Things Pvt. Skippy is not allowed to do at the Switch 2 release event, #14: Loudly read their erotic, explicit Sonic/Shadow fanfic.
#18: Spread rumors that the Switch 2 requires a new, more costly form of electricity to use.
#23: Dress in a robe, ask others in line if they’ve accepted Mario as their lord and savior. Also, they cannot set up a shrine to their Wario Amiibo.
#26: Show off the SD Micro Express card they bought online, telling people “If you don’t have one of these, you’re already dead.”
#28: Swear people to secrecy, tell them they’re a spy working for Sony, then take pictures of people in line to send to “headquarters.”
#32: Bring a blue bowl with spikes glued to the underside, then throw it at the person at the front of the line and try to take their place.
To explain: Lists of things Private Skippy is not allowed to do (usually in the U.S. Army, but also other armed forces or even other places) are an ancient form of internet humor, possibly older than the World Wide Web itself. It’s the kind of thing that would have been traded around Usenet, or even Fidonet. (Its absence from Know Your Meme proves its affected by recency bias.) TV Tropes has a page on Skippy, a claim it originated in 2001—I think it’s older but could easily be wrong—and a link to the webpage skippyslist.com, which is a broken WordPress install. Sorry Skippy.
Here is one surviving list on the Web, although part of the process of Skippy is that people add new items as they pass it around, so there is no canonical list. I should warn you that, as a very old form of internet humor, you can expect these lists to have questionable items on them, depending on who’s posting it. The list I linked also prefaces the list with a backstory. It’s entirely unnecessary: many of us know a Pvt. Skippy of some variety, even if they never served.
Working on the Loadstar Compleat project has taken up a lot of time, so I keep trying to think of ways to use the things I’ve written for it here on Set Side B. This is the introduction I wrote (edited down to the history, mostly), and a shorter piece on the Eras of Loadstar.
A photograph of long-time managing editor Fender Tucker, holding a pipe in his mouth. (Fender is an adherent of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, of the Church of the Subgenius.)
Loadstar was an incredibly long-lived computer magazine, distributed on disk, for the Commodore 64 and 128 home computers. It began in 1985 and its last issue was distributed in 2007, covering a span of 22 years. It had 250 issues of the main publication, 42 quarterly issues dedicated to the Commodore 128, and numerous side products.
About Loadstar
Loadstar was initially created at Softdisk, Inc. You might have heard of Softdisk as the prior place of work of several employees who left the company, founded id Software, and created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake. It’s possible that some of them might remember the Loadstar guys, but it seems doubtful.
Loadstar was distributed on newsstands up to issue 72, when it switched over entirely to mail-order subscription sales. Despite this reduced exposure, Loadstar soldiered on. Starting with #32, some issues of Loadstar contained two disks of programs and information. These issues became more and more common until, beginning with Issue 43, every Loadstar contained at least two disks until the end of its run.
Loadstar published lots of different kinds of programs! The Video Pro-Titler may still be of use today, if you have need of a simple character generator!
Issue 44 began the reign of Fender Tucker, who would helm Loadstar for the next fifteen years. Fender lent the magazine a distinctive style. He’d write editorials describing the magazine as originating in the “Loadstar Tower,” a wondrous place looming over its home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. (The magazine was actually produced in a basement.) He’d also write up the adventures of his nefarious alter-ego and musician Knees Calhoon, who was listed as the author of some of Fender’s own software. Under Fender Tucker’s guidence Loadstar flourished, and garnered a devoted community of users and contributors.
According to Jeff Jones, attitudes at Softdisk were that the company’s Windows and Mac products were the future of the company, but eventually the internet came along and dashed that dream. Softdisk continued along as an ISP for a time, but around 2006 its services were taken over by another company, and it’s now long defunct. During Softdisk’s later years Loadstar continued to support a large and loyal userbase, and didn’t cost much to produce, so it chugged along well into the internet age.
As Loadstar grew, so did its community, and the technology around it. While the Commodore 64 computer was discontinued in 1994, a thriving market of add-ons and upgrades sprang up to serve its users. Probably the most notable third-party producer of Commodore peripherals was CMD, Creative Micro Designs. While Commodore themselves had made expansion memory modules for the C64, CMD took their ball and sprinted way downfield. CMD made a disk drive accelerator (JiffyDOS), powered memory units that could serve as long-term storage, accelerator boards, and even hard drives compatible with the venerable 8-bit machine. Loadstar’s staff used many of these devices in its later years to help produce their magazine.
