Category: retro

Rings of Saturn

The Rings of Saturn logo, from the site itself

This post isn’t about any game specifically, but rather about an awesome Substack blog, Rings of Saturn, that examines the code of games from what they call the “32-bit era,” around the time of the Saturn to the Playstation 2, which includes the original Playstation, Dreamcast, and Gamecube, with a handful for the Nintendo 64, 3DO, Xbox and even the PSP along the way. They load them up in like Ghidra and search for unpublished codes, they look through demos and prototypes for ways to unlock features (sometimes ones that aren’t present in the finished game) and they make hacks to make unreleased features usable. All are very worthy activities that should be of interest for the kinds of people who would visit Set Side B. (You know who you are.)

A few selected items: a mod for Burning Rangers to play it two-player co-op, playing as Sonic in Christmas NiGHTS Into Dreams, enabling a secret English translation in Kingdom Grandprix, a debug mode in Grandia II, a patch to unlock the entire first Clockwork Knight game in Clockwork Knight 2, a code to unlock some extra cartoon artwork in Cotton Boomerang, extra options in Radiant Silvergun, a cheat code for Parappa the Rapper, and much more!

Really, if you’re a fan of games from this era, you’re almost bound to find something on this site of interest to you. Have a look!

Dealing With Mortal Kombat II’s CPU Players

In the past we’ve linked to Modern Vintage Gamer’s looks into how Mortal Kombat II and Street Fighter II CPU opponents utilize unfair advantages against their players. These games’ code react to player movements far faster than another human could, can activate special moves much faster than humans can because they aren’t limited by move input timing, and in the case of MKII have a random component in whether the player is allowed to do certain things to CPU fighters. It might be worth having a look at the MKII video from that post.

So then, what can the player do? Just because CPU opponents have unfair advantages no human player has doesn’t mean its AI can’t be exploited in certain specific ways. Danny Tsung06 has a 19-minute video demonstrating how to handle the various opponents:

Another thing we’ve linked in the past is instructions on how to activate Ed Boon’s secret developer menu in the first three Mortal Kombat games.

NESHacker on Basic NES Platformer Movement

A 6502 is not a bad little machine, but it does require efficient coding to get decent real-time results. NESHacker dives into basic Mario-style platformer movement in a 10-minute video

The main portion of the video goes into subpixel movement, a term you may have heard speedrunners use. Many NES platformer heroes don’t jump immediately to movement when a control is pressed, but instead increase acceleration, and that acceleration is measured, in the case of Mario, in 16ths of a pixel.

The process of conversion is pretty slick though. It doesn’t use floating point math but fixed point. Mario’s position isn’t stored just in hardware screen coordinates but in a number with four extra bits off the right side. This larger number is what acceleration math is performed on, and when it comes time to position Mario’s sprite matrix (he’s not properly a sprite because he’s made of several), the code divides by 16 by just rolling the bits to the right, which is a very time performant operation on a 6502.

Other useful tricks are explicated, like storing controller states in a single byte (easily done since NES controllers have precisely eight buttons) and jumping. It’s not a general guide into general platformer implementation, but that’s okay, as there already exists a terrific example of that.

Christian Hammond Investigates Faxanadu Internals

Oh we here at Set Side B try to make all kinds of posts, but among my personal favorite kind are finding some deep dive into some aspect of a game’s inner workings and presenting it. These days, for multiple reasons (such as ease of monetization) many of these dives turn out to be Youtube videos, but not always.

Christian Hammond (Bluesky) has begun a series of text articles looking into the specifics of the implementation of Famicom/NES game Faxanadu.

To explain its name, Faxanadu’s name comes from Xanadu, an early JRPG from Japanese computer game maker Nihon Falcom. Falcom didn’t make Famicom games themselves, but they did sometimes license their games to other developers to make Famicom ports of them, or spinoffs. Faxanadu, developed by Hudson Soft, is such a spinoff. It has nothing to do with Xanadu other than being a non-scrolling exploratory platformer. Its name is a combination of “Famicom” and “Xanadu,” you see. While it’s not at all as popular as a Dragon Quest/Warrior, it’s well remembered by many.

Christian disassembled the whole game, and found out that it has three separate binary scripting languages. His series to document and explain them so far has only Part 1, which is here, but the rest are forthcoming soon.

This first part explores what is possible using interaction scripts, or “IScripts,” which are run when the player runs into some object or speaks to an NPC. It’s quite easy to understand. If you have some interested in how these things are built and run, it’s worth it to take a look.

John Romero & id Software Founders Explain Catacomb 3D

Quick post today, just a pointer to a video John Romero posted on his Youtube channel a couple of months ago (17 minutes), where he gathered (well, edited together Zoom video of) the other founders of id Software (back before it was just another cubicle within Bethesda’s, and then Microsoft’s box), explain the creation of their first 3D game, Catacomb 3D.

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.)

Displaced Gamers on Final Fantasy I Combat & Bugs

Displaced Gamers has yet another fascinating “Behind the Code” dive into the workings of an NES game, this time the original Final Fantasy. (30 minutes)

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!

Get Info on TV’s TV and TV Games Encyclopedia

Get Info made a substantial post on a couple of significant pieces of Japanese gaming ephemera, a four hour long program that aired overnight on March 14, 1987 that was basically 100 segments on a variety of games (and other things really), and a book that was released later that was an encyclopedia of gaming from around that time. A lot of it is as inexplicabe as Japanese media can be to non-Japanese speakers, but it’s very interesting as a gaming time capsule from the era. Clips are presented not just from Japanese properties but also games from around the world.

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.

Formatting a C64 Disk In 15 Seconds

Recently Commodore History investigated just how Commodore 1541 disk drives format disks, and why it took them over a minute. It was also an explanation of just what it means to format a floppy disk. We linked that last week.

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.

The KIM-1 Programmer’s Guide to the MOS 6502

The KIM-1, 50 years old as of 2026, was the first 6502-based home computer, designed by the legendary Chuck Peddle and sold by MOS Technologies themselves. (Well, we’re not sure if the Apple I or the KIM-1 was first. Or maybe it was the JOLT? As I’ve said before, there’s always something you’ve never heard of before out there, waiting to make you look like a fool.)

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.)

The cover of the Book itself

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.

The Video Game History Foundation Examines a Famicom Punch-Out Prototype

Frank Cifaldi presents a look at a mysterious prototype of NES Punch-Out!! that’s turned up. It’s only got four working boxers, with Bald Bull missing key moves, but it also has quite a few working features, including the password system. It’s completely silent though. The game that is, not the video (5 minutes).

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.

The Bard’s Tale Diaries

Have you ever wondered what the appeal of a rock-hard, old-school, Wizardry-style, first-person, overly-hyphenated classic CRPG is?

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:

Identifying Samples From Sonic CD’s Soundtrack

With the exception of two or three musicians (They Might Be Giants among them), for the most part I’ve agreed with what Marge Simpson once said: “Music is none of my business.” (Not counting that one episode where it was revealed she had been fangirl at the height of Beatlemania.)

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!