Well, yesterday they posted a second video on matters involving formatting disks. (16½ minutes) This time they went over a routine written, for the same drives, that can format a disk in 15 seconds.

So, how can this new formatting method be more than four times faster? In a few ways. The drive’s normal format routine writes 1 bits throughout each entire track; the 15 second formatter doesn’t do anything like that. The stock routine attempts to size the between-sector zones differently depending on how far from the center the track is, and to make that work better it performs a measurement of how fast the drive motor runs. The quick format just uses a same-sized gap throughout the disk. It still reads okay because the drive uses the sync marks to find sectors, it doesn’t try to time the length of gaps when reading, it just looks for a sequence of 10 1 bits in a row. And Commodore’s format routine verifies each track as it’s recorded to the drive; the 15 second format simply moves on, assuming everything worked out.

The result is, the quick formatter does a worse job of setting up the disk, skipping some of the niceties of Commodore’s routine. I wonder if there are some cases where the quick format produces a non-working disk? The video notes that, because there could have been data on the disk before, it could result in cases where the drive gets confused when that leftover data resembles a sync mark or other essential drive structure. Commodore History mentioned at the end of the video that they tried to create such a disk, to see if it caused issues, but was unable to make it happen.

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But the bug isn’t always at fault. The 1541 disk drive takes over a minute and a half to format a disk, but as it turns out it had good reason to, and the time consumed had nothing to do with the C64’s code because the drive does all the work itself; the Commodore 64 just waits throughout the process.

Commodore History goes into considerable detail on the process here (16½ minutes). During formatting the drive wipes out all the data that had been on the disk, lays down syncing structures, writes the disk ID to every sector, puts down the directory track and sets up the Block Allocation Map (BAM), and more. It’s an interesting, if not too useful these days, exploration of what disk drives at the time had to do to make the disk’s magnetic surface usable for data storage.

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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.

VIC-II and FLI timing (part 1 of 3, c64os.com)

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This “ultimate” talk is ultimately about the hardware, its internals and quirks, and tricks that can be pulled off in it. Sure, it’s very technical and extremely geeks, but that’s pretty much the standard around these parts. Enjoy!

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Arcade Command didn’t have bad music at all, but Ron Hubbard’s score is generally regarded to outshine it. The two hardware platforms are really different: the C64 has a 6502-workalike and the legendary SID chip, while the arcade version used a custom platform. This is a first video in a projected series, so at this point we don’t even know if he’ll be successful. Let’s hope.

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But everything that happens in a processor is the result of simple logical operations: ANDs, ORs, NOTs, XORs and memory, all connected in different ways. And there’s some redundancy in that list: some of those logic gates can be constructed out of the others. The whole point of computers is you can perform billions of simple operations in a second, and complex operations are made out of lots of simple ones. When you’re working with binary numbers, all you need are simple operations.

Because of this, computers can actually be built out of physical parts, without even electricty, they’ll just be much bigger, and slower, and less durable, and may need some motor attached to them. Mechanical calculators have existed since the 1700s, and in the 50s-70s were common sights in offices. Arguably the first general-purpose computers, Charles Babbage’s Difference Engines (Wikipedia), were made from mechanical parts, but they had the disadvantage of not being made out of colorful pieces of plastic.

Shadowman39, an artiste who works in the medium of K’nex, has made a number of devices out of those construction toys, but an ALU, an Arithmetic Logic Unit that can increment, add, AND and XOR two binary numbers, is probably his most “practical” creation. He shows it off in this 15 minute Youtube video:

This ALU is one part of a larger processor project that’s still being built. I hesitate to call it a “microprocessor,” maybe we should call it a macroprocessor. We wish Shadowman39 the best, and hope he has enough time, energy and parts to realize his wondrous, ludicrous dream.

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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.

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First thing. I’ve mentioned this on social media, and I want to spread the word as much as I can about it, because this is going to catch people by surprise, and this way as many will find out about it going in as possible. In addition to costing $450 at launch, $500 with bundled Mario Kart World, and possibly more if Trump’s moronic tariffs stick, as stated in the direct, the Switch 2 uses a special incompatible variant of Micro SD cards, called Micro SD Express.

They’ve been out for a while, but uptake has been slow, mainly because their chief benefit is transfer speed, and Micro SD is fast enough for most purposes. But since its use in the Switch’s has been a performance bottleneck, Nintendo went with SD Express, which has the advantage of being faster, but the disadvantages of being both way less ubiquitous, easy to confuse with normal Micro SD cards, and of course, being more expensive. Ars Technica did a rundown, revealing that Micro SD Express cards are actually more expensive than SSDs at an equivalent price-per-gigabyte. It’s not a proprietary format, but consider that it’s possible that the only SD Express cards you’ll be able to find in a store that you buy your Switch from will be Nintendo-branded, and more expensive, it feels like it effectively is proprietary for now.