Loadstar had a symbiotic relationship for about four years with Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. Some type-in magazines would offer a disk supplement, containing all of the software in an issue on a computer disk and saving users from the need to type them in. Commodore had an arrangement with Loadstar to serve as the disk supplement of their magazines. This deal lasted from around issues 11 to 61, and helped bulk out Loadstar’s issues with interesting software.
Early issues of Loadstar often hosted ports of programs that originally appeared in Softdisk. One notable series of these is the Alfredo animations, a sequence of programs that depicted the travails of a stick man trying to survive a dangerous landscape. See folks, the genre didn’t start with Adobe Flash! Long after its parent Softdisk Magazine closed up shop, Loadstar published two final, original Alfredo adventures, in two of Fender Tucker’s last issues, #197 and #199.
Loadstar never distributed the Commodore versions of GEOS, Berkeley Softworks’ surprisingly successful bid to bring a mouse-driven, icon-based, Mac-like point-and-click interface to 8-bit home computers, but starting with Issue 58 and throughout the rest of its run GEOS programs were a regular fixture on Loadstar’s electronic pages. In retrospect, GEOS was done much wrong. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Berkeley Softworks attempted to bring their OS to DOS-compatible machines with GeoWorks, only to quickly be dismissed as a budget pretender to Windows’ throne. GEOS was far from the first, and certainly not the last, Windows competitor to be steamrollered beneath Microsoft’s hardball tactics. (See: CP/M, PC-DOS, OS/2.) Judging by quantity, Loadstar may be GEOS’ biggest supporter that wasn’t Berkeley Softworks or Commodore itself.
Another company that formed an arrangement with Loadstar was Quantum Compuer Services, which served the Commodore 64 community with an online service called QuantumLink. Several early Loadstar issues came with the QuantumLink client software included on one of its disk sides. (At least one of our included issues has a copy, now useless.) Quantum eventually released a similar service for MS-DOS-based computers, and renamed themselves to America On-Line.
“AOL,” as everyone called it, become a runaway hit. They would build upon its strategy of distributing their disks far and wide, first as 3 1/2″ floppies, then as CD-ROMs, and eventually DVDs. QuantumLink was left to languish and, after a long period of decay where users complained of unmaintained upload sections and unmoderated forums, AOL unceremoniously shut it down without so much as an archive. The later history of AOL is generally known: they bought out their rival CompuServe, AOL keywords were broadcast during daytime television, it was a popular early choice for a dial-up ISP, it became the most-used ISP in the United States, and they created a hugely popular instant messaging program (AOL Instant Messager, or “AIM”). Then they underwent a disastrous merger with Time-Warner that would be hastily undone, then obscurity encroached as first the internet, and then social media, made most of it services redundant. AIM, once thought unstoppable, faded and died as more people used their cell phone’s text feature. As of this writing AOL still exists, but it’s fallen far from the days when its iconic “You’ve Got Mail!” catchphrase became the title of a Hollywood movie, proving once again, truly: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.
The premise of this movie will certainly age well. BTW, the more you find out about the history of movies, the more you come to realize this happens ALLTHETIME.
The Eras of Loadstar
The Early Issues Loadstar started as a C64 counterpart for Softdisk’s self-titled Apple II magazine. Many of its earliest programs are ports of Softdisk software.
Commodore Magazine With Issue 9, Loadstar became the official disk supplement for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. The programs from those periodicals helped to greatly bulk out their offerings. The arrangement lasted until Loadstar issue 61.
The Rise of Fender Loadstar’s longest-serving overseer was Fender Tucker, a kind and genuine person with an engaging writing style. Fender joined up with issue 42, and starting with the next issue, Loadstar moved to two disks a month.
Jeff Jones, Loadstar 128 & Loadstar Letter Associate Editor Jeff Jones joined sometime between issues 49 and 55 and brought some additional technical know-how to Loadstar. In addition to touching up programs and contributing software of his own, Jeff was largely responsible for Loadstar Quarterly 128, their publication catering to Commodore 128 owners, and the Loadstar Letter, a print supplement distributed along with Loadstar.
