I’m surprised these folks are still around! The Intellivision was an ancient property even by the time the Blue Sky Rangers were founded, and their site is still up, even now in this blasted dystopian year of 2023.
They’ve been making collections and remakes of, and retro consoles containing, the old Intellivision games since 1997, and once in a while they make a new package to keep the memory of the old games alive. My own shelf has the Gamecube version of Intellivision Lives on it.
You might find it edifying to visit their site. That is my hope. My dream? Look and see.
More low-effort posts about game things spotted at Atlanta’s pop culture mega-convention.
A Cosmic Smash cabinet!
That recent arcade port of NES obscurity Mr. Gimmick!
A 2007 arcade version of Rhythm Heaven, completely in Japanese! This was perhaps the coolest game at the convention.
Sadly blurry in this shot, but: Space Invaders! Without the color overlay though. The monitor didn’t work for like two entire days, too.
Twilight Zone pinball, this picture being of the time I nearly completed the door but lost my last ball before collecting that hated Question Mark! (Don’t worry though, the next day I came back and did it, and played Lost In The Zone. I left with the #2 score on the machine–although oddly, it seems someone else who plays these games also has my initials? JWH? Their Terminator 2 machine’s scoreboard is full of JWH but I’ve never played it!)
The games were brought this year by Save Point, who mostly provided Japanese games and some pinballs, and Joystick Gamebar, which provided a good number or retro arcade machines and more pinball, including that Twilight Zone.
Two of the people who helped bring us the games from Joystick Gamebar this year, Winston (left) and Brian (right)
I’ve got hundreds of pictures that I’ve yet to sift through. More tomorrow!
I love BASIC! I don’t make a secret of it. It was the product, even before DOS, that launched Microsoft. It was invented to be the language to bring programming to the masses, and, for a short time, it fulfilled that function. (These days, if you want to learn coding, I suggest Python. Not only is it a lot more capable and modern, but you can actually get a job writing it.)
Used to be if you had a new computer you wanted families to buy, you had to have a version of BASIC to ship with it. The Apple II had two, one written by Steve Wozniak himself. Right off the top of my head, computer systems with BASIC, go! Altair, Apple II, Commodore Pet, Vic-20, 64, 128, Plus-4, 16, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80, MS-DOS, Windows (Visual BASIC carried the torch for many years), and, most improbably, the Atari VCS/2600, in its BASIC Programming cartridge, an effectively useless cart for its stated purpose that’s nonetheless an excellent hack. The machine has 128 bytes of RAM, but it can still run BASIC, by jove.
The Famicom has a version of BASIC too, coming in at the end of the language’s heyday. Over on the Peertube instance diode.zone, user RE:Enthused did a two-part introduction to it that may be of interested to people who still think in terms of FOR/NEXT loops.
Let’s look at Family Basic on the Famicom, Part 1 (8 minutes) and Part 2 (17 minutes).
Snail Maze, a really simple game (image from article)
It’s not really that deep a game, just a simple timed maze race, but it’s something, in case you got tired of Hang-On and Astro Warrior. Mike (no last name given), the maintainer of the blog Leaded Solder, decided to take that game and make a cartridge for it, so it can be played on any Master System, not just the early units that had it built-in. It’s a story of electronics work and 3D printing, of ColecoVision cartridge simultarity, roadblocks overcome, and ultimate victory. Here’s some appropriate music to listen to while reading it.
When we talk about the old days in computers, there’s easily several eras we could be talking about. There are people who consider the Wii/PS3 era to be the Ancient Times, for after all they were both released in 2006, 17 years ago. They’re almost old enough to drive!
I consider the “modern era” of gaming to have begun with the Dreamcast/Playstation 2/Gamecube era, for in my view that was when, with skilled art design and coding, and modest requirements, one could reasonably generate a realistic scene. Take a look at Crazy Taxi and Soulcalibur on the Dreamcast, both have graphics that seem a little simple now but easily hold up, while the Nintendo 64/Playstation generation has to cut too many corners with their 3D graphics generally.
You can from there go back through the generations: the 16-bit era, the NES/SMS era, then the Atari VCS/Intellivision/Odyssey2/Colecovision era. There’s also the era of home microcomputers, Apple IIs, Commodore 64s and Atari 8-bits, among others, a time that really has no comparison before or since.
But even that wasn’t the beginning of computer gaming. Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atari and the gleaming manufacturers, there was an age undreamed of, when shining timeshare systems lay spread across the world like Big Blue mantles beneath the stars. That was when computing may well have not even meant using a monitor, but instead entering data through a kind of typewriter, with your text appearing on paper, and the machine’s output would also appear on that paper. While that was a time where computing was still new and expensive, and people rented time on big mainframe machines with, at the time, ludicrous resources. The IBM System/370 Model 145 had 500 whole kilobytes of memory, and 255 megabytes of disk space. Such a machine would be partitioned out to many users, who each had accounts on it, and would be served by the processor concurrently. And they liked it!
Two covers for BASIC Computer Games, the common later “Microcomputer Edition” and an earlier one.
And before even teletype machines, there were punchcard systems, and the oscilloscope screen on which Tennis For Two was played, but for this post that’s going back a little too far.
