to tell people to keep them out of astrophysists’ business.

Also, this isn’t a science fact or anything, but the rarer planets types were all designed by Dr. Seuss:

On ZANZALOR you can find all sorts of thing
from long buried data to pieces of string
all of their houses are shaped like a ring
from which natives dangle and swing like a swing!

note: string cannot be found there, you can’t swing, and the planet’s not called ZANZALOR. I had to fit the meter, It’s a gag don’t write me.

Sundry Sunday: Link Breakdances in Gerudo Outfit

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

It’s not always easy to find these kinds of videos? Youtube’s hated algorithm is heavily influenced by the last things you watched, so if you get in a mood to watch restorations of old arcade games, it doesn’t take many of those until your homepage is loaded with them, to the exclusion of other things.

And honestly, who beside me is going to link to videos like this, an animation of Link in Breath of the Wild, in the much appreciated by fans Gerudo Outfit, breakdancing out in the desert, with unexpected accompaniment? That’s what Sundays here are for folks. Showing you the things that Youtube doesn’t want you to see, if only by accident (30 seconds).

When you’re attacking Vah Naboris but the music is really good (Youtube, animated, 30 seconds)

100 Commodore Plus/4 Games

I’ve brought up the Commodore Plus/4 before, an odd system that seems poorly suited as a follow-up to the massively successful Commodore 64. It was the host system for Pac-Pac, a Pac-Man-like game made in recent years for the Plus/4, a system that’s, compared to the C64, really doesn’t seem meant for games. The video that’s our subject today is just a collection of quick views, I mean just a few seconds each, of 100 Plus/4 games, for the reason that there being even one seems like a challenge. Here is the video (17 minutes). Why? I’ll save that for after the embed.

The Commodore 64 had its strengths and weaknesses. It had hardware sprites, but only 8 of them, each with at most three colors, and even for that you had to trade off half their horizontal resolution. It had smooth scrolling, but it required the processor to move every byte of the screen itself, a feat that was actually impossible on unaided hardware within one frame’s time. (Well, there was a way to do it, discovered fairly recently, but it’s bizarrely dangerous. I’ll describe that some other time.) It had a very good sound chip for its time, but it only had three voices. It had 64K of RAM, but some of it was very difficult to access, and a quirk of the system’s design mean that some of it couldn’t ever be used by the graphics chip. And it had a floppy drive true, but in the rush to release it it ended up with a terrible flaw, making the 1541 floppy drive the slowest disk drive of all the 8-bit micros, giving rise to a whole category of fastload software.

The Commodore 64’s greatest strength was its very low price. Founder Jack Tramiel upended the calculator market with a very low cost calculator, and pulled he same trick on microcomputers with the C64, which sold for just $200 for much of its life. The Plus/4 sold for more than that for the scant year it was offered, abandoning its predecessor’s main advantage. To make up for it, it had a word processor, database and spreadsheet included in ROM. The Plus/4 was intended as a business machine, which is a shame, because businesses could afford PC clones. The C64 was properly seen as a games machine. A C64 without its game-friend features was not going to make it.

The Plus/4 had much worse sound support, no scrolling support, and worst of all, no hardware sprites. No sprites means moving objects have to be done either with tile graphics (wasteful in terms of tiles) or a bitmapped screen (slow). It did have a couple of advantages though. It had support for many more colors, up to 121 of them, and its processor, another version of the 6502, was clocked quite a bit faster.

Still, regarding games on the Plus/4, as the adage goes, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Every game in the video, old and new, should be regarded as something of a triumph.

Jeremy Parish Covers SMS Shinobi

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Youtube is largely a wasteland when it comes to game opinion, criticism and history media. Generally, if it has to do with games, you have to sift through a whole lot of crap to get to the good stuff.

The gold standards in this wretched field are Dr Sparkle’s Chrontendo and spinoff serieses, which seek to review every NES and Famicom game in a decade-plus quest, and Jeremy Parish’s NES Works and its own spinoffs. Our post’s topic today has to do with one of those spinoffs, SMS Works, which has at last come to one of the Sega Master System’s defining titles: Shinobi.

One of the best things about Jeremy’s videos is the context they bring. They try hard to mention other games that came out around the same time, and how ideas would be bandied about between the different developers, repeated and refined. His videos are the only source I know of that would realize, that could realize, that Shinobi was heavily influenced by Namco’s spies-vs-tokusatsu-creeps arcade game Rolling Thunder.

So then, at 15 minutes long, here is that video.

SMS Works: Shinobi (Youtube, 15 minutes)