After yesterday’s exploration of a huge collection of antique electro-mechanical amusement machines, it seemed meet to drag out a little video I’ve been aware of for a while, a demonstration of a Piccadilly Circus-style redemption machine made by Konami, amusingly named Piccadilly Gradius (2 minutes).
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of this strange entry in the Gradius series on the internet, just a stub on a couple of wikis. Piccadilly Circus itself seems to be a Konami series, only a little older than Gradius really. Most of them seem to be simple roulette-style machines where you stop a light on a number to win a prize. The Gradius one makes it into a journey to get a spaceship to the end of a course.
It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!
This Youtube video is a follow-up to Choa’s 40 Sonic Adventure 2 Facts, which we posted about recently. Unlike the standard lists of this nature that litter the internet, most of the ones in these two videos are genuinely interesting, and paint a picture of a team trying a lot of things to make their take on the Sonic series work, while pressed for time.
For those not acquainted, Sonic Adventure had a weird structure, with free-exploration Adventure Fields, with permanent powerups to find, NPCs to talk to, and even a few subquests; and more demanding Action Stages. Each action stage had an entrance somewhere in an Adventure Field. Sonic Adventure had six playable characters, each with an entirely different style of gameplay! Sonic running, Tails racing with Sonic, Knuckles treasure hunting, Amy being chased by robots, Omega (itself one of Eggman’s robots!) blowing things up, and Big the Cat… fishing.
What a weird game. And you can tell just from playing it, the weirdness extended to its development. Characters can enter parts of courses intended for other characters. There are secret areas that seem like a holdover from early development, that sometimes can still be entered. Voice lines and animations that are very obscure, or even impossible to trigger without mods, remain in the game. Choa’s video is not a complete listing of these oddments, but it’s certainly a good introduction to them.
Here is the page, just to get the link out of the way. It was written by sdomi back in 2023. They were also one of the people who presented the talk from a couple of days ago about turning Chromebooks into more-useable laptops.
Part of the page describing the wholly-questionable project.
People who know what both Minecraft and bash are are right now exclaiming WTF. People who just know what Minecraft, of which there are very many, might be wondering why writing a server in bash is such a big deal. People who only know what bash is… well, you should remember to take your medication, and remember your gerontologist appointment on Thursday.
bash is the primary scripting language over in the Linux Dimension. Think of it as the old DOS command prompt, but much more powerful. How powerful is it? Well evidently you can write a Minecraft server in it, of course. It can do lots of other, less ludicrous things too. I use it to help get the data into shape for my Loadstar Compleat project. It is not made, to put it lightly, for things like this.
These days “bash” is sometimes used as a synonym for a range of command shells, like zsh, ksh and the like. This is a mistake of course, but to an untutored eye they all look broadly similar, and work in a similar way.
This shouldn’t be mistaken as producing a useable Minecraft server, suitable for hanging out with your friends, building blocky castles and fleeing from creepers in. As much as I can gather, it produces the bare minimum needed to connect to the game. And it cheats slightly by using awk to handle loops and some numbers. But much of the point of bash is to connect other tools together into a data flow, so I’ma allow it.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Is this trying to make a point about racism? Is it arguing against it, or for it, that claims of racism are too prevalent, or not enough? For expanding the definition? For contracting it?
I’m honestly not sure if one could make a solid case for any answers to these questions, but it’s fun, so here (1½ minutes):
That’s it. That’s all for today. It’s 39 minutes though, so it should keep you going for a while. If you’d like to avoid Youtube and its various vagarities, you can also get it directly from the event website.
This is weird. This was around the time of the PC Engine and Mega Drive/Genesis, years after the short-lived laserdisc arcade game boom, but still within the period where some people (executives mostly) thought you could just just have a barely-interactive movie and it would rule the world. One of the attachments allowed it to play Sega CD (a.k.a. Mega CD) games, but it could also use its Mega Drive hardware to play special-made laserdisc games.
The hardware’s uniqueness, and the nature of the format, has contributed to the system’s resisting emulation. As the article tells us, laserdiscs are an analog format! So while it’s possible to copy a disc with a fidelity that would satisfy any human viewer, you couldn’t make an absolutely perfect digital copy even in theory.
The LaserActive bit is the lead-off for a substantial issue of the newsletter, which also contains news about a fan effort to translate a Cowboy Bebop game!
Pretty hard to read. Is that supposed to be AAIMAIS?
