I feel like I’m a bit late on this one, but there’s still two weeks of March left. Some crazy wonderful people every year devote the month of March to classic Macintosh stuff, both hardware and software, and primarily things before the release of OS/X in 2001. The original MacOS traces its lineage all the way back to 1984’s original Macintoshes, and existed as Apple’s primary OS for 17 years. Now it’s been 24 years since the switchover, but a lot of people still like the system that served as Apple’s mainline OS for so long.
MARCHintosh has a website that organizes it, and even offers a style guide. It was created as a fruit-flavored adjunct of similar month-long pun-inspired retrocomputing celebrations DOScember (website currently down for a redesitn) and SepTANDY (doesn’t seem to have a home site at all). Should there be more? VICtober? JUNIX (thanx Ben Zuddist)? I vote yes, regardless of how terrible the pun is! Let’s fill the year with crackling, smoking old tech!
More MARCHintosh projects can be found through the #marchintosh tag on Bluesky and Mastodon.
MacOS Timeline
1976 Founding of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), release of Apple I 1977 Release of Apple II . . 6 years . 1984 System 1, release of the original Macintosh 1985 1986 Systems 2–4 (sometime between 1985 and here) 1987 System 5 1988 System 6 1989 1990 1991 System 7, a.k.a. MacOS 7.6 1992 1993 1994 Switchover to PowerPC hardware 1995 1996 1997 MacOS 8 1998 Initial release of iMac, the beginning of the revival of Apple’s fortunes 1998 MacOS 9 1999 2000 2001 Mac OS/X 10.0 Cheetah (“OS 10,” now called MacOS), initial release of iPod . . 24 years . 2026 Today
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Maybe it’s weird this has never happened before. Both Earthbound and TMBG are both very weird and fun musically, after hearing this mashup of the two it’s surprising how well the two go together.
And I’m not sure which I should be more embarrassed about, that I know all these Earthbound songs so well, or that I know a good four-fifths of the They Might Be Giants tunes from these excellent mixtures from idiokiot (25 minutes).
The dislike for me here is the title, since Earthbound is so much more than “beating Giygas,” but I admit it’s a pretty good match of TMBG’s name.
The Video Game History Foundation has a breezy 3½ minute video about one of the less-remembered magazines of the NES-through-Playstation era, Game Player’s, with the apostrophe-S at the end. But it wasn’t just one magazine. Over ten years they put out magazines under thirteen different titles, and surprisingly, one still survives today as PC Gamer, a fact of its history that even their own website seems not to know.
They say that they have now managed to obtain the complete run of all the issues of the Game Player’s series, and all but one of them can now be browsed online, including Game Player’s Sports For Kids, which wasn’t about video games at all.
I remember Game Player’s as being the least of the game periodicals of the time, without the insider’s angle of Nintendo Power, the gonzo enthusiasm of Electronic Gaming Monthly or the slightly highbrow air of Video Games & Computer Entertainment. Yet it seems to have done quite well for itself.
The main fact I remember about Game Player’s was idly reading through the colophon one day (I was a weird kid) and seeing a familiar name: Richard Mansfield! I don’t remember what his capacity there was, but I do remember his days at Compute! and Compute’s Gazette, and that he wrote a couple of books on machine language for the Commodore 64. I always felt that Game Player’s must have felt like a step down for him. I hope he’s still around, out there somewhere, enjoying the current revival of interest in 8-bit computing.
The Shining series, published by Sega but developed by lots of different people, is all over the map regarding gameplay styles. I’d say that more people have heard of the second game, the great Shining Force (it’s sort of like lighter Fire Emblem with town scenes and no permadeath) than the first one, Shining in the Darkness (a first-person dungeon step-oriented crawl with premade characters). All the games are set in a fantasy world (but not all necessarily the same fantasy world) and have a cartoony art style that helps keep things lively, but beyond the dungeon crawls and tactical battles there have been Diablo-style combat, action RPGs, Zelda-style exploration with bump combat, more general strategy and even a fighting game.