Puzzle Pages Barbara Schulak’s first program was Jump, published on Loadstar #44, but starting with issue 60 Loadstar published a monthly puzzle section that became the magazine’s most enduring feature. From then, every Loadstar had a Puzzle Page until issue 163, but the feature continued, mostly monthly, until issue 197. Barbara Schulak wasn’t the only contributor to the Puzzle Page, and there were puzzles outside of it, but Barbara was its soul.
The End of the Newsstand Edition Issue 7 was the last issue of Loadstar 128 to be distributed on newsstands, and issue 72 was the last issue of Loadstar 64 to be buyable that way. For most magazines that would have been the end, but Loadstar still had 16 years of life in it, sold entirely through subscriptions, mail order sales, and later via the internet, a testament to the faithfulness of Commodore users.
The European Age At its height around 1991, Loadstar had around 20,000 monthly subscribers. Without the free advertising provided by newsstands, by 1994 that had dropped to around 5,000. As Loadstar reached issue 100 and long years passed, it became harder to find contributions from US subscribers. Meanwhile the C64 was still going fairly strong in Great Britian, and many of the games of Loadstar from this era have a distinct demoscene feel. Loadstar also published demos, and reported on Commodore hacking circles. Loadstar would also embrace the internet, and offer issues for sale by way of their website.
Dave Moorman’s Tenure The writing was on the wall. By 2000 Loadstar had about 1,000 subscribers left, too many to just abandon, but not enough to remain profitable for their then-meager staff. Fender handed the reins off to the worthy Dave Moorman, who kept it going to 2007. Moorman was a dogged manager, and went to lengths to keep the magazine full of items, including frequently reprinting software from the magazine’s glory days. While many of Loadstar’s prior stalwart contributors didn’t switch over, Fender himself still wrote for the magazine, and kept up with it until the end.
The Tornado In 2007 a tornado struck Dave Moorman’s house, and wrecked his Loadstar-making setup. While one more issue, #250, would eke out in 2008, the 22-year run of Loadstar, last remnant of the once-mighty field of computer software periodicals, was over. Loadstar had outlived all of its sister magazines from Softdisk (including its DOS, Windows and Macintosh publications) Softdisk Inc. itself, as well as Compute, Compute’s Gazette, Commodore Magazine, Commodore Power/Play, Ahoy, Run Magazine, Family Computing, Creative Computing, UpTime and DieHard.
(I have been reminded of the value of marketing, so I have to include the $15 Loadstar Compleat package I’ve put together with the permission of J&F Publishing.)
This comes out from the halls of Metafilter, and a post there by Wolfdog. Pixelogic is a webpage where every 5×5 Nonogram puzzle (which you may know by the trademarked name Picross) is on a website, and as people solve them they’re marked off.
Part of the fun of most Nonograms is making a picture, and very few of these come out to anything. In the screenshot above 9,303,414 there looks like a crab, and the one above 9,303,408 whose number is cut off is obviously a helicopter, but the rest is pixel gibberish. It’s amazing, though, that one can make even that out of these random blobbies and garbages.
But on the flipside of that, 5×5 puzzles are really easy! It’s a simple matter to do one, and after that another, and so on, and then an hour has passed and you’ve finished hundreds. Add to that the job of just working on something with lots of other people, and you have a damn addictive time. The puzzle software is friendly too: left click to mark squares, right click to mark empties. The solver automatically marks Xs in spaces where they logically must go if you’ve filled all the spaces on a line of column. And unlike many of the Picross implementations on Nintendo systems, there’s no penalty for making wrong moves, although you’re not informed when you fill an incorrect square either.
To work on these, I suggest scrolling way down the page and finding a block of unsolved ones, as the site doesn’t filter out finished puzzles, and then working outward from there.
I realize I’ve assumed that you already know how to solve Nonograms/Picross here. A full description would be verbose and probably unneeded, especially since you can probably figure it out yourself by just looking at the solved puzzles on the site, but just in case:
You have a grid, right? Along the top and left side are numbers. The numbers indicate the runs of filled blocks in the solution of the puzzle. Take this example:
2 2 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
This horizontal line must have two sequences of filled blocks in the solution:
🟩🟩❌🟩🟩
That one was easy, but usually the full solution isn’t so, and must be deduced using the intersections of the rows and columns.
Try it out, but do it soon; more and more solvers are joining on every day, and even with 24M puzzles in the list they’ll probably churn through them all in around a month!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
oh god this hurts my ears (3 ½ minutes). it hurts so much that i’m typing this in lowercase because capital letters are too loud now.
its the most screamy of all game characters, that’s right toad. he’s singing. he’s singing real bad, and real loud. its funny if your ears can take it, i suggest though keeping the volume low. i’ll see you later, i’m going to listen to some whispery asmr.
the video dates back to 2018, and it has over ten million views. to each their own, i guess.