Raimais is a sci-fi-focused maze game from Taito in 1988. Ryan Oliver, writing over at Hardcore Gaming 101, has written an excellent description of the game, including why you might be interested in it. Not only is it like a kind of Arkanoid-style revision of a pre-existing genre but with powerups, in this case maze games, it reminds me a lot of the early arcade and Atari 2600 game Dodge ‘Em. It’s got multiple routes and lots of secrets, including secret endings. It pulls some Druaga-style dirty tricks on the player: without a secret item, you’re doomed to get a bad ending. Even with it, you have to complete a sequence of Quick Time Events during the ending or your character gets zapped by a laser gun and just dies, no do-overs, no continues.
Furthermore, the hardest-to-reach ending was actually impossible to get! The game’s included on Taito Legends 2 from 2006, but there’s a more-recent Arcade Archives version (Switch, Playstation Store), that gives you the option of making the impossible ending possible.
This Arcade Archives trailer gives a good sense of the play without giving too much away (3 minutes):
Here’s a recap of links at the end of the HG101 article:
Sudden Desu, where the impossible-to-reach ending was first revealed
I’ve known about Raimais for some time, and in a reversal of the usual turn of events I had already read the gaming.moe and Sudden Desu pages before HG101 covered it. This is an excellent excuse to link to them though.
I’m a bit late in announcing this, but a lot’s been going on here lately, and it’s a worthy announcement, so here’s the release video for Mega Man Maker 1.10 (2 minutes). This isn’t the last time we linked to a MMM release, and its coders don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.
A free program, it’s got the usual array of new enemies (including favorites Guts Man and Snake Man), items and music typical of MMM. A big new feature is ability capsules, which can grant new powers if found in a level, or at the creator’s option even disable them. This can let you pull off dirty tricks like making a chamber that requires the slide to enter, but that gives you a capsule that disables the slide, making it inescapable. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?
It’s a really strange game even without the context that your protagonist, a fan-waving Japanese guy running around from sunglasses-wearing agents, and occasionally celebrities like Michael Jackson (probably his first role in a Sega game) and a barrel chasing him around mazes, is based on a real person, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in Japan in the early 70s who was taken down by a bribery scandal. When he gets caught by the suits, they put on S&M garb and Tanaka gets whipped by them! Here’s Kim Justice’s report on it (19 minutes). Here’s about five minutes of gameplay.
I can vouch that it’s playable in MAME, and it’s not even that bad a game, certainly better than Abscam, a pretty terrible Pac-Man bootleg that’s probably our closest version of it.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
As I type this it’s about an hour and a half until my presentation on the history of Loadstar at Vintage Computing Festival Midwest 2025. I think I’m ready for it, but yeah, am I really? That’s the kind of question that sends me into a panic attack.
Since I’m so busy panicking, and because I’ve been on my feet for most of the day, I’m going to post something more random than I usually like. Sundry Sunday is themed around randomness, yes, but this is even more. This week I’m posting NATRAPS X FINAL (5½ minutes).
It’s one of those oh-so-very memeish videos where video game characters do various violent things to each other. I think I grew out of these videos… hm, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to into them. But it’s 16 years old, and both the internet and myself were a lot younger then. Maybe I would have liked it when it was new.
“NATRAPS,” if you haven’t noticed yet, is SPARTAN spelled backward. SPARTAN X was the title of the game that was released in the US as Kung Fu. Despite the name, it was absolutely not the last of these videos posted to the account of Bash4208. If you can bear it, look for more of them here.
It’s a pretty good run-down of the various weird timing issues of the Commodore 64. Machines at that time had to do all kinds of weird things to keep up the overriding priority of microcomputers of the time: building a consistent video signal that could be displayed on a television. Nearly all machines needed special hardware to do the job of keeping up the display, to give the CPU time to run user programs, or anything at all.
Circuit diagram from the linked article
The C64’s VIC-II video chip is a product of many compromises. The C64 could contain so much memory affordably because it used dynamic RAM, which requires periodic refreshes, and one of the tasks of the VIC-II was to handle that. It also needed access to main memory in order to build the display image.
But both of these actions conflict with whatever the processor needs to do, so the computer is designed to actually put the 6510 to sleep when the VIC-II needs to access memory. This is why, when the screen is blanked, the machine runs a little faster and more consistently, and that’s why the screen is blanked when a connected Datasette is loading programs from cassette tape.
