Gauntlet is one of the best games that Atari Games made, and is certainly one of the best known, but it’s interesting how little even people who played it know about it.
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.
We’ve linked to Iftkyro’s work before here, he created the mystifying (if you know much about how the C64’s video hardware works) demo Nine, where a system that should only be able to move eight sprites around appeared to display nine. How was that done? As it turns out, with great difficulty, and not a little sleight-of-hand!
Iftkyro’s back with another impossible demo, Quondam Tunneling (4½ minutes, download), which appears to display an animated sequence progressing down a 3D tunnel.
In brief, the tunnel itself only has four frames of animation. The demo keeps multiple fonts throughout most of memory, which are flipped between every eight scan lines, that basically allows it to display arbitrary graphics with each character row. The C64 doesn’t have quite enough memory to do that with all the rows in the full vertical extent of the animation, so another trick is used, taking advantage of palette swapping and the C64’s multicolor mode to store two different possible rows in each font. The horizontal scrolling is done by moving the characters that make up each row left and right in a typical C64 scrolling way; vertical scrolling is done by adjusting which fonts are used as the raster line descends the screen.
Of course nowadays we have computers that can display largely arbitrary graphics throughout the whole screen. Processor power is great enough now that we can even do this in software, but additional to that most desktop hardware has powerful hardware graphics included. Even if you don’t have a bespoke graphics card, major processors from Intel and AMD include substantial graphics capabilities built into the CPU. Such is the power of these chips, it’s easy to forget how difficult these things were in the microcomputer era.
Essentially all of the consumer computers from the C64’s era, and many years before and after it, split the system up into two major parts, the CPU and the graphics hardware. The very earliest home computers, like the Altair and the KIM-1, didn’t have graphics hardware at all without substantial hacks, because they weren’t intended to display their output on a video screen. That was really the innovation that opened computing up to the masses. Until monitor or TV output was possible, home computers were basically little more than glorified calculators to most people.
Having the CPU and graphics chips interact with each other was one of the most difficult parts of the design of these machines. Consoles like the Famicom/NES could give each of these two parts what amounted to its own memory, which simplified system design and helped to make possible its graphics power, but it also meant that programming it was more difficult. You can see this in the glitchiness of some early NES hardware (like in Displaced Gamers’ recent video on the jack of NES Commando, as linked here).
To properly use the NES’s PPU, graphics changes could only be made at a certain time each frame, during “VBLANK,” a time when the PPU wasn’t actively drawing the picture. That limited what changes could be made each frame. There were some tricky ways around this, but they all involved adding extra hardware onto the cartridge, increasing manufacturing costs. Home computers used their tilemaps for text display, meaning tile changes had to be less restricted of timing.
This meant some weird compromises were needed. On the C64, the CPU and the VIC-II operated asynchronously, opening up the potential for bus conflicts if they both tried to access memory at the same time. The VIC-II actually has the ability to put the CPU to sleep when it needs access. The C64’s designers rated the consistency of the video signal as a more important priority than the chip’s processor itself.
Even if the graphics hardware could display arbitrary bitmapped images, manipulating them quickly was difficult. The C64’s bitmap screen takes up 8K of memory. At 1 megahertz, the 6510 doesn’t have nearly enough time to update every byte in one video frame. In the following generation of machines, the Amiga was a lot more capable, but through the use of specialized hardware, its copper with its flexible video modes, and its blitter which could move memory around more rapidly.
That explains why, as Iftkyro states, that Amiga demos can generally do this kind of tunnel effect, but the Commodore 64 requires using a very specific memory layout, and rapid switching between fonts and graphics banks, to do something that superficially resembles it.
Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is back, with an under-the-hood look at another NES Capcom game, following their examinations of Ghosts & Goblins and Strider, links are to our previous pointers to their peerless product.
G&G was implemented by popular early NES anonymous developer and target of player recrimination Micronics, but Commando can’t use them as an excuse, as it was developed in-house at Capcom. They were still learning the ropes of the NES at the time (Strider has no such excuse), and it shows. Displaced Gamers thinks that the game was shipped while the programmers were still working on optimizing it. As they do sometimes, DG implemented their own optimizations, improving the game substantially. You can see the product of their work in a 31-minute video they made about it, here. There is a substantial amount of 6502 assembly code involved, but if you skip around I think you might be able to get the gist of why the glitches happen, and how Displaced Gamers fixes them.