It makes the useful observation that the first programmable game system (that is, with interchangable cartridges that contained program code), the Fairchile Channel F, contained 2K of RAM to use as a framebuffer, a region of memory the system’s graphics controller referred to in building its display. Using a framebuffer simplifies video creation, but at the time RAM was very expensive.
The Atari VCS/2600, however, only has 128 bytes of on-board RAM. It doesn’t create a framebuffer, it doesn’t have enough memory. Instead the processor, a MOS 6507 (a variation of the 6502), works with the TIA graphics chip to build the signal in real-time. Effectively, the VCS has a one-dimensional display: it focuses on building the video signal by focusing on it one raster line at a time.
There’s a danger when talking about these things, of telling people something they already know. It’s been observed that some game facts that were once obscure are fairly well known among enthusiasts, like that Super Mario Bros. 2 was adapted from an earlier Japanese game called Doki Doki Panic. I feel like the unusual way the VCS constructed its graphics might be one of these things. I’m still fascinated by how it works though. I’ll probably end up bringing it up again someday.
I think you might find it interesting or useful or entertaining, or some combination of the three, to have a list of interesting gaming websites to look through and follow. They’re all pretty cool; I’ve tried to weed out some that don’t update often, but sometimes the content on the site overrides that.
The three big indie gaming sites at the moment are Second Wind, the newly-liberated Giant Bomb, and Aftermath, even if they do annoy me greatly whenever they call blog posts “blogs.” I feel like they do it on purpose, or something. Take note that currently Second Wind does not actually have a dedicated website of their own; their internet presence is on other sites and services, especially Youtube and Discord.
Two sites I suggest avoiding are Kotaku, which is run by soulless drones, and, whenever possible, the vast array of Fandom.com sites. This is often not possible, as lots of people use them for free site hosting, but it’s frequently the case that Fandom doesn’t have its users’ interests foremost on its mind, and if a wiki creator decides to leave Fandom for green pastures, you’ll often end up competing with your old site, and it’ll come in ahead of your new site in Google searches for a long time after, maybe forever, because of their strong search engine optimization. Notably the Nethack Wiki had to fight against the ghost of their old selves for a long time, and the Fandom version of the site still, after over a decade, comes up in the first page of Google results. (A useful browser extension for Chrome and Firefox is Indie Wiki Buddy, which marks search results that turn up Fandom sites, while not removing them entirely in case they’re the only real option.)
Some other useful sites:
The Cutting Room Floor, of course, is an amazing resource, bringing together development information on thousands of games.
Hardcore Gaming 101 may be the website with the most complete information on all kinds of video games that exists, other than Wikipedia of course, and WP prioritizes general audiences, not enthusiasts.
Gaming Alexandria is preservation-focused, and hosts scans of old gaming and computer magazines, including scans of Japanese type-in computer magazines, a category that has not been well-preserved in the West despite some programmers having moved into mainstream commercial development after having gotten their start with magazine publishing.
Game Developer Research Institute collects information on a vast array of companies and hosts a number of interviews with classic gamedevs too. They also keep an informative blog (being, a series of blog posts).
Computer Archeology updates but rarely, but has useful information on several classic arcade games. They’re the site that figured out the cause of the long-standing arcade Galaga bug that sometimes cause the enemy insects to stop firing.
We’re now moving into the category of personal sites, but don’t count them out because it’s mostly one or two people who make them!
Donnie Hodges’ Website doesn’t update often, but has such a wealth of info that I can’t leave it out. Note that Hodges has come out as non-binary, but their site still keeps their pre-transition name.
Gaming Hell is lots of fun, and has old-school web design that reminds me of the ancient |tsr’s NES Archive. Their linklist was the source of several sites, in turn, in this list/
Finally, more out of a sense of memory than anything else, there’s Press The Buttons, home of the blog and podcast of my late friend Matthew Green, currently still on the internet. I don’t know what will happen to it now that he’s gone. He wasn’t the only host of the Power Button podcast. I hope the surviving members keep it going. If they do, you should follow it, too.
