This is one of the rare times where I won’t embed the video myself, because the blog Old Vintage Computing Research presented it as a link to their readers, and the video itself is unlisted on Youtube, so it won’t turn up in searches or through discovery features. So I hope I can help spread the word about this wonderful find.
Here is their post, and here is the video (1 hour 33 minutes). It’s a link to the Computer History Museum’s symposium on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, and has Steve Wozniak (creator of the Apple II), William Lowe (“father” of the IBM PC), Adam Chowaniec (Vice President of World Product Development at Commdore) and Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore and key to the success of the Commodore 64).
Since this talk was given, three of the four have passed away, leaving only Steve Wozniak, probably by virtue of his youth when he invented the Apple. Please enjoy!
“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.
Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.
They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:
I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):
Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):
The Amiga has hardware sprites, but they’re fairly limited. Most programmers prefer to use its powerful blitter hardware to simulate sprites, drawing them to screen memory much more rapidly than non-blitter hardware can. For more information, I refer you to the video.
That’s it for today, but there be something more substantial tomorrow….
It’s Christmas Eve, and at the moment I’m maintaining a Christmas video watch thingy for friends, so not a lot of time to post something deep today. Here’s a video that’s been hanging around my linklist for a long time, Nostalgia Tech Lounge on Youtube musing on the lost are of joke programs. (12 minutes)
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel (Game Wisdom). Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
Slowly making headway against a year’s worth of accumulated links. Please enjoy whatever takes your interest.
1. Sega’s One-Sided History, from The History of How We Play, about the tensions between Sega’s Japanese and American management.
2. From Mugen Gaming, working on a translation of Japanese TTRPG Sword World, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin in 2026. Included here because Sword World is soaked in video game influences. It really is a case of back-and-forth around the world: Wizardry and Ultima inspired Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest inspired other JRPGs, and then those JRPGs influenced Sword World. And to go with it, a nearly-complete fan translation of a Super Famicom Sword World game.
4. At Retroevolve, Mandy Odoerfer describes the charm of bootleg Pokemon games, games like 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle and Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.
Image from the article, up on Retroevolve
5. The Splatterhouse Homepage, an oldschool webshrine, is still updating, and has a new page on the recent dumping of an unreleased sequel to Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti, called Splatterworld, although I notice that one of its downloads is actually dated to 1993. Hmm, curious!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I was going to use Pannenkoek’s Christmas video this week, but then realized that I used that one last week. Serves me right for doubling up!
Instead have a listen to this collection of video game songs with a Christmas vibe. There’s no length notice because it’s a 24-hour-a-day livestream. Here!
YES I KNOW, yet another Nintendo thing. Nintendo Adults are the video game version of Disney Adults, in so many ways. One more way now because there are actual Nintendo theme parks.
I maintain that I am not a Nintendo Adult. But they have had a long history of making inventive and interesting games. I thought they’d been failing a bit at that lately, but then comes Kirby Air Riders, as weird and distinctive game as they’ve ever published. (By the way, did you know that they’ve put up Christmas decorations on the Kirby Air Riders menu screen and paddock area?)
It was a weird time. Around the time as the Famicom was just getting started, Hudson Soft struck a deal with Nintendo to release some of their games for the PC-88 Japanese personal computer platform.
Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)
You can tell the page is old because it has a Digg social media button. (Wait, what’s that? They’re trying to revive Digg?) Please excuse the Wayback Machine banner stuck in the middle of the screenshot, it’s an artifact of Firefox’s screenshot tool.
There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)
Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.
Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.
One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!
It’s a weird bit of console gaming lore than Sony was so proud of the PS2’s Cell processor that they actually officially ported Linux to it. All you had to do was buy the “Linux Kit,” which contained two DVDs, a module that added monitor-capable video out and Ethernet ports, and a “gigantic” 40GB hard drive.
As it turns out, the PS2 was actually all that great a Linux machine, and it was soon outclassed by PCs. That hasn’t stopped there from being a Playstation Linux community, with a website that sadly announces that it most soon close down in a post dating to 2009. It feels a bit like one of those “Closing Liquidation” signs that sometimes stores that have no plans of shutting down put up, in the hopes of attracting some extra customers. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll perish eventually, such is the way of all things. I just hope they can hold out a few extra decades.
Buying a complete unopened PS2 Linux box nowadays can cost you well over $1,000.
It was released in 2002; Linux itself was first created in 1991.
It’s based on the Japanese distribution Kondara, which itself was based off of Red Hat, and it shows due to it using RPM for its package format.
It runs WindowMaker for its GUI, which is based off of NeXTSTEP, the predecessor of the GUI used in current-day macOS.
In 2025 this is very much a Stupid Computer Trick, or perhaps a Stupid Console Trick, but ActionRetro has so much fun running OSes on various unexpected hardware that it’s difficult to fault him for it.
Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.
In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.
In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!
