Microsoft’s Evil Quotient (EQ) has fluctuated over the years. On the average it was trending down for a while, but their sponsorship of OpenAI, and their ruining of Windows 11 and forcing many people to buy new machines to use it, have caused it to shoot right back up again.
But they have made two significant historical contributions to open source software recently. Back in September they open-sourced the original version of Microsoft Basic, which was partly written by Bill Gates himself as a teenager. Here’s the announcement on Microsoft’s Open Source blog, and here’s the GitHub repository with the code. It’s worth noting that Bill Gates was long vocal against the principles of free code sharing, and his arguments in favor of commercialization of computer software are partly responsible for our current capitalist hellscape, but I guess better very late than never, eh what?
More recently, as in the 20th of this month, Microsoft announced that they were officially opening the source code for the three Zork games. The copyright for them passed into their holding by their acquisition of Activision. If you have a time machine, it’d be a fun trick to go back to the founding of Activision and tell them about the later history of their company, although in doing so you might cause them to give up their efforts in despair.
It must be said that Microsoft didn’t publish the source code to the Zork games; instead, they gave their official blessing to Jason Scott and the Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve it. They did that by adding documents to the GitHub repositories for Zork I, Zork II and Zork III. The source code takes the form of ZIL files, code written in the Zork Implementation Language to be compiled into object files compatible with Infocom’s Z Machine interpreter, so if you want to understand what that means, I suggest Andrew Plotkin’s introduction, What Is ZIL Anyway?
(Edit: changed stylization of the name of the system so it’s not all-caps.)
I was sure I had posted about this before, I mean I had to have. It’s such a cool bit of gaming history, never less than a bit obscure, but still, incredibly, has multiple websites devoted to it today. While waiting to binge on Kirby Air Riders, I figured I’d work off some of my indie KARma (heh) with this post about something that could not possibly be more different.
I’m talking about Eamon, an Apple II text adventure/RPG system with ports to other platforms (there was a not much used C64 version, and a PC/MS-DOS version with a bit more uptake), but was biggest on Apple II.
Eamon itself isn’t a single game, but is more like a family of games, each created to a certain specification. The closest thing that Eamon has to being at its center is the Master Disk, which is a character creation tool and a starter adventure. The idea is, you create and customize a character using the Master Disk, which saves your character and allows you to take them into other adventures, written by others.
If you remember me talking about Dungeon (from Loadstar issue #74 and others), it’s the same kind of idea, but from far earlier, and a lot more freeform. Dungeon had creation tools and a game engine. Eamon adventures were BASIC programs written from scratch, that modified the character file. Your in-game surrogate was really at the mercy of whatever horrors the adventure writers had in mind. If you feel a mild chill of existential horror at the idea, that’s because you live after decades of internet culture has trained you to recoil in fear that a software author could do just anything. It requires a degree of trust on the part of the user. Of course, Eamon adventures varied in quality and fairness. You have to expect that even your best characters could get pasted by a level 1,000 Tarrasque right as an adventure begins. Of course, smart people made backups of their character disk; in a chaotic realm like this, it’s a lot less cheating than basic prudence.
I promised links to websites. Here they are.
There’s Eamon Remastered, which is a web-based recreation with many recreations of classic games. With it, you can create a character which is saved to the website, then put it through the options on the Master Disk, and then can send them through the adventures, without having to get an emulator working or anything. If you just want to try it, that’s probably the best.
First off, you should probably try the Eamon Remastered web-base recreation, which has a fair number of adventures to play. Here is its manual.
After you create your character (if you’re playing the Apple II original, make sure to follow directions in town, as the game is positively gleeful about killing newly-made characters), you’ll want to buy a weapon and some armor. Advancement in Eamon is not of the level-based D&D style, instead characters advance by doing. When you attack with a weapon, you might improve in your ability to use it. When you’re struck by an attack, you might improve in your use of armor. It lacks the “dopamine hit” (I hate that term) of gaining a level, but I think this is quite a more realisticm, and dare I say, better, method of character advancement. It’s more like the Runequest/Call of Cthulhu/Basic Role-Playing system, where most of a character’s ability is encoded within a number of individual skills. Though it’s a lot more gradual, it also means that characters are a lot more individual.
When you play it, you’ll find that it works basically like Infocom adventures did. Since each Eamon game is a program to itself, things could work very differently between them, but I think most of them tried to adhere to some shared conventions.
The “Beginners Cave” adventure is the intended first experience with EAMON. It provides you with some basic treasure, opponents and advancement. It is quite possible for a new character to die there, so treat this adventure with care. I found that there’s some quirks. “take [item]” tends not to work; “get [item],” however, does. “attack [monster]” can be used to attack in melee. There is a button, by the input box, that you can click for a list of available commands.
