Interesting thing to notice? The word “Softdisk,” publisher of Gamer’s Edge and former workplace of the id Software founders, doesn’t appear anywhere in this video. There’s at least one screenshot that has part of its name, but it’s covered up with a different graphic.

(I’ve been trying to track down as many old issues of Softdisk’s publications as I can; it seems the only public place where they survive at all is in collections of Loadstar, including my own. Even the Internet Archive only has a smattering. They deserve to be preserved, dammit, both these guys’ previous work and that of everyone else who made software for that company.)

rodneylives

We’ve linked videos in this series many times before, but it’s wuite a doozy this time. Final Fantasy is known to have a number of combat bugs. Critical Hit chances are determined by the index of the weapon in the weapon table, not the stat in that table; weapon special properties just don’t work, regardless of what the Nintendo Power Strategy Guide says; and more.

This isn’t just an explication of those bugs though, it goes through all of how basic (non-magic) combat works in the game, explaining the value of all the stats. That’s one of the things about RPGs: you’re told items are “+4 better,” but often those values don’t match up to what they’d mean in D&D, where a plus is usually either a one-point increase in damage, a 5% improvement on odds for something, or both. Final Fantasy’s attack roll turns out to be a 1-in-200 die, so, a mere +1 is negligible to attack odds.

They probably didn’t elaborate on what these numbers mean in the manual because, at the time, Square and Nintendo were keen to get players hooked on Final Fantasy and other JRPGs, and nothing would dissuade them from picking up the game than to be confronted with battle formulae in the manual. Looks too much like school work! But they could have at least mentioned something about relative chances?

If you really want to know what the numbers mean, the video is there waiting for you. You can just let your eyes glaze over during the math if you want. I won’t tell the teacher!

rodneylives

Nearly the whole program (with minor edits for copyright) is on Youtube (4 hours), with a table of contents with links in its description. Although, unless you have an insatiable hunger for random gaming clips, you’ll probably want to go through the TOC.

This post is mostly intended to point you to Get Info’s much more substantive piece, but here are links to a few of the more recognizable clips these days: Ballblazer, Space Invaders, Out Run, Flight Simulator, Super Mario Bros., Eliza, Zanac, Little Computer People, Fantasy Zone, Karateka, Pinball Construction Set, Marble Madness, Rescue on Fractalus, Wizardry and Galaxian. All 100 clips are also on Youtube separated out into individual videos (and with better image quality overall).

The book that followed contains Denshi Yuugi Taizen : TV Games,” presents 40 interviews with a who’s-who of game creation at the time, including Nolan Bushnell, Ed Logg, Steve Cartwright, Fukio “MTJ” Mitsuji, Trip Hawkins, Freefall Associates, Timothy Leary, Shigeru Miyamoto, Yuji Horii, Toru Iwatani, Sir-Tech, Shigesato Itoi and many more. A full scan of the book is on the Internet Archive.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

Someone on Mastodon (I can’t find the post now) mentioned that the KIM-1 had excellent programming guides, as it rightfully must have had, considering a freshly-assembled KIM had to have been programmed in raw machine code, and coming from an era before the World Wide Web. I had a look and, lo, it did!

Have a look for yourself, from a copy hosted by Rich’s Classic Computer Pages (PDF). Explained in an early chapter is how to properly add together numbers of arbitrary sizes, something that I had to find out from random sources. I wish I had this book when I was programming on the Commodore 64; I did have the famous Programmer’s Reference Guide, but that’s just it. It’s a reference work, and very difficult to learn the principles of assembly coding through it directly. (That said, there are pages in the C64 PRG that will look very familiar to someone flipping through the KIM-1 Programmer’s Guide.)

If you sat down and read this all the way through, and it’s quite readable for a programming manual, you’d be well placed to write code for, not just the KIM-1, but any 6502 computer. While for other machines you would need more information, like memory maps and hardware documentation, and you might like to have an assembler too, you’d still have a great foundation for whatever crazy programming adventure you were about to embark upon. I love it.

rodneylives

The weirdnesses continue…. The cartridge has mock-up art on it that looks like the “black-box” trade dress early NES games had. The chips on the cart are mask ROMs, not EPROMs. In the attract more scroll, arcade names are used for some of the fighters, like Pizza Pasta, Piston Hurricane and Vodka Drunkinski.

rodneylives

The original Bard’s Tale, not the PS2 action RPG reboot, and not the more-recent continuation either, created by Michael Cranford, is not as harsh as Wizardry, but is still a tough game, and one that demands that you map it out as you go. Instead of a menu-based town like in Wizardry, you have to actually explore the town of Skara Brae to find important locations within it like Garth’s Equipment Shop, Roscoe’s Magic Emporium or even the Review Board where you gain experience levels, and surviving the town’s random monsters long enough to do those things is your first major challenge. Yet despite, or maybe because of, that difficulty, the series sold more than a million copies, and was an important early hit for both developer Interplay and publisher Electronic Arts.