Ashley Day at Time Extension rated all 23 of them, and their opinions seem pretty decent to me. So you know, #1 was Shining Force III (the infamous one released on three sold-separate Saturn disks, of which only one made it to the US), #2 was Shining Force II, and #3 was the confusingly-titled “Shining the Holy Ark” also in Saturn. #5 is Shining Force I, and #4 is its GBA remake. Many of the lower-placed games on the list are various later installments, which is fair. The Shining games seem like they’ve fallen off lately, but it’s not like you can’t go back and play the originals… through some, um, means or other….
(Axe smashes through door.) Heeeeres… Ashley Day! Does Stephen King know of these games?
This link’s five years old, and itself came five years after Iwata, beloved programmer president of Nintendo, suddenly passed away. Early in Iwata’s former employer HAL Laboratory’s history, they made games for Commodore 8-bit microcomputers. I myself own a C64 cartridge of HAL’s Pinball Spectacular, a variation upon Namco’s arcade pinball/Breakout mixture Gee Bee. It’s known that Iwata made at least one game for the VIC-20, a Galaxian clone called Star Battle.
It was known that there’s unused text in the cartridge ROM of Star Battle identifying Iwata as its author. Robin of 8-Bit Show And Tell had a look at the code in a monitor (27 minutes), and discovered that there’s a section that would have printed the credit from Iwata and HAL Laboratory to the screen but for the flag that would have triggered its display not being set. A change of a single byte from 0 to 1, and Iwata’s name gets printed to the screen in flashing colors!
While examining the code, Robin discovered a place where it reads the states of the two Shift keys and the Commodore key, and loads a 1 if they’re all pressed at once, but then throws the value away without doing anything with it. He speculates that this was the trigger for the easter egg showing Iwata’s name and HAL Laboratory, but for some reason was removed before release. Robin figured out a way to restore the egg by changing just a few bytes, and lo, in the modified version it works!
I remember the title screen for Pinball Spectacular on the C64 has a credit for HAL Laboratory. Whether Iwata coded it too is, I fear, lost to the ages. But how weird is it that the future president of Nintendo, the interviewer of all those Iwata Asks articles, originator of the Nintendo Directs and long time programmer for HAL got his start coding those little cartridges for Commodore. They just don’t make them like that any more.
From July of last year, the blog called decryption posted a bunch of wondrous examples of 1-bit MacPaint art from the early days of the platform. MacPaint had a distinctive aesthetic: tiny dots, each either white or black, favored the use of dithering to create makeshift grayscale. (Note: one image is NSFW.) Here’s a few selections, but there’s lots more where these came from!
If this kind of thing is up your monochromatic alley, decryption’s on Mastodon and Bluesky!
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
It’s hard to read in this screenshot. It’s hard to read on the original site too! Here’s some of the text:
Welcome to the EarthBound CuLt join us or you will DIe______________________________________________ how about I sharpen you I just love sharpening. you don’t want me to sharpen? thou shalt not use the suporma obeyeth the mighty lord of scaraba
the meek shall inherit the deep darkness of stonehenge for all eternity The Ten EarthBound Commandments I. Thou shalt not use the suporma II. Thou shalt not question the existence of the Apple of Enlightenment III. Thou shalt not steal from the Egg and Banana Stand IV. Thou shalt not covet the Zombie Chick V. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s Sword of Kings VI. Thou shalt not neglect thine exit mouse VII. Honor thy Courage VIII. Thou shalt not fear the Photo Man IX. Thou shalt not abuse thine Rock Candy X. Honor thy Father and Mother… especially thy Father.
Ah, that’s some quality nonsense right there. Of course it’s densely packed with Earthbound references. The Wayback machine indicates this page (in an earlier form) has been around since May 23rd 2006.
Starmen.net is a true star (obs) of the World Wide Web. They’ve sent packages full of fanwork to series creator Shigesato Itoi and were instrumental in distributing Tomato’s famous Mother 3 translation patch, which opened up the classic third game in the series to English speaking audiences. They were the origin of Fangamer, which is a pretty big deal now! And they still have an active forum, which doesn’t see the traffic that it used to, but still sees new comments from time to time.
Super Mario Bros. is over 40 years old, and is only 40K in size, and yet there’s still a lot of weird behaviors in it. The old infinite 1UP trick from bouncing repeatedly on a Koopa shell is pretty old hat now; the Minus World trick is slightly less known, but is still not much of an eyeopener these days.
