Set Side B

Loadstar Progress

I imagine some people look at this blog and think something like, “what the hell is its audience?” People who follow indie gaming, retro stuff, classic computer software, weird gaming videos? Should anyone be interested in all of that?

I answer, YES. It’s all important. I vouch for all of it. I want to cast a light into all of the corridors of video, computer, even electronic gaming! I regret that I only have the time and energy for one post a day! Everyone should know of these things!

One of those things is old computer magazines, and the example of those that I have the most contact with is Loadstar, the Commodore 64 disk magazine that lasted for 22 years and 250 issues.

I mentioned Loadstar lately, and the itch.io page I’ve put up distributing, with the permission of its owners, their archives 243 issues of its archives, plus many extras.

A lot of my time the past few weeks has been spend on the “Loadstar Project.” I’m working on an expanded edition of Loadstar Compleat, to make it much more accessible to people who don’t play around with computer emulators as a matter of course. Yes, I understand they exist!

I envision a custom-written program, offering lists of highlights from among the long halls of its archives. What are you interested in? Arcade-style games? Puzzles? Animations? Music? Art? Reviews of old software? Editorials from a bygone age? Dedicated lists of all of these things. You’ll be able to scroll through and pick something to try. One click brings up its instructions. Another starts it up immediately in VICE. Have a favorite author? Many of Loadstar’s most prominent creators will (if I have my way) have their own lists. With literally hundreds of items in each category, that will keep you going for a good long while.

There’s many technical barriers to making this work, but they are coming down, slowly, one after another. Here is what the menu looks like at this second:

There’s a long way to go. I have to reverse engineer the compression used for text files in later issues, for one thing. I have to finish entering the data for early issues before their Presenter system settled into a single file format. There’s tons of issues left to add to the system, preferably using automatic tools because there’s literally thousands of items here. And yes, the menu system looks really plain right now, and could stand some sprucing up.

I continue to push at the boulder. Sadly the world contains many distractions, and I have other things I need to do with my time. You’re reading one of them right now. But maybe it’ll all come together. Let’s keep our many varied appendages crossed.

I also want to shout out to the Reverend Dave Moorman, Loadstar’s last editor, who oversaw the magazine from issue #200 to #249. He graciously gave me permission to include his range of issues in the compilation, and they’ll be joining their siblings soon! He also has a book on Amazon: The Most Marvelous Machine: A History and Explanation of Computers in General and the Commodore 64 in Particular. If you bought a copy there, there’s no referral code on that link, I won’t see a cent of it, but I’m sure he’d appreciate it! Think it over?

Triggering “Data Over Flow” in Mario Paint

A while back I linked to a video showing the obscure “Data Over Flow” error in Mario Paint. Here’s the post, and here’s the video (1 minute):

It occurs because Mario Paint’s SRAM is only 32K in size, which isn’t large enough to store every possible creation. The cartridge uses data compression to squeeze everything in, but the thing about data compression is, it can never be guaranteed to work. Every possible compression format has data that will cause it to take up more space. It’s a fact about the universe we live in. It just is.

If you only use the canvas, or only use the “Animation Land” motion option, then there is enough RAM, but using both in one composition means the software relies on compression to make everything fit, meaning, some kinds of data won’t fit, and that’s when Data Over Flow happens.

But as it turns out, while if you’re using Mario Paint in the way most people it’s unlikely you’ll trigger the error, it isn’t actually difficult to cause it. Creating a random mess of all the colors of pixels in a stamp, then filling the whole canvas and all the animation frames with that stamp, seems to be enough to do it. Mario Party doesn’t use a particular complex compression format. Maybe if it used something lossy like JPEG it might be able to do it, but rather it uses bit-perfect compression. That kind likes repeating patterns and areas of solid color, and doesn’t like what I’m going to call rainbow snow.

So here, watch a user start from a blank project, on real SNES hardware recorded through video capture, and go directly to the Data Over Flow error. Sorry! Our RAM is too sick to contain your masterpiece, it has vomited it all up, please try again (3 minutes):

Best Next Fest Demos Part 5

This is part 5 of my (Josh Bycer’s) indie showcase of the best Next Fest demos from February 2025.

00:00 Intro
00:16 DeadWire
2:00 Gnomes
3:33 Nitro Gen Omega
4:57 Beyond the Ice Palace 2
6:35 Blightstone
8:02 Geargrit
9:50 Scarlet: City of Devils

Mr Wint’s Investigation Into The Games: Winter Edition’s Copy Protection

This is a deep one. As linked by one for the books over on Metafilter, a GitHub user with the username MrWint was looking at the code of the Olympics-like DOS minigame collection “The Games: Winter Edition.” They wondered why it seemed to be impossible to achieve better than a certain score in some of the events. It turns out to be because of failed copy protection checks in most of the versions of the game produced after the initial release. Most of the cracks of that game that can be found on the internet are affected. They even affect two later official physical releases, and GOG’s release, which is a terrible problem for people who bought any of those versions expecting a working game.

If you’ve played it and never been able to score higher than 86.7 meters in the Ski Jump, it’s not you, it’s the game practically gaslighting you into thinking you failed. It’s impossible to land the jump if you’re affected by the bug and have gone that far!