As was often the case with your jankier NES games, the scroll stutters and character chaos were caused by the game failing to make its VBLANK timing targets. Thing is, despite the glitches, NES Commando is arguably the best version of the game! Characters sometimes disappear from the screen and backgrounds turn into garbage, but there’s so many cool secrets and things to find in it that I can forgive Capcom for it.
Note that Displaced Gamers doesn’t release patches with their fixes, preferring to focus on making videos. Their code is presented on-screen though, so it’s possible for others to insert the changed programming on their own. I hope someone does this soon, as a fixed version of NES Commando would be nice to play.
These days writing a command-line OS for 8-bit or 16-bit era computers is almost an old trick, but GNO/ME (any relation to GNOME is purely accidental) has the difference of both having Unix-like features like signals, pipes and multitasking, while also having been written back in the day, in the 90s. Author Jawald Bazyar shows it off here (26 minutes):
The story also includes a story of the author’s teenage dialup exploration, and stumbling upon a Unix system without a password on its root account, and other such young computing adventures.
GNO/ME can be obtained, for running in an emulator or on bare metal, here, if that’s your idea of a good time.
I’m a bit late to the trough on this one, but it’s worth calling back to the Video Game History Foundation’s recent release of over 100 ROMs and other data from the Sega Channel, that short-lived service that allowed subscribers with a model peripheral to play downloaded games over a cable TV line. It was kind of like a terrestrial version of Nintendo’s Satellaview service, but also one that wasn’t locked to Japan.
Some of these games were never released outside of the Sega Channel, and the VGHF also has unreleased prototypes for public perusal through their own archived collection and an association with Gaming Alexandria. Two particular finds are a hitherto undiscovered variant of a Garfield game and a Genesis Flintstones game that, at a glance, seems to be based off of the John Goodman movie. An abandoned project also in the collection is a Sega Genesis web browser, which would have been quite a thing to see back then. Notably, Gaming Alexandria’s torrent of the complete data is only 147 megabytes, which isn’t such a large download all told.
Image from the VGHF’s site. This would have seen release probably around 1999. For reference, the Sega Saturn and Playstation were released in 1994, and the Nintendo 64 was released in 1996.
The VGCF prepared a 58-minute promo video for their project here, with commercials and other content that are, ah, very nineties in style.
As an aside, I was shocked to see the company General Instrument come up early in this video. Weren’t those the people who made chips for pre-VCS dedicated game consoles back in the 70s? As it turns out, yes they were (PDF link)!
Did you know there are seven of them? Really! Super Mario World has way more moons than you need to win the game, by a large margin, but it still feels special to find one of these secret collectables.
MarMax Gaming points out all their locations in this video (10 minutes). There’s not a huge numbers of reasons to get them all, Super Mario World practically throws extra lives at you, but you still might want to know how to find them. Well, this is how. Here:
There was once a time when Compute’s Gazette, the Commodore 64 type-in magazine, was nearly the center of the computing world.
An important source of low-cost computer software from the age before the internet, Compute’s Gazette distributed a variety of software, including a couple of games each issue. They also distributed Speedscript, an important early word processor, which was one of their biggest hits. But for kids, the games were the most important thing.
The C64 Appreciation Society recently typed in the early CG game The Frantic Fisherman, and made a fifteen minute video demonstrating the process and the game. Remember, while you could order a 5¼” disk with all of an issues programs on it, most people who wanted to use them had to sit down in front of their machine and type on line after line of code. It often took hours, and even with error checking software like The Automatic Proofreader and MLX to help, the danger of typos was great.
The Frantic Fisherman is not a terrific game. It’s really simple, just a matter of moving your fisherperson to the right place and either swinging your club or raising your umbrella. You can select the speed, but it doesn’t get faster naturally as you play. But it’s a good demonstration of what magazine type-in games from the time were like. Take a look, and travel back in time.
I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.
Yesterday they broke their silence with an examination of the startup routines of arcade Galaxian, Teddy Boy, Joust 2, Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. It’s “only” 41 minutes, but it’s hugely informative of the necessities of how and why arcades games go about arcading:
I will summarize. The main task an arcade machine must do upon startup is test as much of the hardware as it is able and confirm that it’s operational. The main part of this is testing the various memory types comprising the machine’s storage systems: audio, video and work RAM, and program and graphics ROM. Not just to test them, but to stop operation and alert the operator if something is awry. The garbage often shown on-screen on powerup is a direct result of writing and reading 0s and 1s to and fr0m every bit in the video RAM. The system must also check the contents of the ROM, which is usually done by adding all the values in each bank and comparing them to a known total, literally called a “checksum.”
