Author: rodneylives

PC-88 Versions of Nintendo Games

It was a weird time. Around the time as the Famicom was just getting started, Hudson Soft struck a deal with Nintendo to release some of their games for the PC-88 Japanese personal computer platform.

Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)

You can tell the page is old because it has a Digg social media button. (Wait, what’s that? They’re trying to revive Digg?) Please excuse the Wayback Machine banner stuck in the middle of the screenshot, it’s an artifact of Firefox’s screenshot tool.

There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)

Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.

Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.

One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!

Strange and Wonderful NEC PC-8801 Games (Wayback Machine)

Action Retro Demonstrates PS2 Linux

It’s a weird bit of console gaming lore than Sony was so proud of the PS2’s Cell processor that they actually officially ported Linux to it. All you had to do was buy the “Linux Kit,” which contained two DVDs, a module that added monitor-capable video out and Ethernet ports, and a “gigantic” 40GB hard drive.

As it turns out, the PS2 was actually all that great a Linux machine, and it was soon outclassed by PCs. That hasn’t stopped there from being a Playstation Linux community, with a website that sadly announces that it most soon close down in a post dating to 2009. It feels a bit like one of those “Closing Liquidation” signs that sometimes stores that have no plans of shutting down put up, in the hopes of attracting some extra customers. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll perish eventually, such is the way of all things. I just hope they can hold out a few extra decades.

Here is the video (20 minutes), although note that it contains a sponsored segment. This link skips past it. Michael MJD also tried it out a couple of years ago (27 minutes), if you’d like to see their reactions.

Some observations:

  • Buying a complete unopened PS2 Linux box nowadays can cost you well over $1,000.
  • It was released in 2002; Linux itself was first created in 1991.
  • It’s based on the Japanese distribution Kondara, which itself was based off of Red Hat, and it shows due to it using RPM for its package format.
  • It runs WindowMaker for its GUI, which is based off of NeXTSTEP, the predecessor of the GUI used in current-day macOS.
  • In 2025 this is very much a Stupid Computer Trick, or perhaps a Stupid Console Trick, but ActionRetro has so much fun running OSes on various unexpected hardware that it’s difficult to fault him for it.

Leaving Kakariko Village At The Wrong Moment Makes Hyrule Go Crazy

Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.

In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.

In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!

Multilink Monday 12/15/25

Another session of links from my huge For-SSB browser tab group, presented here with minimal comment in the hopes of clawing back a bit of RAM.

1. Fan patches English into Wizardry VI for Saturn.

2. The unreleased web browser for the Gamecube. (8 minutes)

    3. Read Only Memo on a recompilation of Dinosaur Planet, Rare’s N64 game that got reconfigured into Star Fox Adventures on Gamecube, their last game made for Nintendo before Microsoft bought them. (They did make some portable games after that, like It’s Mr Pants for Gameboy Advance and a port of Diddy Kong Racing for the DS.)

    4. Max Fog on Interactive Fiction blog The Rosebush writing on the history of Infocom and the Z-Machine.

    5. A Sonic the Hedgehog romhacking tutorial. (15½ minutes)

    6. Pictochat Online.

    Sundry Sunday: The Amazing Circus, and Christmas in Mario Land

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

    Two new items. The short one first, a brief holiday video from pannenkoek, the Mario 64 expert. It isn’t about beating the game without pressing the A button, nor is it a deep dive into the game’s internals in such a way that you could use it in a computer science course. It’s just Christmas as it’s celebrated on Cold Cold Mountain, with festive decorations and multicolored penguins. It’s only a minute and a half:

    You want something longer? The Amazing Digital Circus just released episode 7, and it’s much darker than past episodes. What’s that, you think it’s been plenty dark already? Well, now it’s even more so, despite the fact it’s titled Beach Episode and features the return of the Sun. (33 minutes)

    Not long ago the creators mentioned that Amazing Digital Circus was never envisioned as a long-term series, that just keeps running on and on, and I think I remember them saying the plan was for about nine or ten episodes? Not many of those left. I wonder if afterwards Gooseworx will get back to continuing her personal series, like the adventures of Elaine or Darly Boxman, or maybe something else like Little Runmo?

    Super Monkey Ball All Glitch Breakdown

    This one is incredible. The Monkey Ball games are as hardcore as they come, and, for the most part, have reasonably accurate physics that’s consistent under normal circumstances. But normal circumstances do not apply at extremely high speeds, where weird edge cases in the engine become much more likely to affect the ball’s travel.

    Nambo created a video that showcases every Super Monkey Ball glitch, for the first two games at least. The video title calls them techniques, but I think glitches more accurately describes what’s being explicated here.

    The video is amazingly complete and is 42 minutes long. It takes some kind of ridiculous ultrageek to watch the whole thing. Yes, I did that, why do you ask? Are you going to do it too? If you don’t it’s no skin off of your nose, maybe just watch enough of it to get some idea of how deep the Super Monkey Hole goes?