If you’re about to trigger the Minus World glitch (entering the left-most pipe in the World 1-2 Warp Zone before the numbers and “Welcome to Warp Zone!” message appear), but instead of going into the first pipe instead go into the second, you’re sent to World 5. Also, if you have Fire power, and somehow take damage the instant the message appears, Mario keeps his Fiery colors.
Bowser’s normal colors are actually a deeper shade of green, because his green color is the same as the darker color Koopas use in Castle levels. The palette, and this his color, are updated when the level-ending Axe is drawn by the level interpreter off-screen. Usually by the time you see Bowser the Axe has been placed, but if you scroll him on slowly you can sometimes still see him with the earlier color. This is why the extra Bowser in one of the Lost Levels is a different color.
Enemies hit from below while near the left side of the screen turn into Koopas!
Stomped Red Parakoopas are a different enemy type than normal Red Parakoopas, and will walk off ledges. Also Bullet Bills that come out of cannons are different from Bullet Bills that emerge from the side of the screen; screen-side Bills are vulnerable to Koopa shells, while cannon Bills are not.
The bricks that form the walls in the water section of World 8-4 are the result of a special case in the code that draws those bricks if the world number is equal to 8. This can be seen in World 8 of Lost Levels in a pipe outside of a Castle area.
There is a Koopa Troopa in Lost Levels that’s generated over a pit, and immediately falls down into it while offscreen, and so wasn’t known about for over three decades.
There is also a green Cheep Cheep in 2-3 and 7-3 generated high up offscreen and wasn’t known about for a long time.
The point/life award from stomping a Koopa is not awarded on the frame it’s earned, it takes a frame or two to get credit for it. If you stomp it again before it registers, the award will reset. This means if you stomp it very quickly (like if Mario hits his head from the bounce) it’ll look like you’re earning tons of lives but won’t get anything. Also, if you stomp the Koopa that fast, it’s possible to overflow the stomp counter, and go back to earning points (that, because of the first thing, are never awarded anyway).
World 5 doesn’t start with a big Castle! It begins with a little Castle like you were coming into it after the first two levels of a world. Also, one of the bridges in 2-3 and 7-3 has a guardrail that extends an extra block beyond the bridge.
It’s not explained why it happens, but an example is shown of shelled enemies hit from below sliding around on their own, slowly, with active hit boxes. It’s a strange sight to see!
Never let it be said that I’m not alert to the benefits of reusing work.
I was just watching the beginning of Video Games 101’s first video, of four, of Final Fantasy IV née II, which was such a substantial jump over the first Final Fantasy that it instantly gained a bunch of admirers back then, including myself. It came out early in the SNES’ lifespan too, and I’d say it was instrumental to getting players interested in the system. Of course, it only seemed like such a great jump because Japanese Final Fantasy games II and III never made it to the US, and back then were barely even heard of at the time.
Around the 19 minute mark in the video (which I’m not embedding because it’s not actually the subject of this post), Professor Brigands mentioned how much better it was that FFIV, unlike the first game, didn’t adhere to a convention of earlier C/JRPGs: if a character tries to attack a monster that an earlier character to act has targeted and defeated, then that character’s turn is wasted. In FFIV and most games to follow, the character will instead pick another random opponent. FFIV marked a change in behavior for CRPGs in this, and it’s rare that you’ll find a later game where characters will waste turns like this.
I happen to know the justification behind those wasted turns, and in fact I think the change was for the worse, and being of an argumentative mood I made a comment on the video explaining it. That is what follows (edited slightly) below.
Combat in FFIV. Image from retroachievements.
Brigands called this ridiculous, and most people would agree with him, but I don’t. RPGs have, for a long time, decreased the function of actual strategy over time. This isn’t true just of turn-based games or JRPGs, but in general. They keep getting easier and simpler.
Losing a turn is, against most opponents, a really minor penalty anyway. It’s an incentive to spread out your attacks against weak foes, allowing the player to conserve a small amount of HP (from potential attacks from other monsters) through the use of good tactics, and it means you can’t just completely turn off your brain even against groups of the weakest foes. If you just pound the A button, you risk giving the other monsters free hits against you. It increases player engagement, not by a huge amount, granted, but by a smidge.