The gold standard of game breakdowns continues to be PannenKoek’s extremely detailed and approachable examinations of Super Mario 64, but there’s other people out there are also nerding out excessively over games.
Also of interest is a video they’ve done about “Wall Assisted Super Bouncing,” a Mario Kart DS technique that can cause you to game big air and leap over barriers under the right conditions. It’s 11 minutes, and even if (as is likely) you’re not in the Mario Kart DS TAS speedrunning scene, it may be interesting for its look at the specifics of MKDS’s engine.
Jed’s Journey is a fun little Zelda-like game for the Commodore 64. If you weren’t a Loadstar subscriber around 1993 or so, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s one of the many programs from Loadstar’s 22-year run, which I’ve put up for sale (with permission of J&F Publishing’s co-owner Fender Tucker) on itch.io, but the disk can also be found on the Internet Archive. (We talked about making Loadstar available to people back last month, here.)
Jed lost drawing straws with his villager friends, and so it’s up to him to do something about all the monsters infesting his world. The monsters move quickly and randomly, so fighting them is a mix of reflexes, strategy and luck. Clear a screen and you get rewarded with coins, and possibly a potion that you can save for later. The potion colors are green for health, blue for invisibility, yellow to be teleported back to the starting point, and red to clear all the monsters from the screen.
Jed’s world is pretty big. If you explore for a bit, you’ll find treasure rooms with lots of money inside, a place to pay for healing, buyable weapon upgrades and keys for purchase. It’s not known at the moment if there is a way to win at Jed’s Journey, but the fact that the locked doors must be leading somewhere important suggests that there is. To even have a chance of reaching the end, if it exists, you should make a map of the world, and I mean by hand.
Jed’s Journey makes use of a hardware trick, seen in some sprite-based video chips, to get free collision detection. When the C64’s VIC-II is drawing sprites on screen, if two of them would be drawn on the same pixel, it’ll note a collision between them, and note this fact in a register. There are quirks to this system though. On the C64, this is pixel-based collision detection, not using hit boxes, which might mean occasional misses for players used to hitbox detection. Only two of the possible three colors in a multicolor sprite set off the collision detection. And the collisions only register which sprites are colliding, not what they were colliding with, which sometimes means, when you kill one beast, two others that were touching each other onscreen elsewhere will also be considered slain.
Will someone finally finish Jed’s Journey after all these years? Will it be you? If you try it, please let us know!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Eggpo is a video game-themed series that was part of the “Two More Eggs” animations that The Brothers Chaps, Mike and Matt Chapman, creators and makers of Homestar Runner, made for Disney’s XD service. While the series is nine years old now, nearly all are still viewable on XD’s Youtube channel, minus a couple that were removed for some reason.
This is the fifth of the Eggpo cartoons, and clocks in at a minute-forty. We’ve seen the previous four here so far. They’re about a couple of Goomboid creatures from an 8-bit game questioning their places as underlings in video game world. They’re pretty good, and short. In this one, the Eggpos explore their game’s instruction manual. It’s not explained how they got in there.
There’s another game-related sequence in Two More Eggs, “CG Pals,” which follows the adventures of a bunch of low-polygon friends and their adventures in the Third Dimension. Since there’s only two Eggpo cartoons left, maybe we’ll look at those after Eggpo runs out.
Amazon has, in some areas at least, become a slop-pile, full of entries for misleading and scammy products. It seems just about anyone can advertise on Amazon for any product, including endless products with fake machine-generated brands, and flash drives that misreport their size as bigger than they really are and corrupt your data if you try to fill them.
These are just more recent versions of an old scam, computer-generated self-published works, with content stolen from other sources, and presented at new material. They’re not even LLM-generated, except maybe for a few sentences. The bulk of the content was written by others, people who have no idea their work is being appropriated to make a quick buck.
The five books Robin found, and bought to show off on his channel, are laughably fake. The computers pictured on the cover are the furthermost things from Commodore 64 machines, and the middle initial of their supposed authors consistently puts the period before the letter! They practically flaunt how easy it is to create AI slop, how little effort and money they must expend to get obviously fake books up, to sell to the maybe dozen people, tops, in the world today seeking info on how to program a forty-year-old 8-bit computer. (The books are copyright 2023, so at that time it merely a 38-year-old computer.)
The third book’s introduction in particular is great. All the books offer “Funny helpful tips” on the first page of content, but this one tells us to “incorporate activities that promote lymphatic drainage.” See! Look!