This was the time in which David Ahl’s book, BASIC Computer Games*, appeared on store shelves. It was first published in 1973. When I was younger I had a copy of it, given to me by a relative, but it was already a relic by then. I once spotted it on a store shelf, gamely offered for sale despite it being probably around 1991 at the time, a good lifespan in a genre of book nowadays considered disposable. Remember, Pong debuted at Al Capp’s Bar in 1972**. There was a thriving culture of computer gaming even before the first commercial video games were sold.
(* Note 1: While it’s often forgotten now, BASIC is properly written with capital letters. It’s an acronym that stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. That’s not as tortured as, say, “GNU’s Not Unix.”)
(** Note 2: Pong wasn’t the first commercial video game. That was likely the Odyssey, or Nutting Associates’ Computer Space. I don’t want to get into it here. This comment is here largely to satisfy my own obsessive/compulsiveness.)
Super Star Trek. The text of the book indicates that versions of the Star Trek text game existed since “the late sixties.” Remember, the show aired in the late sixties. People were playing Star Trek on computers while Star Trek was airing on television in first broadcast.
BASIC Computer Games, and its sequels More BASIC Computer Games and Big Computer Games, record, as program listings, a couple hundred old computer games and other entertainments much as they existed at the time, which makes it an incredibly important book for software preservation and computer historians, I’d think anyway. It has listings for a version of the “Star Trek” text game that was popular at the time, and that even once inspired a vectorscan arcade game from Sega, as well as a good number of other amusements.
I say game design doesn’t go obsolete, but it’s true that current expectations of what computer programs should do, let alone games, are not met well by the programs in the books. Still, they can be fun to interact with, for a while at least, and a project exists on Github to update all of the programs to a variety of current (I refuse to say modern) programming languages.
You can also obtain the software in .bas files compatible with Vintage BASIC, a reimplementation of classic Microsoft BASIC for current OSes including Windows, Mac and Linux.
Spare Change is an odd little Apple II game from 1983, where the player tries to thwart mischievous creatures who escaped from an arcade game, who are trying to steal quarters from the machines. One of Broderbund’s earlier hits, although it never gained the recognition of Lode Runner.
Such a charming little game
Do you not only understand this, but enjoy reading it? Then this should be very interesting to you.
Spare Change, in addition to its various little features like animated intermissions and customizable difficulty, also had a pretty strong copy protection scheme. These schemes served to prevent casual copying at the time (although cracks of all the popular titles inevitably started making the rounds on BBSes), but also serve to work against software preservation. Spare Change is 40 years old now, and disks fail frequently. There is an available crack, but it’s said to be missing an important feature: it fails to save their high scores to disk.
4am is the famed preserver of classic Apple II software, performed by dint of figuring out their protection and removing it as unobtrusively as possible. His account on Twitter (I refuse to call it X, I don’t even like saying Xbox) made for great reading for people of a technical mind. He isn’t on Twitter any more for, I dunno, some reason, but he still posts his cracks, and his explanations for how they work, to the Internet Archive, under the 4am tag.
All this is to say his crack of Spare Change makes for entertaining reading to one of the right mindset. One of you may have it, so here it is.
The Atari brand has been in so many hands, and been used for so many things (including, most recently, NFTs and hotels) that making sense of it all is maddening. Christ Trotter on the atomicpoet Pleroma instance made a fairly lengthy series of posts laying it all out that, to my eyes, is accurate. He may actually know more about their history than I do, although pride makes me loathe to admit it!
The whole thread is useful, but here’s the first post on it, presented as screenshot because WordPress doesn’t yet support embedding that kind of thing directly. I don’t know why it’s so blurry, that seems to be WordPress again.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Screenshot of Segapede prototype (image from hiddenpalace.org)
In the 90s, there was effectively two Segas, Sega of Japan and Sega of America. Unlike with Nintendo though, where it’s fairly obvious that the Japanese division called the shots, Sega was a little more evenly split. Despite the company mostly being known nowadays for their Japanese productions, Sega was originally an American company, founded in Honolulu making entertainment devices for U.S. military bases. Indeed, SEGA originally stood for SErvice GAmes.
The Japanese branch began to pull out ahead when they started making home computers for that market, but by the time of the Mega Drive/Genesis there was Sega Technical Institute on the American side, which employed some talented developers, including Yuji Naka.
The story of STI is part of that of Segapede, a game created by Craig Stitt. Originally pitched as a Sonic spinoff, it would eventually be cancelled, but not before a demo ROM was created, which saw the light of day for the first time late last year. Not only available is the ROM image itself, but the story of its inspiration, development, and ultimate cancellation, all on its suitably-named home hiddenpalace.org.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Super Mario World is one of the most hacked games of all. There’s a whole website devoted to hacking it, SMWCentral. They do have Yoshi’s Island and Super Mario 64 hacks too, but SMW is the main attraction.
They’ve done a bunch of contests over the years, where different members compete in judged hacking competitions to make hacks to various criteria. In April they wrapped up their second “Questionable Level Design Contest,” QLDC. And the gimmick of the winner is… pretty special.