Before FFIV, most games applied this turn-wasting concept. So, why did so many games do this?
In some of the earliest days of RPGs, those of 1st Dungeons & Dragons*, a combat round was intended to be a full minute of time. This was explained in that attacks were intended to actually a sequence of combat moves: thrusts, slashes, feints, dodges and the like, that were elided in play in terms of just getting to the numerical effect of those actions.
That’s why fighters in those games could gain extra attacks per round: it wasn’t that they got more swings, but that they were more efficient in their actions, and could get in more telling blows. This is also why Armor Class doesn’t reduce damage, but instead decreases the enemy chance to hit. Damage came from the accumulation of telling blows.
And HP loss itself was also an abstraction, not entirely being directly hurt, but more like scratches, welts, getting worn out, the results of pressing your luck a bit too far, and then actual wounds. If staging an attack against a monster takes a full minute, it makes more sense that one character killing it would cause a following attack that turn to be wasted. In 1E D&D, players had to declare their actions at the start of a round before anyone acted, and the DM was also expected to record each monster’s plans at the start of the round and follow through with them when their turn came.
The page in question
The justification for all of this can be found on page 61 of the 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons DM’s Guide. Now I mention this not to say if it’s good or bad. It’s obvious that current-day D&D doesn’t adhere to this mental model of combat, probably because most players themselves didn’t understand Gary Gygax’s theory of play, but also because it made the game more complicated if everyone had to plan their actions ahead, at the start of each round.
But it does mean that video games from that era did tend to adopt those concepts. The original Final Fantasy is known to have copied many things from D&D, including many of its monsters, and other ideas too, and this seems to have been one of them. I mention all of this just to shed some light on why the original FF did this, and also that, in this one area, it makes the game slightly less thoughtful.
* This wasn’t actually true of the very earliest days of Original D&D, or OD&D, for it didn’t actually have a set combat system at all! Players were intended to use Chainmail, a previous system of medieval combat, to simulate battle. The system that we would recognize as the root of current-day D&D’s combat began in Greyhawk, OD&D’s first supplement.
The chief difference between normal, sequential programming and game programming is that most video games have to make a framerate target, and have to split their processes between frames. Lots of little things are usually happening concurrently, and you can’t rely on normal program flow to keep track of things. Instead, each of those little processes has to remember what it’s doing between frames, and that memory takes the form of state machines, reminders of what each routine is in the middle of doing.
Drawing it out with circles like in this video I think makes it seem a bit more complicated than it actually is, but it does require a different way of thinking about your code than you may be used to in other programming disciplines.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A bit of an oldie this time, and in more ways than one, a four minute stop motion animation from Rymdreglage made with Lego bricks, from way back in 2009. It’s still great though! By “8-bit,” in this case, they mean specifically the Commodore 64 end of the swimming pool, especially as concerns the game International Karate+. Even though this video is 16 years old, Ryndreglage is still making videos now! Have a look for yourself if you like.
It’s a good one today folks. Modern Vintage Gamer had a look into how the CPU opponents of two of the most popular and foundational fighting games, Mortal Kombat 2 and Street Fighter 2, cheat against players trying to progress far into the game on their meager financial resources.
Their Mortal Kombat 2 video (11 minutes) is three years old now and has racked up 1.5 million views, but it’s well worth reviewing. While MK2’s source code is not known to the public, UK3 for the Playstation’s source is known, and is suspected to be similar to that of the earlier game, and uses a dynamic difficulty variable called diff. MVG uses this source to make an educated guess of how and when MK2 decides to cheat.
Lest you think it’s only us filthy Americans who would resort to such underhanded means to rob honest teenagers of their quarters, Street Fighter 2 does it too! Much more recent is MVG’s four month old video (9 minutes) on that game. (If you’d like to skip the video’s preamble, this link is queued up to the beginning of the cheat discussion.)
In brief, the games use input reading and the ability to perform complex moves lag-free to get an edge over human players. A player would have to enter moves on the joystick and with the buttons, while the CPU can just do them, without having to spend that time. And by reading the player’s inputs (like the Ironknuckles in Zelda II), they can react to player actions reliably, where a human opponent would have to judge based on vague visual indications, and then respond with a move to counter your action that was already in progress.