I don’t know if this is true of every adventure, but to get away from a battle you’re currently in, it won’t do to move out of it, if you don’t want to fight you should use the “flee” command, although monsters can follow you anyway if they choose. Flee sends you to the previous room you were in. If the monster that was menacing you chooses to follow, then I don’t know what else to do than just keep attacking and hope for the best.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Eamon myself, so I must leave you to your own devices for furthering your adventuring career. Good luck!
The Amiga line of computers from classic Commodore are rightly revered, but they did have their limits. Infamously, the people at id Software claimed that, despite all its custom chips, Wolf3D and Doom weren’t possible on it, and it’s true that in the time since no one has managed to make games like those on stock Amiga without some pretty major drawbacks. It’s been said that the lack of those foundational first-person shooters were really what caused PCs to be seen as gaming machines. From there, the fact that you could use one machine for both work and play arguably paved the way for the Windows hegemony of the current day.
But let’s not forget that Amigas were quite capable in other ways, and a recent technical feat has demonstrated this: the creation, by someone called reassembler, of a nearly arcade-perfect of Sega’s arcade hit Outrun (itch.io). Outrun was amazing to see in action at the time, and it’s still pretty awesome to watch today. It used Sega’s “Super Scaler” hardware to push up to 128 huge sprites per frame. The Amiga, by contrast, only has eight hardware sprites, and they’re not that different from those on Commodore’s 8-bit computers really. Where the Amiga excelled was using its blitter, a way to rapidly modify memory using custom circuitry, to simulate sprites.
Let’s not be too harsh on Probe’s port, as it was written for earlier Amigas. The new port requires the AGA graphics set and a 68030 processor, meaning the earliest machine that could run it was the Amiga 4000.
reassembler has made a video explaining the optimizations he made to get the game running so smoothly. (16½ minuites) I eat this kind of thing up. Here’s hoping it’ll be a filling meal for you too!
I’ve got a huge backlog of things to post about, so once a week I’m going to just dump a few of them into a post, preferably on a Monday without much discussion of the contents, just to get them out of my notes. I figured I’d do a new pixel art banner for this idea later, for now let’s get to the links!
TToOVG is the initialism I’m trying out for Drew Mackey’s blog Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and they have an excellent post up about Mario’s death animation, in fact the death animation of lots of platformer characters, where the fall off the screen.
They turn to face the player, as if acknowledging for the first time that there’s a space alongside the strictly 2D in-profile world through which he traveled before the Nintendo 64 existed, and leaps out like an ant escaping an ant farm. Like this:
Image from linked blog (there, however, it’s animated)
Mario isn’t the only character to die this way. Other faller-deathers include Milon, the Doki Doki Panickers, Wonder Boy, Master Higgins, the Mice Mickey and Minnie, Little Nemo, Kid Dracula, Kirby, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Scrooge McDuck, who really should be able to afford a more unique animation.
Think about how odd it is that so many games use this leaping out of the screen idea, and that we rarely question it. Then go read the post, where they interrogate the idea even further.
Isn’t it the way? I made a Halloween post on Castlevania games, including the various videos and pages friend-of-the-blog Jeremy Parish has done on that beloved series, but wouldn’t you know it? That very day, after my post here went live, he released a new video on one of the most beloved Castlevania games, Rondo of Blood.
It might be a bit late for Halloween posts, but isn’t Halloween something we hold in our hearts year long? If we don’t, we should. Here’s that video, which is pretty long by his standards at 25 minutes:
And just yesterday he published another new video about an appropriately spooky game, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, which as it turns out was ported by Yuji Naka himself! (19 minutes)
Hello! John “rodneylives” Harris here. Let me quickly explain this before I get into it.
I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)
But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.
So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.
2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.
3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.
From “Kin no Tori,” or “The Golden Bird,” an anime movie. This alchemist witch character and her cat-bat minions are so much fun!
It’s Halloween today! Boo! I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean it enthusiastically! Boo, I say!
Growing up I was never a big fan of Halloween, other than the opportunity to get candy. I never wore a costume out. This has changed a bit in recent years, I still don’t dress up but I do try to observe the season. Today I’m running a video marathon of various things over on cytu.be. If you know me, you might know where to look to find it, if you’re interested in such things, but this isn’t really the place for it.
While waiting for trick or treaters, here’s a few vids to help you pass the time.
MrMatthews reviews all the Gameboy Castlevania titles (29m), a collection that rates from pretty good to abysmal. But that’s not what he says, he pretty much likes them all, even Adventure and Legends.
If your tastes run a bit more academic, Jeremy Parish has some dives into the Castlevania games: the original (16m) II: Simon’s Quest (15½m), Super IV (17m) and Circle of the Moon (23m). He hasn’t done III yet it seems. His old design discussions of the NES Castlevania games at anatomyofgames.com are still up, marred a bit by the fact that the site’s been hacked to host links to casino sites. Earlier this month Jeremy appeared on the Still Loading podcast to talk about the ‘Vainia, which you can listen to on the site, or on Youtube (1h33m). The embeds below are of the original and the podcast:
To finish off, an early Sundry item, TerminalMontage’s “Something About Castlevania” animation (4m). This is basically Simon Belmont’s whole personality: violence.