How to tell a standard Micro SD card from a Micro SD Express card? Express cards have an EX logo on their label, and they also have more contacts, as shown by this illustration from an SD Association whitepaper:

It’s true the Switch 2 has much more internal storage than the Switch. But many users will also be bringing their Switch digital libraries with them, meaning it’s possible for that storage to be full on day one. I have a 256 SD in my Switch, and I already have to make hard decisions about what I have installed and what I leave in “the cloud.” That will be my reality as soon as I transfer my eShop purchases to the Switch 2.

I mused a bit on Nintendo’s stating that the Switch 2 will be mostly backwards compatible with the Switch 1, meaning, not everything on the original Switch will work with it. What gives?

Nintendo has a page listing games that aren’t Switch 2 compatible. At first glance, it seems that all the issues are with games that are physically incompatible. Like, the Labo VR Kit isn’t compatible, because the Switch 2 is larger than the Switch 1, and it can’t actually fit into the cardboard goggles. Several other Labo kits are similarly “incompatible.” WarioWare Move It is mostly compatible, but the Switch 2 JoyCons don’t have the infrared camera the right JoyCon on the Switch 1 has. You can still pair Switch 1 JoyCons with a Switch 2 though, so if you have them laying around you can still play IR-requiring games. This also affects Game Builder Garage and some Labo titles.

Ring Fit Adventure and Nintendo Switch Sports use accessories that you insert a Switch 1 JoyCon into, and Switch 2 JoyCons won’t fit into them. And 1-2-Switch has a unique issue: the Switch 2 has more subtle rumble, and it seems a 1-2-Switch minigame uses that rumble to communicate information to players, which could end up being an issue.

But… that isn’t the whole story. It turns out there’s a good list of Switch games that have issues on the Switch 2, software issues, but you have to click through to a couple of PDFs to find out about those. Here’s a list of games with “start up issues,” meaning probably they won’t load. And here’s games with issues once they’re running. These lists may shrink over time as bugs are found and stamped out, but that might take a good while; it took years for the Wii-U to run the WiiWare game LostWinds.

Some notable games on the not-starting list: a selection of NeoGeo and Arcade Archives titles, Another Crab’s Treasure, Fornite (although I suspect there will be a Switch 2 native version), Nintendo’s own Fitness Boxing, Doom Eternal, Pizza Tower(!) and River City Girls Zero. Some of the games that play, but with issues: two Tetris The Grand Master games from Arcade Archives, Factorio, Fall Guys, Mega Man Legacy Collection and Stumble Guys.

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It is true, this one’s for hardcore geeks and programmers only. I love reading about stuff like how to do large 48-pixel graphic displays, useful for score readouts or title screens, even if I probably won’t ever use that information myself. Or on Bank Switching, which reveals that, since there’s nothing in the system’s tiny cartridges’ ROM space that indicates which bank switching scheme is being used, emulators scan through the executable image looking for signature bytes to determine when to map parts of it to the processor’s address space, and homebrew games try to give them appropriate hints so they’ll work smoothly.

There’s a page, Introduction to Processor Hardware, that gives us the surprising information that some EPROM chips, when used with the 2600, may act unpredictably when used in a dark room. That quality esoterica right there.

The Atari 2600 Technical Wiki

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The Sony Playstation (16m):

The Nintendo 64 (18m):

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The explanation: Did you ever play around with a 32X? Evidently not a lot of people did. It was straaaange. Unexpectedly powerful! A bit misjudged! Hosted a port of DOOM! Had a port of Virtua Racing that compares favorably with the Saturn version! Had that crazy hard-to-play Knuckles game that gave us Vector the Crocodile!

Have you ever hooked one up though? Its hardware is odd. It’s like a completely separate console to itself. The Mega Drive wasn’t made to support add-on processors and chips like that, so Sega used a clever solution: the 32X has its own video output, and also a video input. You plug the Genesis’ output into the 32X, and then the 32X into your TV. The 32X mixes the Genesis’ signal into its own, as if it were chromakeyed. Since the 32X cartridge supplies the program running on the Genesis as well as itself and they can talk to each other, the two processors and graphics chips should be able to sync perfectly, if awkwardly.

But: because the Genesis’ video signal emerges from that console through this external wire before reentering the 32X, it’s possible to do things to it while in transit. The Genesis supplies video timing information that the 32X relies on, so you can’t get a signal from the add-on without the Genesis’ AV plugged into it, but the Genesis does produce a viewable video signal that you can see on its own.