    Jamey Pittman’s Pac-Man Grouping Tutorial

    Jamey Pittman is the creator of the foremost document on the workings of Pac-Man ever created, the Pac-Man Dossier. If you’ve never read it, but have any interest in playing classic Pac-Man, then you should go read it immediately. It will make so many things make sense to you.

    Pac-Man has a reputation as a game of patterns, and seems designed in such a way as to enable patterns to work. The only randomness is in the behavior of the ghosts when they’re vulnerable, and even then, if the player has performed the same moves at the same times up to that point in the level, even their vulnerable behavior will be consistent. Its GCC-developed follow-up, Ms. Pac-Man, has the red and pink ghosts move randomly at the start of each board specifically to foil patterns.

    But you don’t have to play Pac-Man as a pattern game. It is possible to play it “freestyle,” like a naive player would, reacting to the ghosts’ movements. You’re unlikely to make it to Pac-Man’s famous kill screen at board 256 that way, but you can still make it pretty far.

    Key to doing that is keeping the ghosts as close to each other as you can. The ghosts are much more dangerous when they’re scattered around you, because they can block off all of your escape routes. Four ghosts piled up on the same spot not only can’t block off other corridors, but their AIs tend to continue to keep them together, at least when they’re far away from Pac-Man. Red and Orange behave identically when they’re at a distance, and Pink’s behavior appear to be more like Red’s the further away from Pac-Man it us. Blue has the most chance of diverging, but often moves the same way anyway.

    Not only does keeping the ghosts clustered make survival easier, but it makes it much easier to eat all of them with a single Energizer. The ghosts only turn blue up to around the 4/6th Key board, but up to that point it’s basically impossible to get the maximum score from every Energizer if one hasn’t managed to herd the ghosts into a single, easy-to-gobble blob.

    That’s where Jamey’s tutorial comes through. It presents a series of situations and techniques for getting the ghosts near each other and moving as one unit, whether it’s for avoiding them or getting the maximum points from an Energizer. It’s a bit much for casual play, but it can be very interesting to see how a true expert goes about doing it. Here, then, is the tutorial (27 minutes):

    Jeremy Parish vs the Nintendo 64

    EDIT: I said that Jeremy didn’t have an N64 initially, and I thought he said that, but later on he said he got it at launch. My mistake.

    I still don’t know how Jeremy Parish can finish all of his video game history subseries before the year 2084, when the Robotrons revolt and destroy human-kind, but he’s making good time. He’s at last started on his examination of the Nintendo 64 era, with N64 Works #000. (22 minutes)

    He admits that the N64 era was one where he originally didn’t have the Nintendo console for that generation, opting instead for the Playstation. I was in college at the time and had both, but got the N64 first, and got far more use out of it overall. Maybe I had weird tastes? Jeremy does admit that Super Mario 64 looked really impressive on all those demo kiosks.

    Back then, Mario 64 looked like an impossible feat. Nowadays, through the efforts of people like pannenkoek, Kaze Emanuar and others, we know that Super Mario 64 was a creation combining long cycles of iteration, a bunch of outright hackery, and a whole lot of work. I hope someday that the full story of Mario 64’s creation can be told. Maybe Jeremy’s eventual examination of the game will help to pull back the curtain?

    The Basement Brothers look at Popful Mail for the PC-88

    Falcom’s Popful Mail is one of those games that takes after classic anime. It’s almost the perfect anime-styled light RPG, with appealing and fun characters on a quest that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It got a good number of ports, and they all have something a bit different about them. In the US we only got the Sega CD version, ported by the prolific-but-controversial Working Designs, but in Japan there was a PC-88 original, and ports to the PC-98, PC Engine CD and Super Famicom. Hardcore Gaming wrote them up here.

    I could go on about its very light RPG elements (there’s no experience system at all), its comedic story, its characters and music, and I will someday. But until then, please be content with what the Basement Brothers had to say about the original PC-88 version of Popful Mail, which is the version for the weakest machine, but still fun. (39 minutes)

    Falcom had developed a reputation for making hardcore, unique and system-heavy RPGs like Dragon Slayer and Xanadu, so Popful Mail was a departure. It was designed to be an early multimedia game, with animations and even voice acting in some versions. This version, however, was distributed on floppy disk, and for a underpowered system, so it couldn’t rely on audio-visual splendor. It still did pretty well for itself, as the Brothers demonstrate.

    It’s always saddened me that Popful Mail was a one-off. It’s a property that seems ripe for sequels and animation, but to my knowledge it never happened. Maybe Falcom will ease their stream of Ys sequels someday and look at updating more of the other games in their history, and maybe then they’ll return to Mail and her cartoony comrades. Here’s hoping.