Another arcade classic strategy rundown, and again c0ncerning Donkey Kong. As the video rightly notes, the Springs board, a.k.a. Elevators, is most devoted players’ greatest barrier to playing to the kill screen, and even pros mess it up sometimes. I think it’s the worst part of the game, personally. Donkey Kong is great, says I, because it’s open to multiple strategies, while the later Elevators boards have to be finished a specific way, all because of those springs. That way is what this video (4m) is about.
Sadly the video has been made non-embedable, so it’s up to you to follow the link, if you care. The video encapsulates information on donkeykongforum.net (which it mislinks). That link is some hardcore geekery, of the kind beloved to Set Side B’s cadre of pixelated aliens, so please take a look.
Image from donkeykongforums.net.
Here’s the basics, in text form. Donkey Kong gets more difficult over the course of five “levels.” These are different from “boards,” a.k.a. “racks” or “screens.” In the corner of the screen there’s a notice, “L=X” where X is some number. That’s the Level. It goes up by one every time you finish a Rivets board.
The problem is, starting with Level 2, the spots at which the springs hit the ground is slightly randomized. The final climb up to Pauline’s platform is super dangerous, since Mario is vulnerable the whole way. Level 4 is the hardest difficulty for the springs on Elevators, and you have to handle it a very specific way: climb up to the first safe spot, wait for a spring that comes out bouncing at a specific location (near DK’s right foot) then running to another safe spot, then waiting for another specific spring speed to rush over and up the ladder.
So go forth and conquer the elevators, and as Coily the Sprite reminds us:
I had thought about doing this as part of a Romhack Thursday, but I didn’t get it together in time for yesterday. And anyway, it’s not a hack of another game, but a homebrew title for the Genesis/Mega Drive. And it’s quite good!
While it has a recreation of the original Q*bert, the main attraction to Mega Q*bert is Mega Mode, which adds a lot of new elements to the game. It takes inspiration, not just from arcade Q*bert, but from Konami’s Q*bert for NES and the underrated Q*bert 3 for SNES. It even borrows bits of Q*bert creator Jeff Davis’ own unreleased arcade sequel, Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert: Q*bertha returns from that game, a chaser character that can change cube colors herself. Later on, as in FHMCQ, that are levels where Slick and Sam change cubes to an unsolvable color, and only Q*bertha can return them to play.
Some other new elements, joining the balls and baddies of the arcade games:
The Red Balls have tiny fast and huge slow versions, they behave the same but the difference in timing makes them tricky. Along with them are “Stop and Go” balls, which change speed.
There’s new purple octopus enemies that generally fall down the pyramid, but can meander unpredictably, including up and sideways.
A relative of Slick and Sam shows up later on, who in addition to wrecking your work can skip cubes on the way down, including jumping right over your head.
There’s also static disks that can be reused (a borrowing from Q*bert 3), disassociated playfields that disks must be used to travel between, cubes that can only be left in certain directions, one-hop cubes that disappear when landed on (and provide an alternate way of tricking Coily to its doom), and more. And there’s a two-player co-op mode too!
I won’t say it always has the best design. I’ve found at least one situation where the one-hop cubes can make a level unsolvable unless you lose a life, which resets them. And the way the balls move make some routes very difficult to ascend, due to their frequent tumbling down and blocking narrow paths. But these challenges, once you’re aware of them, can be overcome, and the game has passwords for every level anyway. If you like the original game, you’re sure to have a good time with Mega Q*bert.
Here is a full playthrough by its creator Jaklub. It’s pretty long (2 hours, 9 minutes)!
Mega Q*bert (rom for Genesis/Mega Drive by Jaklub, free download)
People familiar with MS-DOS should be right at home, although some commands are different. (That’s because MS-DOS changed them; it was originally made as a CP/M clone.) One major difference is the absence, in this version, of disk directories. Instead there were up to 16 numbered “user areas,” each its own individual region on the disk, kept separate from the others. CP/M was an amazingly compact system, a single floppy disk could host a half-dozen compilers and have room to spare.
#2: Speeding Up PETSCII
Commodore BASIC was notoriously slow, but also feature-poor. A version of the same Microsoft BASIC that was co-written by Bill Gates himself, and was later ported to MS-DOS as QuickBasic. This page is a collection of different ways to speed up printing PETSCII characters, covering several optimization techniques, one of them, avoiding IF statements, being non-obvious.
Our retro arcade strategy week is over, but this is a related video that I’ve been sitting on for quite a while. The Disconnector made a very nice strategy video (20 minutes) for Namco’s cult favorite cat-and-mouse game Mappy. It works as both an introduction and a guide to the game as it develops.
Not only is the information good, but it’s really well put together! Looking through the rest of their channel, while the post about other games (most recently about Robotron [8 minutes]) it seems to be the only strategy video of its sort. I hope they make more, I think they have a talent for it!
