Category: retro

PC-88 Versions of Nintendo Games

It was a weird time. Around the time as the Famicom was just getting started, Hudson Soft struck a deal with Nintendo to release some of their games for the PC-88 Japanese personal computer platform.

Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)

You can tell the page is old because it has a Digg social media button. (Wait, what’s that? They’re trying to revive Digg?) Please excuse the Wayback Machine banner stuck in the middle of the screenshot, it’s an artifact of Firefox’s screenshot tool.

There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)

Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.

Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.

One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!

Strange and Wonderful NEC PC-8801 Games (Wayback Machine)

Leaving Kakariko Village At The Wrong Moment Makes Hyrule Go Crazy

Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.

In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.

In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!

Multilink Monday 12/15/25

Another session of links from my huge For-SSB browser tab group, presented here with minimal comment in the hopes of clawing back a bit of RAM.

1. Fan patches English into Wizardry VI for Saturn.

2. The unreleased web browser for the Gamecube. (8 minutes)

    3. Read Only Memo on a recompilation of Dinosaur Planet, Rare’s N64 game that got reconfigured into Star Fox Adventures on Gamecube, their last game made for Nintendo before Microsoft bought them. (They did make some portable games after that, like It’s Mr Pants for Gameboy Advance and a port of Diddy Kong Racing for the DS.)

    4. Max Fog on Interactive Fiction blog The Rosebush writing on the history of Infocom and the Z-Machine.

    5. A Sonic the Hedgehog romhacking tutorial. (15½ minutes)

    6. Pictochat Online.

    Jamey Pittman’s Pac-Man Grouping Tutorial

    Jamey Pittman is the creator of the foremost document on the workings of Pac-Man ever created, the Pac-Man Dossier. If you’ve never read it, but have any interest in playing classic Pac-Man, then you should go read it immediately. It will make so many things make sense to you.

    Pac-Man has a reputation as a game of patterns, and seems designed in such a way as to enable patterns to work. The only randomness is in the behavior of the ghosts when they’re vulnerable, and even then, if the player has performed the same moves at the same times up to that point in the level, even their vulnerable behavior will be consistent. Its GCC-developed follow-up, Ms. Pac-Man, has the red and pink ghosts move randomly at the start of each board specifically to foil patterns.

    But you don’t have to play Pac-Man as a pattern game. It is possible to play it “freestyle,” like a naive player would, reacting to the ghosts’ movements. You’re unlikely to make it to Pac-Man’s famous kill screen at board 256 that way, but you can still make it pretty far.

    Key to doing that is keeping the ghosts as close to each other as you can. The ghosts are much more dangerous when they’re scattered around you, because they can block off all of your escape routes. Four ghosts piled up on the same spot not only can’t block off other corridors, but their AIs tend to continue to keep them together, at least when they’re far away from Pac-Man. Red and Orange behave identically when they’re at a distance, and Pink’s behavior appear to be more like Red’s the further away from Pac-Man it us. Blue has the most chance of diverging, but often moves the same way anyway.

    Not only does keeping the ghosts clustered make survival easier, but it makes it much easier to eat all of them with a single Energizer. The ghosts only turn blue up to around the 4/6th Key board, but up to that point it’s basically impossible to get the maximum score from every Energizer if one hasn’t managed to herd the ghosts into a single, easy-to-gobble blob.

    That’s where Jamey’s tutorial comes through. It presents a series of situations and techniques for getting the ghosts near each other and moving as one unit, whether it’s for avoiding them or getting the maximum points from an Energizer. It’s a bit much for casual play, but it can be very interesting to see how a true expert goes about doing it. Here, then, is the tutorial (27 minutes):

    The Basement Brothers look at Popful Mail for the PC-88

    Falcom’s Popful Mail is one of those games that takes after classic anime. It’s almost the perfect anime-styled light RPG, with appealing and fun characters on a quest that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It got a good number of ports, and they all have something a bit different about them. In the US we only got the Sega CD version, ported by the prolific-but-controversial Working Designs, but in Japan there was a PC-88 original, and ports to the PC-98, PC Engine CD and Super Famicom. Hardcore Gaming wrote them up here.