The C64 Appreciation Society is working through the original Bard’s Tale in an in-progress series of videos, ranging from 10 to 15 minutes in length, and they’re excellent both for an introduction to the classic series, and for understanding what made the game so popular.

The playlist is in reversed order, so if you watched it from that you’d start with the episode 4 and then watch 3, 2 then 1, and it’s really for the best to watch them in the correct sequence, so here those are: Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4. Embedded here is the first of those episodes:

rodneylives

Because of this, I just have to assume that this 16½-minute video from Cat’s Eye and Cybershell finding many (although they admit not all) of the songs that the musicians behind the Japanese version of Sonic CD drew samples from is on the up and up. The Japanese version’s soundtrack was by (looking up spelling on Sonic Retro) Naofumi Hataya and Masafumi Ogata. They mostly don’t seem to touch the US version, which had mostly different music by Spencer Nilsen and David Young, maybe because of those many musical references. Whichever you prefer is mostly a matter of taste, and how well you can handle an intro track for a game about a cartoon hedgehog with lyrics about “leather and lace” and “toot toot sonic warrior.” (Didn’t I make a post about that at one time? A search suggests no, but I was sure I had….)

Lots of names and bands that I’ve never heard of, and songs that I’ve never heard! Look, I know, it’s a huge area to be ignorant of, but at this point I don’t feel like I could possibly do it any justice, so I guess I’ll just go back to my CD of Flood. (Starts absentmindedly singing the lyrics to Particle Man for the hundredth time….)

Extra: this Sonic Retro forum post where The Sunshine Feeler dove into figuring out who did the vocals on the Japanese version, which reveals the amazing fact that the artist who did the rap portion of the intro song, Casey Rankin, also sang the remix of the DK Rap for Smash Bros. Melee!

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

The Wizard stars Fred Savage of The Wonder Years, a popular show that you barely hear anything about any more. Like thirtysomething, remember that? I don’t either.

Many of my nights lately have been consumed with trying to play enough Caves of Qud so that I don’t embarrass myself too badly when I finally decide to talk about it. Most of my early explorations were in permadeath Classic Mode, but I have come to realize that playing it that way would mean I would need several years to finish it. I may not actually finish it before I write on it. On Nethack I had the advantage of being obsessed with it for years, had read many spoilers on it and participated on the Nethack Usenet group. These days much discussion of that nature has moved onto Reddit, which I have strong moral qualms about visiting now, not to mention that its app sucks on toast.

Well, back at it. Send fresh water.

rodneylives

I’m not happy with the clickbait title The Game Display chose for this video, claiming they found a “golden mushroom” in Super Mario Bros. 3 like it’s some actual thing. What it is is a 1-Up mushroom with a weird palette. But it’s still a video worth linking (11 minutes), and seeing, because to find it you have to learn about an unlikely secret mechanic in Mario 3 involving the map screen and the wandering Hammer Bros. You can watch it, but I’ll give you the gist down below.

Remember those map Hammer Bros. in Mario 3? They walk around after you finish a level or lose a life, adding a bit of extra uncertainty to the map screen, and giving you a stored powerup if you beat them.

But did you ever notice that sometimes the blocks in the battle arena where you fight the Hammer Bros. have powerups in them too, but only sometimes? And it isn’t something to do with the Hammer Bros. themselves, the same fight might have a powerup one time, but no powerup another. What determines whether it’ll be there or not? Is it random?

The diabolical thing is that it turns out the map intersection spaces, the little coin-like locations that Mario/Luigi can stand on but don’t contain levels, Toad Houses or anything that can normally be entered, are actually valid gameplay locations! They’re only loaded as battle arenas when you fight enemies encountered on the map screen on that spot. Although most of those locations look the same on each world, some of them have powerups in a specific block, and some don’t. The qualification for whether you can find it or not is where you fight the Hammer Bros., not which one you fight.

In the sky portion of World 5, there is one specific map screen spot where, if you can lure that area’s lone Hammer Bros. onto it and fight it there, you can find that 1-Up mushroom with the weird palette. It requires a lot of tricky actions to find it, since the Hammer Bros. icon can’t travel up one of the only two ways to that spot, and you also have to avoid clearing a couple of levels using Jugem’s Cloud, because if you clear a level normally, the M or L space that is produced blocks the movement of map screen enemies. You also have to avoid fighting and defeating the Hammer Bros. early of course, and you have to avoid turning the enemy into a Treasure Ship. That might seem like an unlikely thing to have to watch for, but it is a issue encountered in the video. Watch it and you’ll see.