IMPORTANT FUNNY HELPFUL COMMODORE 64 LYMPHATIC TIPS
The stolen text, down to swiping the very images from the original, seems to come from this book from 2020, Beginner’s Step-by-Step THEC64 Coding Course by Rich Stals, a book written to support one of those recent-vintage, all-in-one platform revivals, the THEC64 Maxi.
Almost as infuriating as Amazon selling the same book under five different titles and with content pirates from a different book, the hoops they made Robin jump through to return them for a refund were a terrible experience, limiting him to picking an option to return them from a list, none of them being “this is an illegal copy of a different book.” Depending on the reason he picked, but not in any logical sense, he was offered a free copy of the same book in recompense. Awful.
Also on the subject of Commodore 64s…. I am still working feverishly on my Loadstar explorer menu program, which seeks to make leafing through the 22-year history of that C64 magazine much easier than having to individually open disks into an emulator and seek them out through the disks’ original menus. I hope to have something to share on that count very soon! Set Side B is a general (if esoteric) video gaming blog, we aren’t going to go all-out Commie for Commodore, but you might see a marked uptick in C64 info for awhile.
White Pointer Gaming is another excellent source of retro game hardware information, and a few days ago they uploaded a dive into the specifics of the real time clock used in Pokemon Generation 2 (14 minutes), and as an encore discussed Gameboy mapper chips, a related topic. It seems the clock hardware is on quite a few other GB games as well, as it’s built in to a common mapper chip, but it needs extra power to run the clock, and an oscillator to keep the time accurate. Another game that uses the same mapper, but doesn’t have the oscillator? Pokemon Generation One. Hmmm!
The video mentions that powering the clock and oscillator causes Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal cartridges to run out of battery power, and lose their saved game data, much faster than other Gameboy carts with save game battery. Sorry to break it to you; your Pokemon are probably gone by now. Poor out a health potion for Pikachu.
Another interesting fact revealed is, the clock works by recording raw time since the game was last powered on, and the actual date and time are fully updated when the game is started up. If you wait a long time between plays, over 511 days, the timer can wrap around and lose track of how long it’s been.
Mario Paint, Nintendo’s weird but beloved image, animation and music creation tool from way back on the SNES, is an anomaly. As with the Gameboy Camera and everything else Nintendo makes that has creation as its purpose, so much love went into it! It has an interface with whimsical characters like the Save Robot and Undodog! There are jolly icons representing the musical notes in the music maker! You can play with the title screen! Totaka’s Song is hidden there! There are randomized startup and erase animations! There’s that fly swatting minigame! Homestar Runner wouldn’t have existed without Mario Paint! I could, and should, go on, but I should more get to the point.
The post needs some visual interest, and Mario Paint’s title screen contains more joy per square pixel than almost anything else in this life, so here!
The point is, Mario Paint was also pretty unsuited to its hardware. I mentioned recently the fact that the cartridge doesn’t actually have enough memory to save all of its data and tries to use data compression to make everything fit, which, due to the nature of compression, doesn’t always work. Also, Mario Paint came with the SNES mouse which it requires, packed in, raising its price and increasing it even more in the aftermarket. And, worst of all: you can only save one image to the cart at a time, and the official supported way to preserve your work, as the Brothers Chaps did with the Homestar Runner link above, is to record it using a VCR.
This sounds like the kind of thing the hacking community could solve, but a rapid Google search (I’m running out of time in making this post) doesn’t turn up anything, even though I’m sure this exists somewhere. Someone on hackaday.io says they’re working on a physical device that could rescue the image off of a Mario Paint cartridge, and would even have an LCD screen built into it so you could see a cart’s image saved onto it, which I’m sure would have blown a young Mark and Matt Chapman’s minds long ago. But the last update was in 2023.
Going the other way, putting outside images onto a Mario Paint save, is not only possible but there’s a tool to do it automatically, hosted, awesomely, on Neocities.
The homepage of AutoMP, which can put images into Mario Paint save data, but not currently get them out. With that good old-time web design aesthetic!
There’s speculation that Nintendo themselves might do something with Mario Paint and the Switch Online service on the Switch 2. The Joycons on that system can be used as mice! But given the direction Nintendo’s been going with Sw2 (“switwo”) it’d probably be a paid feature, and nothing’s even been hinted at yet so who the hell knows. But imagine support for exporting Mario Paint images to your SD card, or onto your smartphone?