All the details are in the video, which has been embedded below for your convenience and amusement.

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Episode 1 (15 minutes):

Episode 2 (17 minutes):

That removed BCD feature. Why? The video notes that the circuits are right there within the chip, but have been disabled by having five necessary traces severed. The video notes that the 6502’s BCD functionality was actually patented by MOS, and asks, was the feature disabled because of patent issues? Was Ricoh trying to avoid paying royalties?

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I’m not one of the people who complains about not understanding the controller or how to hold it. That part’s pretty easy to understand: you hold it one way, with the central prong in your left hand and the right handle in your right, for games that use the control stick like Super Mario 64; you hold it with one handle in each hand for games that instead use the Control Pad. It makes sense that Nintendo still wanted to feature the Pad prominently since it was one of the defining characteristics of the NES and SNES era.

The Control Pad is durable and easy to use, even if it does result in bruised thumbs when pressed with force, as can happen in challenging games. What’s not so durable is the N64’s signature control device: the Analog Stick. A special design that didn’t see much update after the Nintendo 64, because of the “white dust of death,” a mysterious fine powder that emerges from the inner workings of the stick after heavy use. Along with the powder always came degraded control performance: the stick would lose some of its tight feel, wobbling when shaken, and would no longer recognize the full extend of its range. All official N64 control sticks would succumb to the dreaded dust with time.

During the console’s life the source of the powder wasn’t common knowledge. It turns out it’s the result of the control stick grinding against its housing and actually rubbing itself in a fine dust. The looseness came from the powder getting into the tight confines of the stick’s mechanism, and from the pivot chamber getting looser as it was ground away by the joystick.

Some games were notorious for decreasing a controller’s working life. The Mario Party series was infamous for demanding rapid spins of the control stick, that could produce the dreaded dust and wobble after surprisingly few games. But with use, it seemed that all the official joysticks would succumb to it eventually. Third-party sticks, such as the then-ubiquitious MadCatz sticks, didn’t suffer from the problem, but their control sticks weren’t as sensitive, and required a smidge more force to push. For demanding play, the official sticks are a must.

This has resulted in a big problem. Since all the Nintendo-made N64 sticks degrade eventually with use, and Nintendo isn’t making them any more, speedrunners playing on original hardware have few options for playing games the way they were intended by their designers. Some jealously hoard pristine sticks, which have become expensive, while others work to make replacements.

Retromeister on Youtube has made a 24-minute video explaining the problem, and the lengths to which runners have resorted to keep themselves playing. And this, following, is that very thing:

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As I said yesterday, the X68000 cost three grand, and that was just for the base system. If you thought the NeoGeo was expensive, hah. It’s price was justified in that it was a computer, indeed a workstation, and had a variety of software other than games. But it did still have a lot of games, including some of the best arcade conversions, including excellent ports of Rygar, After Burner, Strider, Final Fight, Street Fighter II and Detana! Twinbee, and a well-remembered recreation of the original Castlevania up to then-current aural and visual ideals. The X68000 even got conversions of Atari arcade games like Marble Madness, and even KLAX, that would I would have loved to have played back then.

The X68000 also worked a lot like a MS-DOS machine from the time. It ran mostly HUMAN68K as its OS, a DOS clone made by HudsonSoft, although it also had windowing OSes. Despite how it seemed in use though, it used Motorola 680X0-family processors, like original iteration of the Macintosh. But while it has a DOS-style OS, it’s a home computer with a dedicated sprite chip!

At times it feels like this blog is a recap of my gaming-related Youtube explorations, but I have no qualms about it when they’re as excellent as the two I have this time. One is a review of the “pro” version system from four years ago, from someone who went and obtained one:

Three years later, RMC returned with a more thorough exploration of a different machine of the line:

And this one is about emulating it, which is probably the closest most of us will ever come to trying out any of its software:

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Sharopolis on Youtube digs into the system and its capabilities (17 minutes):

As you can tell by the video’s cover image: Amazing Power, No games. The SuperGrafx only had five games released for it throughout its lifetime, pretty harsh for a system that cost around $300 by today’s money. That cost, relative to that of the PC Engine CD, which was also expensive but could play CD games with vastly greater storage, was probably what doomed it. For those really seeking an arcade experience in Japan there was the Sharp x68000, famous at the time as the true enthusiast’s system with a good number of nearly exact arcade ports. It also cost around $6,000 in today’s money, and still $3,000 in then-money.