It’s so cryptic and precise that it seems like it must be an intentional secret, the one non-level map screen spot with a 1-Up in it. Given how many infinite life tricks Super Mario Bros. 3 has, I can’t say that it’s particularly useful, but that isn’t the point. It’s a little nod by the developers to the obsessed player, a way of saying, we see what you did there.

rodneylives

Variable Screen Position, or VSP, is basically an abuse of the C64 hardware, a way to make its VIC-II graphics chip do something it’s really not meant to do, a way to get it to get its graphics data from memory in such a way that it does rest on the bedrock of 1K memory boundaries. Perhaps best known for its use in the 1993 classic Mayhem in Monsterland (video, 59 minutes), and more recently the homebrew C64 port of Super Mario Bros.

Without VSP, scrolling on the C64 beyond an eight pixel range is extremely processor intensive, and in fact cannot be done for the full screen in a video frame’s time on unmodified original hardware if moving color RAM is required too. Here is a page that describes it, and how to do it safely, that is, how to live with the memory corruption it causes on some hardware. I had mentioned before that it had to do with messing with the VIC-II memory refresh timing, but this page claims that it’s actually due to the VIC trying to access memory at a time when a read hasn’t stabilized.

Well anyway, here’s video of that C64 port of Super Mario Bros., so you can marvel as the system doing something that’s much easier on the NES.

rodneylives

Why is it misunderstood? Because it received several ports to other platforms around the time it was popular, they all lacked the special something of the original game, and in more recent times the game has been unfairly derided on the strength of those ports.

What is it that makes Dark Castle great on original Macs? It’s a combination of super-sharp art, responsive and unique controls (it’s a platformer but you attack enemies by throwing rocks at them with the Macin-mouse) and character. The game has gotten more worthy remakes in the current era, but still faces difficulties. One of the best modern versions sadly became unplayable on later-day macOSes when Apple decided to no longer support 32-bit software, a decision that I can’t possibly attribute to Steve Jobs, but somehow it still feels like it has to be his fault, somehow.

Now, as the video tells us, there’s a new remake programmed in Unity, released on the Mac App Store but also Steam, and is finally playable in a decent port for non-Apple platforms. It even got a whole episode of Retronauts about it, which I can’t link because, ha ha, it’s paywalled. I’m sure this video will give you enough information to decide if it’s worth your time, and even if it isn’t, it’ll fill you in one one of those many secret little corners of video game history that Set Side B exists to point out to you.

rodneylives

Fewer people know that Sonic CD goes a step farther. If you wait three minutes without moving Sonic, he’ll say aloud “I’m outta here!” (his first voiced line in the series!) and jump off the screen. What’s more, this ends your game. As Sonic abandons his journey, the game will deduct all of his lives, and the GAME OVER notice appears immediately. The hedgehog has been offended! Learn to pause the game next time, player.

The gag seems like it may have been hastily programmed, because there are a lot of quirks to the animation that play around oddly, and conflict in some ways, with the other aspects of the game. Camamania shows off all the bugs and glitches around the joke in a 7½-minute video.

Among the cases are when Sonic’s jump causes him to trigger a boss fight, to enter an acceleration tube, and when it causes him to cross the level-end sign. Some of them only apply to the MegaCD original, having been fixed in the US version, and some have different behavior in the 2011 remake. Interesting behavior, so says I!

rodneylives

grub (properly lowercase) is a bootloader for some Linux machines. I can’t tell you if it’s easy to add it to a computer’s startup files, but if you know how to do such things, please enjoy.

rodneylives

Here’s the list of games covered:

Missing In Action (Green Beret sequel, arcade)
Rush’n Attack: ExPatroit (another Green Beret sequel, this time in 3D, released much later on PS3)
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (Diablo-like sequel, PS2, Xbox)
Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 (PS3, Xbox 360)
Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 (PS3, Xbox 360) also mentioned were the Bionic Commando games for Gameboy and Gameboy Color
Heart of the Alien (sequel to Out Of This World, SegaCD version)
Fade to Black (3D Flashback: Quest for Identity sequel for Playstation and DOS)

rodneylives

In brief:

Mode 0: Up to four independently movable backgrounds, but with some pretty serious color limitations. Mostly got used for title screens.

Mode 1: Up to three backgrounds, two with more colors. The SNES’s most-used mode.

Mode 2: Two backgrounds, with “offset per tile” on one of them that lets the system move columns of tiles vertically by arbitrary amounts. Used for certain special effects, like (along with raster-based scanline placement) the waving flag in Battlemaniacs, Super Turrican 2’s worms and rockets stages and Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack’s rising game boards. Horizontal offset per tile was also possible, but much less used due to the coarseness of the scroll.