It’s a fine explainer, even if they didn’t cover my personal favorite game startup, that of Twinbee and Gradius with the Bubble Memory system . The storage media of the game was unreliable unless it had physically warmed up, so when turned on it would play music while the game was making itself presentable, known fondly as the Morning Music. I posted about this way back in 2022! Here it is again. It would be an excellent tune to set a wake-up alarm on a cellphone. Just saying.
What I remember doing is working hard on a post proclaiming to the world the existence of a weird offshoot of the Pac-Man universe called Packri Monster. I wrote it, and I saved it (I believe) so it would be posted on the morning of January 16th.
Well, I just had a look and instead of the post I thought I had scheduled, there was just an empty shell, a title to an empty page. Even the name “Packri Monster” was misspelled. How embarrassing!
But what’s even more embarrassing is that I found out what I had written before had a notable factual inaccuracy, so I’m kind of glad it didn’t get out in that form.
Let’s remedy all of these things right now.
The Backstory & Coleco Pac-Man
Namco made the original Puck-Man, in Japan. Bally-Midway licensed it, changed the name to Pac-Man to avoid people messing with the P in the title, and that was when Pac-Man became a worldwide mega-hit. At the time game rights tended to get portioned off separately to consoles, home computers and dedicated handhelds. While (in)famously Atari locked up the console and (through Atarisoft) home computer rights to Pac-Man, the handheld rights went out to a variety of places.
Notably Coleco made (relatively speaking) a respectable tabletop version of Pac-Man, doing the best they could with its discrete graphic elements. You can play a recreation of that here. (Note: use WASD to control the game, the arrow keys are for Player 2.)
Coleco Pac-Man is interesting as a game in itself. Its box confidently asserts that it “sounds and scores” like the arcade game, of which I assure you neither is true. Its background noise is an annoying drone; while it usually takes two boards to reach 10,000 points in the arcade and earn the sole extra life, it took me five on my test play of Coleco Pac-Man. Even so, it’s the best handheld or tabletop version of Pac-Man from the time.
Because all of the LED graphic elements of Coleco Pac-Man’s are discrete, pre-made images, they had to take certain liberties with the in-game art. Pac-Man is drawn permanently facing left; alternate spaces on the board depict him with mouth open and closed. The dot image is repurposed as one of the ghosts’ eyes. Energizers are red, so when a ghost passes by one of those spaces one of its eyes, too, turns red. Ghosts don’t show up in different colors to identify their personalities. Each contains a Pac-Man graphic themselves, which isn’t illuminated when they are vulnerable. All of these elements are repeated throughout the board, visible dimly when inactive, and lit brightly when intended to be used as a game element.
I maintain that Coleco tabletop Pac-Man is playable. The simulation linked above has a flaw, you can’t hold down a direction to take a corner early like you could in the arcade, you have to press a key at the moment you sail past an intersection if you want to take it. But even in this form, it’s arguably a better game, in playability, than Atari 2600 Pac-Man. It sold 1.5 million units after all, despite coming out after.
It was a time when it wasn’t uncommon for companies to make ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) that could play one or more games, which they would license to other companies. General Instruments made a number of these for dedicated consoles (here’s a catalog of their products), playing a number of games, including Pong and Tank clones.
One such ASIC was made by Bandai, the same company that decades later would merge with Pac-Man creator Namco itself. It was made for a handheld that Bandai themselves would produce called Packri Monster.
Packri Monster as a Game
It’s an interesting little machine. Like Coleco Pac-Man, it uses discrete images for its graphics, which have to be mixed together in various ways to satisfy all of its play requirements.
Note the yellow letters on the package: PACK MAN. It’s obviously intended to be a fly-by-night knockoff, from the very company that would later merge with Pac-Man’s creator!
Differences are many. The maze is much smaller, the ghosts (“Bogeys”) are limited in number to three, and there’s only two “power foods,” in the upper corners of the maze.
The lack of one entire ghost makes sense, given the smaller size of the game. But it turns out there’s another knockoff of Pac-Man, with an even smaller maze, and a bizarre limitation. It’s the game I had originally mistaken for Packri Monster, and I wish I knew more about this variant, because it’s fairly widespread.