    Multilink Monday 12/8/25

    The latest installment in my eternal quest to reduce the size of my notes file! Also because a lot of my day yesterday was spent in preparing for a TPUG World of Commodore demonstration of Loadstar Compleat, which I hope to show all of you soon, but meaning that I need something relatively low-effort for today.

    1. Godot Lesson 1: The Basic Basics, a non-video tutorial for getting yourself started with the best Unity alternative.

    2. NESbag, a system for wrapping NES homebrew for immediate play by others without having to set up an emulator yourself, announces two-player support.

    3. A “demake” of Zelda’s Adventure for CDi to make it a much more playable, Link’s Awakening-style game for Gameboy Color.

    4. Along those lines, from Gumpy Function, maker of Grimace’s Birthday (previously), two Simpsons fangames for Gameboy, Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge 2, and the My Dinner with Andre game that Martin was seen playing on an arcade cabinet.

    5. He uses AI-generated images to provide visual interest, which is usually a strike against a link for me, but I know he means well so I’ll give him a pass this time. Youtuber Lupe Darksnout presents a series on getting video to play on a Commodore 64. (playlist link, 48 videos averaging about 17 minutes each, about 10½ hours in all)

    6. Abyssoft on Youtube, Multiple World Record Speedruns Brought Into Question. (18 minutes) There is a sponsored segment that’s about a minute long, here’s a link queued up to after it.

    Sundry Sunday: Eggpo Speedrun

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

    To recap. Ten years ago, Disney hired the Brothers Chaps, creators of seminal Flash series Homestar Runner, to make for them a series of Flash shorts for Youtube and (I think?) broadcast as bumpers, called Two More Eggs.

    At that time Matt and Mike Chapman already had a working relationship with Disney working on their shows Gravity Falls and Wander Over Yonder, and it was an opportunity to return to their roots making little shorts in Flash. The Two More Shorts are generally brilliant, and one subseries of them that fortuitously strays just inside the borders of our mandated focus is Eggpo, about two Goomba-like minion characters within a video game. We’ve covered five of the seven episodes so far; check out the Eggpo tag for all of them.

    In Eggpo #6: Speedrun (2¼ minutes), our underling friends get invested in the success of a speedrunner blazing through their game.

    Blippo+

    Blippo+ is a game because it’s presented as a game, it was originally presented on the Playdate, and these days games are defined so maximally that anything could be a game. But there is no gameplay in Blippo+, unless you count the random times the signal drifts, a purely artificial event, and you have to adjust various sliders to make the picture clear again.

    Blippo+ is more of a unique means of telling a story than a game. I’m brought to mind of Portal, not Valve’s 2007 weird kinetic puzzle-action game, but Activison’s 1986 even weirder storytelling experience, about exploring a planet-wide information system to discover what happened to its missing inhabitants. In both Blippo+ and (older) Portal, all the “gameplay” is in a system of presenting information to the viewer/reader.

    There is a story that progresses through a series of updates. On the Playdate it was timelocked, so it was like it was passing in real time. In the new Steam and Switch versions, the story unfolds more at your own pace; after you’ve seen most of one set you can “download” the next “packette” of shows, but also go to previous packettes whenever you feel like it.

    Trailer for Blippo+ (1¾ minutes)

    I said shows, because Blippo+ presents itself as the television of a distant planet. I have avoided calling it an alien planet, because it’s really a lot like Earth, and while there’s definitely some unexpected elements (a scientist talks to long-dead inhabitants who are brains in jars) most of it you wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen on Earth TV in the early 90s. There’s a self-centered teen show, an exercise program, an entertainment news show that feels like it’s from the MTV of old, a show with a character much like Max Headroom, and many other callbacks to cable television of three decades past. There’s even a scrambled porn channel, although there’s really no porn behind it, other than “Tantric Computing,” which is but video clips of a lady’s hand lovingly fondling old-style computer mice and monitors.

    There’s a show about two space-faring cowboys. A claymation kids show. The “Fighting Trillions” series of action movies, of which we only ever see trailers, narrated by a virtual soundlike of the late, great Gary Owens. (All of the shows have really great voice acting!) A D&D-themed trivia gameshow. The weird Julia Child-like cooking show Snacks Come Alive. And more. One of the shows is just different kinds of static. Another is info cards for local programming. The “Tips” channel is, wonderfully, just a sequence of error messages.

    It’s all rounded off with a Preview Guide-style program listing channel, and a Ceefax-like information presentation service that’s somehow one of the most affecting parts of the whole package.

    Each show, of about 20 in all, is only two minutes long. It’s easy to load it up and watch the entire contents of one or two of the channels, either intently or as background to other things.

    It really needs to be experienced to get the idea across. This collection of first week clips on Youtube (11 minutes) that should demonstrate to you what it’s like.

    Blippo+ (Playdate $10, Steam $15, Switch $15 currently on sale for $12)