Please overlooked the glitchy title screen. In this one, the presentation isn’t the main attraction.
A long walkway to the right from the starting location.
What? Is this a troll hack? One that just makes you run everywhere and nothing ever really happens?
Hmm. This screen looks like it’s full of levels, but none of the circles or houses work. The object is to get to that red pipe.
You hold X or Y to run, or, as this screen mentions, don’t hold X or Y to not run. That Pirhana Plant is animated, and if you run into it while it’s in your way, you have to restart the screen. A fun gimmick, sure, but we’re just getting started.
In case you haven’t cottoned to the gimmick yet–there is no actual level. The whole game is played on a series of connected map screens. You’d think not a lot would be possible, but in this hack, Mario can actually “jump” on enemies if his feet touch them. On this screen, Bullet Bills enter from the right, and you have to use the curved paths, along with judicious running, to “stomp” them with the right timing. When you reach the OFF circles to the right you clear the green blocks, and then have to work your way back left to get to the pipe.
And on this screen, the Thwimps jump back and forth, and you have to avoid them as you pass around the screen. If you touch an enemy you don’t “die” so much as get sent back to the start.
Then you get to this screen, which is a remake of a portion of the first level, and you wonder how far they’re willing to go with this gimmick.
As it turns out, they’re (“they” being Faro and MM102) not even close to being done. This level introduces these Stars that, when you press A on them, cause Mario to do a spin jump. This jump, however, actually activates the standard SMW platforming engine. Mario can move around as if he were in a level. Here you have to use that jump to bounce off the Big Boo and land on the other Star, which puts you back into map travel mode and lets you go to the pipe. The following levels make extensive use of this feature, and there’s lots left to explore.
The creators made a playthrough video, embedded below (it’s about nine minutes), but they suggest that you try the hack yourself first. You can do what you want, but it’s a joy discovering how they unveil progressively crazier gimmicks as you go. Consider trying it our yourself first, if you have the mind and means.
From the article, a photo of the inside of an original Pac-Man game. The insides of most arcade games are usually a stark contrast to their externals, even upon release, but time is often unkind to them.
I’ve been working on diversifying our link game a bit, so here’s a more academic article, one with an actual bibliography no less, from the site romchip.org, by Kieran Nolan on restoring arcade machines. I’ll let the link speak for itself this time!
Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth is a Famicom/NES title with a lot of ambition, perhaps too much. Over on his self-named blog Kid Fenris posted a long article on it back in March. It makes it seem a lot more interesting than it otherwise would! We at Set Side B love experiments, successful or failed, and Wurm certainly was one, with shooter, side-scrolling platformer, first-person boss fights and even some visual novel elements. And protagonist lady named “Moby” is searching for her boyfriend named “Ziggy.”
Green-haired Moby wears the kind of outfit you could only find in something inspired by 80s anime.
The post mentions that designer Shouichi Yoshikawa, a.k.a. “Angela,” has an interview up at GDRI. It also mentions that Angela used to have a site devoted to their game, which while gone now has a backup on the Wayback Machine! Sadly the promised English version of the site never materialized.
Also–Kid Fenris mentions he once wrote about Wurm on GameSetWatch. My old stomping grounds!
There are a number of NES games that feel like they’re held together with paperclips and chewing gum. Some of them are almost endearing for their glitchiness. When it comes to janky NES games, a few that I tend to think of are those made by Micronics (who implemented Ghosts N’ Goblins, which has an awful frame rate) and Athena (where one boss has a death animation that causes it to flip through many of the sprites in the game).
A company that usually did a lot better with their internally-developed games was Capcom, makers of Mega Man, 1943, Bionic Commando, and all the Disney Afternoon games from the time, all of which have slick 60 fps update rates and smooth animation. One game they made of which that is definitely not true, however, is NES Strider.
If you’re only familiar with Strider from the beautiful arcade version, you might wonder what even NES Strider has to do with it. It’s not proper to say Famicom Strider, because Capcom never released it in their home territory, perhaps because they were too embarrassed to.
Other than the first stage being set in generally the same fictional location in Russia (even if it doesn’t look at all the same), its story has absolutely nothing to do with it. Jeremy Parish looked at it (and remarked on its glitchiness) in an episode of Metroidvania Works from a couple of weeks ago. Some people, like Kid Fenris of the self-titled blog, actually likes it, although acknowledges its many issues.
Behind the Code, one of the best game internals series on Youtube, had a look at the implementation of NES Strider. It’s an interesting 15 minutes to my taste, but if you want a tl;dr, NES Strider often doesn’t make its framerate target, and instead of slowing the game down as most games do, it plows ahead forward into the next frame, leaving the incomplete data in its update buffer to be copied into the PPU. This causes the individual hardware sprites that compose enemy characters to sometimes have only one of their coordinates updated, or even causing data remaining from previous frames to be copied over.
Why does it does this instead of just slowing the game down? Possibly the coding was so crappy that it would have caused excessive slowdown; the scene chosen as an example in the video has the problem occur when there’s only two basic enemies on the screen in the game’s first area! Not the best engine on the system there Capcom.