Mode 3: Two backgrounds, one of them gets either 256 colors or, using direct color, being able to specify colors without palettes, with 8 bits of RGB value. Often used for high-color stills. Earthbound’s “THE WAR AGAINST GIYGAS!” screen uses it.

Mode 4: Has the high color first layer of Mode 3, and the offset-per-tile effect from Mode 2 for its second layer (which has fewer colors than in Mode 3). Rarely used. Puzzle Bobble uses it for gameplay, to independently shift the playfields from the rest of the gackground.

Mode 5: Two backgrounds, with 16 and 4 colors per tile respectively, but supports high resolution with 512 pixels per scanline. Can’t do transparency (but can kind of fake it with dithering). Notably, the high res menu screens in Secret of Mana use this.

Mode 6: Only one layer, hi-res like the second layer in Mode 5, but supporting offset-per-tile. Often considered completely unused, White_Pointer Gaming found out that Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals does use it during the credits.

Mode 7: The famous mode that supports scaling, shearing and rotation of a single background layer, used for special effects and fancy 3D effects in games like F-Zero, Pilotwings and Super Mario Kart. Supports 256 paletted colors or direct 8-bit RGB color.

Notably though, Mode 7 can’t actually do 3D effects on its own; it has to use another feature called HDMA. It uses a raster effect to change the horizontal scale of the background on each scanline. As it turns out, the calculations to do this on each line are substantial, which is probably why so many games that use Mode 7 to a significant degree use one of the SNES’ coprocessor chips, like the DSP or SA-1, to help the processor out. The video then rounds out with a discussion of the Mosaic function used in such places as the map transitions in Super Mario World and Final Fantasy IV (II).

Elsewhere, Retro Game Mechanics Explained did a 16-part series covering the SNES’ hardware feature in considerable depth.

rodneylives

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!

There is lots to find exploring the hashtag #marchintosh, this is just a few items. Level 2 Jeff emulated the original Macintosh on a microcontroller (15 minutes):

Michael MJD emulated Windows on a PowerPC Mac (32 minutes, but running, it should be said, OS/X, not classic MacOS):

Retro Repair Roundup did an hour-long video where they talked about old Macs:

It’s from back in 2019, but Ron’s Computer Videos showed off a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Hypercard stack! (1 hour 16 minutes) They have a whole MARCHintosh playlist too.

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

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

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….

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

If this kind of thing is up your monochromatic alley, decryption’s on Mastodon and Bluesky!

rodneylives

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….

In a dusty corner of classic Earthbound fansite starmen.net is this page.

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.

rodneylives

Kosmic, general SMB expert, has a video that shows off ten really obscure tricks, the kinds of things even speedrunners tend not to know. (8 minutes) Note, the video has a sponsored section; if it bothers you, consider installing the SponsorBlock browser extension.)

An overview:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Enemies hit from below while near the left side of the screen turn into Koopas!
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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).
9. 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.
10. 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!

rodneylives

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.

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 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.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

Gauntlet has 100 levels, although seven of them take the form of an in-game tutorial. The first level has three exits; one if market EXIT TO 4 and another EXIT TO 8. EXIT TO FOUR skips the player forward a bit, and EXIT TO 8 leaves the training levels entirely. This is how Atari Games’ standard difficulty selection is implemented in Gauntlet, the first levels introduce various game concepts gradually: Ghosts & Generators, Grunts, Demons, Lobbers, Deaths, and Sorcerers get their own spotlights.

Starting with Level 8 though, the remaining 93 levels are part of a great loop. Players will notice that the difficulty increases greatly with Level 8. Which level is 8 actually varies between plays. Gauntlet lasts forever, there is no ending level and the loop never ends. When the last player in the game runs out of health, the machine remembers which level in the loop the game ended on. The next game begins at the start of the tutorial levels again, and when that game reaches Level 8, it’ll be the map that the previous game ended on. (More information on arcade Gauntlet can be found in FalkentyneDragon’s classic infosheet on GameFAQs.)

More than that, the game is known to remove food from levels, depending on how many players are in the game (fewer players means less food), player scores, which characters are being played and how many credits have been inserted during the current game.

Later revisions of the game put the screws on more tightly to try to prevent marathon games. Despite this, very good players can play indefinitely with certain characters. In this ten hour Youtube video, mackey_special plays continuously with Elf through 474 levels.

If you want to find out more, watch the video. They have videos for all four characters on their channel, here.

Note: I am not sure this is arcade Gauntlet. It’s possible that it’s the Japanese Mega Drive version. The Arcade Mode of Genesis/Mega Drive versions of Gauntlet (known as Gauntlet IV in some territories) looks and plays very similarly to the arcade version.

rodneylives