    I could go on about its very light RPG elements (there’s no experience system at all), its comedic story, its characters and music, and I will someday. But until then, please be content with what the Basement Brothers had to say about the original PC-88 version of Popful Mail, which is the version for the weakest machine, but still fun. (39 minutes)

    Falcom had developed a reputation for making hardcore, unique and system-heavy RPGs like Dragon Slayer and Xanadu, so Popful Mail was a departure. It was designed to be an early multimedia game, with animations and even voice acting in some versions. This version, however, was distributed on floppy disk, and for a underpowered system, so it couldn’t rely on audio-visual splendor. It still did pretty well for itself, as the Brothers demonstrate.

    It’s always saddened me that Popful Mail was a one-off. It’s a property that seems ripe for sequels and animation, but to my knowledge it never happened. Maybe Falcom will ease their stream of Ys sequels someday and look at updating more of the other games in their history, and maybe then they’ll return to Mail and her cartoony comrades. Here’s hoping.

    Multilink Monday 12/8/25

    The latest installment in my eternal quest to reduce the size of my notes file! Also because a lot of my day yesterday was spent in preparing for a TPUG World of Commodore demonstration of Loadstar Compleat, which I hope to show all of you soon, but meaning that I need something relatively low-effort for today.

    1. Godot Lesson 1: The Basic Basics, a non-video tutorial for getting yourself started with the best Unity alternative.

    2. NESbag, a system for wrapping NES homebrew for immediate play by others without having to set up an emulator yourself, announces two-player support.

    3. A “demake” of Zelda’s Adventure for CDi to make it a much more playable, Link’s Awakening-style game for Gameboy Color.

    4. Along those lines, from Gumpy Function, maker of Grimace’s Birthday (previously), two Simpsons fangames for Gameboy, Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge 2, and the My Dinner with Andre game that Martin was seen playing on an arcade cabinet.

    5. He uses AI-generated images to provide visual interest, which is usually a strike against a link for me, but I know he means well so I’ll give him a pass this time. Youtuber Lupe Darksnout presents a series on getting video to play on a Commodore 64. (playlist link, 48 videos averaging about 17 minutes each, about 10½ hours in all)

    6. Abyssoft on Youtube, Multiple World Record Speedruns Brought Into Question. (18 minutes) There is a sponsored segment that’s about a minute long, here’s a link queued up to after it.

    Video Games 101 Tackles Ocarina of Time

    The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a reputation of being one of the “best” games ever made. Professor Brigands of VG101 recently spent around twelve hours making a video walkthrough of the whole thing, even finding every Heart Piece, and even every Gold Skulltula, despite the fact, as they say frequently, that the reward is in no way worth it. Each video is approximately three hours long; maybe you can have it playing in the background while doing other things.

    First video (beginning to the end of the second dungeon + extras):

    Second video (Jabu-Jabu’s Belly through to the end of the Forest Temple):

    Third video (the Fire Temple, the Water Temple and the fetch quest to get Biggoron’s Sword):

    Fourth video (The Shadow and Spirit Temples and the end):

    Is that not enough? Rival channel U Can Beat Video Games has been churning through all of Final Fantasy VI (a.k.a. III, it’s complicated), having done five videos so far with one left to go, with videos ranging in length between 3⅓ to 4 hours: Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five.

    Nintendo’s Pre-NES Video Games

    Switchaboo on Youtube had a look at video gamethings Nintendo made in the era before people habitually left the spaces out from between words. (14 minutes)

    I didn’t know that Nintendo’s first foray into consoles was making a custom controller for the Odyssey (not the Odyssey 2, the Odyssey), and distributed it in Japan. But I do know that Nintendo’s history extends far back before video games, to making Hanafuda and traditional playing cards, and still makes them to this day, along with Mah Jong, Shogi and Go equipment.