The system used the same chip as the PC Engine before it, a 6502 variant running at 7 mHz, meaning it was only a 8-bit system. But was that really so bad? The major 16-bit competition for it was the Motorola 68000, another venerable chip at the time that was used in the original Apple Mac, the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. Yet the 68000 also had some more overhead. Many instructions on the 6502 completed in from two to four cycles, whereas the minimum cycle count of a 68000 instruction was four, with some taking up to 20. This, of course, is offset by the 68000’s greater number of registers and ability to work with two bytes at once for many instructions.

Its graphics were essentially two of the PC Engine’s graphics chip, with some circuitry to interface their outputs together. This description brings uncomfortable reminders of people deriding the Wii’s graphics as “two Gamecubes taped together,” but it’s a much closer description of the SuperGrafx’s graphics. But in practice this meant twice the sprites, dual-plane backgrounds, and double the potential colors on-screen at once, while the MegaDrive/Genesis infamously was still stuck with 64.

The SuperGrafx’s failure in the market was one of those inflection points of the growth of video gaming. If it had succeeded then NEC might still be a player in gaming today, and maybe Hudson Soft would still be an independent entity, instead of just another property for Konami to mine for nostalgiabucks.

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Well, actually, yes, if you always want a perfect image. Sebastian Staacks (an awesome name) figured out a way to do it that mostly works. It’s a cartridge that goes into the Gameboy, that itself has a slot into which you plug the cartridge that you wish to play. Simple, right?

No, no, wait. There’s a problem. The Gameboy doesn’t expose its video through the cartridge port. There is no pin leading out providing a video signal that can be converted for display. There’s no way this could work!

Well, there is a way, kind of. The device contains a Raspberry Pi that runs its own Gameboy emulator, that it tries to keep synced with the version running on physical hardware. It does this by watching bus activity exposed to it through the cartridge port!

But while there’s a lot that it can do with this information, there’s also a lot it can’t see. It can’t, for example, see directly what buttons are being pressed. However, by watching how the cartridge reads the cart ROM, it can deduce what inputs were pressed.

The process is not perfect. While it can spy some memory accesses, a few things escape its inspection. While it can recreate the layout of the starting blocks in Tetris Game B, it can’t catch their randomized appearances. Also, while a Raspberry Pi is much faster than a Gameboy, it’s not fast enough to carry out its display in the same frame as the main unit, so it lags behind a couple of frames. Still though, it’s a very clever idea, and it’s amazing that it works as well as it does!

Sebastian made a Youtube video explaining and showing off his work, here. (It’s the same one embedded above.)

There Oughta Be A Game Boy Capture Cartridge

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tom7, aka suckerpinch on YouTube, is a freaking genius. I don’t believe in geniuses, but he is a strong counter-argument, I will admit.

His modus operandi is to take some absurd premise and carry it to its logical conclusion, usually using some form of technology along the way. He then makes a video about it. Sometimes the video is in connection with a paper he’s written for SIGBOVIK, which is an entire oil tanker full of worms that I really don’t want to get into here, suffice to say it’s hosted on the site of the Association for Computational Heresy.

The PDF of their 300-page record of proceedings calls itself, “The fifteenth annual intercalary robot dance party in celebration of workshop on symposium about 2⁶th birthdays; in particular, that of harry q. bovik,” about which all I can say, honestly, is, woof. I encourage you to go to that side and read, or at least try to read, some of their papers. You will come to feel like a complete imbecile, but you’ll probably be entertained.

AnYwAy. This post isn’t about SIGBOVIK but about tom7. The post above is about his questionable quest to construct mass storage devices out of unlikely things, like masses of Nintendo Tetris emulators, or a mass of used COVID tests. In the past he’s done fascinatingly-insane videos on bad chess algorithms, generalizing the concepts of uppercase and lowercase, created a number of weird bikes, or (to stick with the blog’s theme) teaching a computer to play Super Mario Bros. in a fairly silly way, which at least will teach you what lexicographical ordering means.

Found via a Metafilter post from user zengargoyle.

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A highlight of the channel that falls under our jurisdiction is him trying to get DOOM running on an old IBM machine running old IBM Unix. Over an hour long, the video is a long sequence of sadness, involving misconfiguring hostnames, getting X running, discovering that IBM’s C compiler costs about $2,500, running into basic C functions IBM didn’t implement, building OSS for AIX (and buying a $10 license for that), and then the issues with building and running the game itself. So yes, add it to the long list of devices that run DOOM, but at what cost?

Well, to NCommander, $10 plus several days of time. To you, about an hour of entertaining (somewhat) learning about obscure computing esoterica!

NCommander at YouTube: What Does It Take To Runu DOOM On A $10,000 IBM RS/6000 From 2001?

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