Mystery Handheld Pac-Man Variant #3
This version is probably best known as the basis of Tomy’s handheld Pac-Man game, in the appealing yellow case.
Tomy Puckman, using the original Japanese name and character art! Image from The Old Robots Web Site.
A simulation of Tomy Pac-Man is playable in MAME, and additionally can be found on the Internet Archive in playable form. It’s a simpler game than the Coleco version, and like Packri Monster tops out at three ghosts, starting at level four.
Especially notable about this version is its extraordinary difficulty, and dare I say, unfairness. There’s only 34 discrete places in the maze that Pac-Man can even be at, and two, later on three, of those places are going to contain ghosts at a time. From two to four locations can be threatened (“in check”) by the ghosts at any moment, for unlike arcade Pac-Man, these ghosts are more prone to reversing direction whenever they want. At the start of a board ghosts are prone to behaving randomly, so you can’t even devise patterns to ensure your safety. The Energizers become essential tools for survival, and expire rapidly, so you’re unlikely to ever eat more than two ghosts with one.
This is the only version of 80s handheld Pac-Man that I know of that has fruit. Graphic limitations mean that it’s always going to be cherries, but the points advance to 400 pts. per fruit on level four, where it becomes an essential component of your score. One extra life is awarded at 2,000 points.
But the weirdest thing about this version… since, like in all these versions, Pac-Man is stuck permanently facing left, and the dots are set between Pac-Man locations in this version, the unknown designer of Tomy Pac-Man decided that the player can only eat dots and Energizers when traveling left. The game isn’t about visiting every location in the maze, but visiting every dot when traveling in the right, that is left direction!
So if you’re fleeing from left-to-right, you’ll never eat any dots. It influences your travel significantly, and you’ll unavoidably often have to double back over dots to satisfy Pac-Man’s directional digestion.
When you pass level five, you get told: “good“. I don’t know if any later four-letter message await you. There aren’t enough elements for “wow”.
Like Packri Monster, Tomy version of Pac-Man’s got licensed out, but in an unusual format: at the basis for an LCD watch Pac-Man game from Nelsonic. Sum Square Stories shows off this version here. (8 minutes). There’s some substantial differences: it seems easier, scores much lower, and starts you out against only one ghost. But it retains Tomy Pac-Man’s most distinctive quirk, that eating can only be done when going west.
Why does this version of Pac-Man do that? To make the game harder? I have no clue at all. Can anyone enlighten me as to the reason?
Made in 1995 but not released until 2001, it’s really something. That is, it’s a thing, and there is some of it. Not only are the effects and acting somewhere beyond the line of rationality, it looks like it’s barely playable, even on the easiest difficulty. Imagine plunking down $50 for this in 2001 for your obsolete Sega CD, out of production for five years.
Huh…. on further reflection, that actually sounds awesome! The Playstation 2 had been released by that point! It’s certainly memorable, although I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it for purposes of playing it unironically.
Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archeology Documentary is a 166-minute, that’s approaching three hours long, documentary about the effort to recover the source code of the Williams arcade classic, made by SynaMax.
SynaMax also made a modified version of the game that makes the notoriously difficult arcade game easier in various ways, in interesting ways.
I’ve been watching Awful Block on AGDQ, so that’s all I have for you today. Hopefully that’ll hold you over, although I suggest that you might want to watch AGDQ too, while it lasts.
Interactive Fiction blog Renga in Blue reports that a rare variant of classic Adventure, that was playable on Compuserve for many years and only went down when their game offerings went offline in the mid 90s, has been recovered and made playable online.
Promo image for this version of Adventure from Regna in Blue. You know it’s an adventure game in the70s & 80s when there’s a bunch of mostly naked people in the art.
It’s called Adventure 751 in reference to the number of available points there are to find. The post in turn links to Arthur O’Dwyer’s article on this version, and other versions, which seem to contain substantial added content from the original Crowther & Woods version.
It’s playable, but requires a lot of effort to get there, including compiling a PDP10 emulator and loading a disk image into it. I wish VCFMW wasn’t months behind me now, it’d have been a blast to see if someone there had access to a working PDP10, and if the game could have been transferred onto it!
As O’Dwyer mentions, there are plenty of games from this era that are just completely, utterly lost, with practically no chance of recovery. And even versions like this, that can technically be played, still hang on by just a thread. The people who created them often don’t have accessible archives, and the institutions who hosed them rare seem interest in preserving them. It’s a sorry state indeed, but at least there are a few survivals like this one.
