Category: retro

Classic Mac Gaming’s History of Dark Castle

MARCHintosh is almost over, so here’s a short doc (13 minutes) on one of the most misunderstood games for pre-OS/X Macs, Dark Castle.

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.

Sonic CD “I’m Outta Here” Weirdness

By now lots of people know, in classic Sonic the Hedgehog games, if you wait a few seconds without touching a control, Sonic will look at you and tap his foot impatiently.

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!

A Way To Make A PC Startup With The Pokemon PC Noise

isithran on Mastodon came up with a grub boot line that can make your PC’s speaker (or whatever substitute it may have) play the classic Pokémon PC startup noise (3 seconds). A demo can be tested here. “PC” obviously stands for “Pokémon Container.”

This sound right here.

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.

Inglebard Gaming Reports On Obscure Game Sequels

The games mentioned here (17 minutes) really are obscure, including two sequels to Green Beret, a.k.a. Rush’n Attack, one for the arcade. I’ve only heard of one of those before, and vaguely Heart of the Alien. I’m working on a lot of Caves of Qud stuff for the coming days and weeks, hopefully things like this can help tide you over until then.

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)

White_Pointer Gaming Examines All the SNES Graphic Modes

White_Pointer Gaming’s series examining how different graphic tricks were pulled off in 8- and 16-bit games has been great, and now they have a video going over all eight (Modes 0-7) of the SNES background modes. (42 minutes)

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.

MARCHintosh 2026

I feel like I’m a bit late on this one, but there’s still two weeks of March left. Some crazy wonderful people every year devote the month of March to classic Macintosh stuff, both hardware and software, and primarily things before the release of OS/X in 2001. The original MacOS traces its lineage all the way back to 1984’s original Macintoshes, and existed as Apple’s primary OS for 17 years. Now it’s been 24 years since the switchover, but a lot of people still like the system that served as Apple’s mainline OS for so long.

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

Sundry Sunday: Earthbound x They Might Be Giants Musical Mashup

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.

The History of Game Player’s Magazines

The Video Game History Foundation has a breezy 3½ minute video about one of the less-remembered magazines of the NES-through-Playstation era, Game Player’s, with the apostrophe-S at the end. But it wasn’t just one magazine. Over ten years they put out magazines under thirteen different titles, and surprisingly, one still survives today as PC Gamer, a fact of its history that even their own website seems not to know.

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.

Time Extension Rates All the Shining Games

The Shining series, published by Sega but developed by lots of different people, is all over the map regarding gameplay styles. I’d say that more people have heard of the second game, the great Shining Force (it’s sort of like lighter Fire Emblem with town scenes and no permadeath) than the first one, Shining in the Darkness (a first-person dungeon step-oriented crawl with premade characters). All the games are set in a fantasy world (but not all necessarily the same fantasy world) and have a cartoony art style that helps keep things lively, but beyond the dungeon crawls and tactical battles there have been Diablo-style combat, action RPGs, Zelda-style exploration with bump combat, more general strategy and even a fighting game.

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….

(Axe smashes through door.) Heeeeres… Ashley Day! Does Stephen King know of these games?

8-Bit Show And Tell Revives Satoru Iwata’s VIC-20 Easter Egg

This link’s five years old, and itself came five years after Iwata, beloved programmer president of Nintendo, suddenly passed away. Early in Iwata’s former employer HAL Laboratory’s history, they made games for Commodore 8-bit microcomputers. I myself own a C64 cartridge of HAL’s Pinball Spectacular, a variation upon Namco’s arcade pinball/Breakout mixture Gee Bee. It’s known that Iwata made at least one game for the VIC-20, a Galaxian clone called Star Battle.

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.

Classic MacPaint Art

From July of last year, the blog called decryption posted a bunch of wondrous examples of 1-bit MacPaint art from the early days of the platform. MacPaint had a distinctive aesthetic: tiny dots, each either white or black, favored the use of dithering to create makeshift grayscale. (Note: one image is NSFW.) Here’s a few selections, but there’s lots more where these came from!

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

“Welcome to the EarthBound CuLt”

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.