Here’s their description of the result of the checks, and here’s their lengthy writeup of the problem, what causes it, what it does, which versions don’t fail the check, and a fix for it. Both pages have animations of the bug in action. Here’s their patcher.

Here’s a tl;dr summary, although the most interesting part of it all is the reverse engineering and description of the problem. But in case you aren’t interested in that and just want the gist:

The original release came with a code wheel copy protection system, and performed a number of checks for the event that the protection was bypassed. A value was created as the result of the check, and was modified and stored in various other places. Each of the events itself checked one of those places against a second, obfuscated copy of the code wheel’s lookup table. If the original wheel check is bypassed, which happens for most of the versions of The Games: Winter Edition now, illegal or legal, those places won’t have the correct value, and the game will sabotage those events during play in different ways.

It’s really sneaky, and as it turns out, it also affects the GOG release of its sequel, The Games: Summer Edition in a similar manner, although cracks of that game managed to fix the sabotaged events.

Sunday Sunday: Cat Bypass Speed WR (Good Ending)

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Witness this person as he uses all the tricks at his disposal to make his cat let him by in the hallway in record time (1 ¼ minutes):

He’s been speedrunning annoying his cat for some time! Here he bugs his cat until he goes inside (any%, 1 minute):

How many pets his cat can handle (1 ¼ minutes):

And annoying his cat until he gives up the chair (video has 2.3M views somehow, 1 minute):

It’s not the usual Sunday silliness, no it’s a different kind of Sunday silliness, but hey it’s April Fools Day! Wait, you’re saying it isn’t April Fool’s Day any more? It’s even May now? Crap.

Poking Technology Tries To Play Samples On A Commodore PET

The Commodore Amiga has quite nice digital sound output. The Commodore 64 has the SID chip, well-regarded in 8-bit computing circles. The Commodore PET, on the other hand….

I’ve seen people call the PET the first home computer. This is false. There were computers before it, but they were sold in the form of kits. One of them, the KIM-1, was sold by MOS Technology before they were bought by Commodore. The PET was released the following year as an all-in-one unit, even with an integrated monitor.

Some PETs had a basic speaker included. The speaker had to be driven directly. With the later SID, you wrote data into registers and the chip’s circuitry handled the sound generation over time, freeing up the process for other things. On the PET, the processor has to push bits into the register itself, or else use a shift register set up to do the bit pushing. That means, if you get the data in fast enough, that you actually have a fair bit of flexibility over what the speaker does, but it also means you spend a lot of CPU cycles in doing in.

The Youtube channel Poking Technology recently tried playing digitized sound through the PET’s poor little speaker and documented their work in a fairly long 58 minute video. This is it:

58 minutes is a bit of a time imposition. And there is some hardcore hackery going on, with them writing assembly code on camera and testing it over and over in an emulator until it works, as well as both harsh hiss and very high-pitched beeping. To avoid those fine examples of audio torture, you can jump here to hear the final result, at around the 56 minute mark. By the way, the sound being played is the Windows 95 start up noise, the one composed by Brian Eno.

The Best #steamnextfest Indie Game Demos (Part 4)

This is part 4 of our demo coverage of February 2025 Steam next fest.

0:00 Intro
00:14 Mashina
1:06 Roots Devour
2:57 Rift Riff
4:22 Kill the Music
5:29 Wild Growth
6:33 Conquest Dark
7:55 Machine Mind
9:01 Bad Cheese
9:52 Centum
11:03 Nordhold
12:17 Cauldron

Obscure Things To Do in Super Mario Galaxy

Mr. Goof on Youtube made a video with some cool and relatively unknown things that can be done in Super Mario Galaxy. Like the ground pound move in that game has a homing function, you can hold crouch to skate backwards on ice, and there is a secret button press that can give you a speed boost at the start of Cosmic Mario races. But none of those things are what they claim is the most obscure thing in the game.

The video is titled “Super Mario Galaxy’s Most Obscure Mechanic,” which is a bit wrong. It’s not a mechanic, or mechanism, it’s just a move with no real gameplay purpose. If you stand near water and jump, Mario will dive into the water with a special animation. That’s it. It’s cool, but pretty useless. Still, it’s nice to see it in action.

Here’s the video (7 minutes). Now, go forth and win Mario-related trivia contests, if they happen to ask a question about this extremely specific behavior.

CBS 8 San Diego’s Visit to Atari in 1982

I’ve been working a lot on compiling lists of programs that appeared in Loadstar, and it’s taking a lot of time. So here’s a quick item for today: a visit by the news team of CBS 8 in San Diego to Atari’s headquarters. 12 minutes from the company heyday in 1982, when they were riding high off the success of the Atari VCS/2600 and their many beloved arcade titles.

Super Metroid Map Logic Project

If you explore the internet long enough, you find wonders and horrors, but you also find very weird and obsessive things. One such thing is sm-json-data, a project to not only comprehensive catalog all of the tricks in Super Metroid and the situations they apply to and their uses, but to express it in a machine-readable fashion, so randomizers can use it.

I don’t even really know how to read it, but just the level of detail present here kind of makes me think it’s worthy of presentation here. It also sets off my allergies against obsession, it makes me itch like I’ve got hives, so I won’t be spending much time here. But maybe it’s the kind of thing you might find interesting?