    Restoring an Arcade Vs. Castlevania Machine

    If you know where to look, there are many arcade machine restoration videos on Youtube, whole channels devoted to them. This Halloween-themed video from Electric Starship Arcade is only one of them. It’s mostly about the process of fixing up the cabinet and has very little gameplay, but it does end with a fun sequence where they dress up someone as a vampire and, driven in a hearse, bring him out in a coffin to introduce it! (40 minutes) And if you watch it, it’ll haunt your view history, and influence Youtube into recommending more restoration videos to you, in a suitably spooky fashion. Ooooooo!

    Mechanical Hand-Held Games

    Robin from 8-Bit Show-And-Tell has mentioned Loadstar, the magazine that I am trying to help preserve with the itch.io version of Loadstar Compleat. I say that just to mention anything that might even be slightly considered to be conflict of interest. There, done. All of this said, this post has nothing to do with any of that!

    Before Tiger’s line of cheap handheld mechanical electonic games in the 80s and 90s, there were cheap handheld mechanical wide-up games in the 70s and 80s! These are basically forgotten by most people today, but kids of that age might vaguely remember them, made by companies like Tomy.

    There used to be more websites dedicated to uncovering and preserving them. One that remains to this day is the Handheld Museum, which has an extensive listing of Tomy’s titles.

    Another place you might be able to learn about them, with demonstrations, is Robin’s video on them. (29 minutes)

    Robin shows off a variety of them, including a variety of electric (as opposed to electronic) games. Some weren’t even battery powered, instead having to be wound up via a dial on the back, but all but the last of the games in this video run on batteries. One had to be repaired on camera. The first game is the earliest, a solitaire version of poker, dating to 1971; for context, Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was made in 1972.

    It just goes to show that personal gaming was something that existed even before video games. It was something in the air at the time, and even if Pong hadn’t happened (or the earlier Computer Space, or the Odyssey, or even prior games made at universities and laboratories), it seems evident that it would have happened shortly anyway. It was an idea that was bound to happen eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.

    WIP Super Mario 64 Port to Playstation

    File this under blasphemous acts of hackery, reported on by Video Game Esoterica (Youtube, 10 minutes) and Time Extension, a super-deluxe techno-nuts person going by malucard is trying to port Super Mario 64 to the original Playstation. They have a GitHub repo containing their efforts so far.

    The growing number of fan-made decompilations of classic games is what make these hilarious affronts to the very idea of console exclusivity possible. But while ports of such games to PC platforms allow for much greater visual clarity and the resolution of long-standing deficiencies, this is almost a celebration of the idea of technical limitations—and I, for one, am all in favor. But you have to understand, I’ve given serious thought to the idea of picking up an old CP/M machine and coding on it in assembly. I’m crazy pants, is what I’m saying, and on things of this nature you probably shouldn’t be listening to me.

    Just look at the footage in that video, and how it’s more glitch than game. It seems impossible that it’ll ever run like the N64 original, but we can dream, can’t we?

    Multilink Monday 11/23/25

    Taking another opportunity to get a few tabs out of my browser….

    1. BlipForge retro sound effect generator (itch.io, $8), for when bfxr (web, free) isn’t enough.
    2. Luanti, open-source voxel game engine, for realizing the Minecraft of your dreams.
    3. galacticstudios on the other Star Trek game. The default Star Trek game was a 1971 mainframe game that had a version published in David Ahl’s classic 101 BASIC Computer Games. This game is different from that, it seems.
    4. The Plush Girls Dozen is a collection of fantasy console games; that’s games for fantasy consoles, not fantasy games for consoles. 10 are for PICO-8, two for TIC-80.
    5. The GameBrew emulation wiki. (non-Fandom!)
    6. The Racketboy emulation site.
    7. I linked yesterday about an instance of the Gigantes legendary machine battle in Kirby Air Riders City Trial. Here’s a full game of it, from Gigantes’ point of view. (8 minutes) I hope this doesn’t become a frequent thing, it might be fun once in a while but not if every other game turns into a huge boss battle.