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

A bit of an oldie this time, and in more ways than one, a four minute stop motion animation from Rymdreglage made with Lego bricks, from way back in 2009. It’s still great though! By “8-bit,” in this case, they mean specifically the Commodore 64 end of the swimming pool, especially as concerns the game International Karate+. Even though this video is 16 years old, Ryndreglage is still making videos now! Have a look for yourself if you like.

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Iftkyro’s back with another impossible demo, Quondam Tunneling (4½ minutes, download), which appears to display an animated sequence progressing down a 3D tunnel.

He’s now also uploaded a video explaining how it was done (14 minutes):

In brief, the tunnel itself only has four frames of animation. The demo keeps multiple fonts throughout most of memory, which are flipped between every eight scan lines, that basically allows it to display arbitrary graphics with each character row. The C64 doesn’t have quite enough memory to do that with all the rows in the full vertical extent of the animation, so another trick is used, taking advantage of palette swapping and the C64’s multicolor mode to store two different possible rows in each font. The horizontal scrolling is done by moving the characters that make up each row left and right in a typical C64 scrolling way; vertical scrolling is done by adjusting which fonts are used as the raster line descends the screen.

Of course nowadays we have computers that can display largely arbitrary graphics throughout the whole screen. Processor power is great enough now that we can even do this in software, but additional to that most desktop hardware has powerful hardware graphics included. Even if you don’t have a bespoke graphics card, major processors from Intel and AMD include substantial graphics capabilities built into the CPU. Such is the power of these chips, it’s easy to forget how difficult these things were in the microcomputer era.

Essentially all of the consumer computers from the C64’s era, and many years before and after it, split the system up into two major parts, the CPU and the graphics hardware. The very earliest home computers, like the Altair and the KIM-1, didn’t have graphics hardware at all without substantial hacks, because they weren’t intended to display their output on a video screen. That was really the innovation that opened computing up to the masses. Until monitor or TV output was possible, home computers were basically little more than glorified calculators to most people.

Having the CPU and graphics chips interact with each other was one of the most difficult parts of the design of these machines. Consoles like the Famicom/NES could give each of these two parts what amounted to its own memory, which simplified system design and helped to make possible its graphics power, but it also meant that programming it was more difficult. You can see this in the glitchiness of some early NES hardware (like in Displaced Gamers’ recent video on the jack of NES Commando, as linked here).

To properly use the NES’s PPU, graphics changes could only be made at a certain time each frame, during “VBLANK,” a time when the PPU wasn’t actively drawing the picture. That limited what changes could be made each frame. There were some tricky ways around this, but they all involved adding extra hardware onto the cartridge, increasing manufacturing costs. Home computers used their tilemaps for text display, meaning tile changes had to be less restricted of timing.

This meant some weird compromises were needed. On the C64, the CPU and the VIC-II operated asynchronously, opening up the potential for bus conflicts if they both tried to access memory at the same time. The VIC-II actually has the ability to put the CPU to sleep when it needs access. The C64’s designers rated the consistency of the video signal as a more important priority than the chip’s processor itself.

Even if the graphics hardware could display arbitrary bitmapped images, manipulating them quickly was difficult. The C64’s bitmap screen takes up 8K of memory. At 1 megahertz, the 6510 doesn’t have nearly enough time to update every byte in one video frame. In the following generation of machines, the Amiga was a lot more capable, but through the use of specialized hardware, its copper with its flexible video modes, and its blitter which could move memory around more rapidly.

That explains why, as Iftkyro states, that Amiga demos can generally do this kind of tunnel effect, but the Commodore 64 requires using a very specific memory layout, and rapid switching between fonts and graphics banks, to do something that superficially resembles it.

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#1: CP/M working in a browser

I’ve mentioned before my fondness for CP/M, the first widely-used microcomputer OS, the DOS-before-DOS. My attempts to try to emulate machines using it, however, have mostly gotten snagged on one thing or another. Well they have a post about getting in-browser CP/M working, with information on some of its commands. Here you can run it yourself,

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.

#3 Online Retro IDE

The linked page is actually about a recent update for it that adds support for DOSBox and BBC BASIC. It supports loading your code directly into a Javascript emulator. It supports many other computers and consoles. The IDE itself is here. The update page claims that FreeDOS is available as a platform, and with it another runnable version of Rogue, but I couldn’t figure out how to get into it before posting.

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Loadstar was an incredibly long-lived computer magazine, distributed on disk, for the Commodore 64 and 128 home computers. It began in 1985 and its last issue was distributed in 2007, covering a span of 22 years. It had 250 issues of the main publication, 42 quarterly issues dedicated to the Commodore 128, and numerous side products.

About Loadstar

Loadstar was initially created at Softdisk, Inc. You might have heard of Softdisk as the prior place of work of several employees who left the company, founded id Software, and created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake. It’s possible that some of them might remember the Loadstar guys, but it seems doubtful.

Loadstar was distributed on newsstands up to issue 72, when it switched over entirely to mail-order subscription sales. Despite this reduced exposure, Loadstar soldiered on. Starting with #32, some issues of Loadstar contained two disks of programs and information. These issues became more and more common until, beginning with Issue 43, every Loadstar contained at least two disks until the end of its run.

Issue 44 began the reign of Fender Tucker, who would helm Loadstar for the next fifteen years. Fender lent the magazine a distinctive style. He’d write editorials describing the magazine as originating in the “Loadstar Tower,” a wondrous place looming over its home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. (The magazine was actually produced in a basement.) He’d also write up the adventures of his nefarious alter-ego and musician Knees Calhoon, who was listed as the author of some of Fender’s own software. Under Fender Tucker’s guidence Loadstar flourished, and garnered a devoted community of users and contributors.

According to Jeff Jones, attitudes at Softdisk were that the company’s Windows and Mac products were the future of the company, but eventually the internet came along and dashed that dream. Softdisk continued along as an ISP for a time, but around 2006 its services were taken over by another company, and it’s now long defunct. During Softdisk’s later years Loadstar continued to support a large and loyal userbase, and didn’t cost much to produce, so it chugged along well into the internet age.

As Loadstar grew, so did its community, and the technology around it. While the Commodore 64 computer was discontinued in 1994, a thriving market of add-ons and upgrades sprang up to serve its users. Probably the most notable third-party producer of Commodore peripherals was CMD, Creative Micro Designs. While Commodore themselves had made expansion memory modules for the C64, CMD took their ball and sprinted way downfield. CMD made a disk drive accelerator (JiffyDOS), powered memory units that could serve as long-term storage, accelerator boards, and even hard drives compatible with the venerable 8-bit machine. Loadstar’s staff used many of these devices in its later years to help produce their magazine.

Loadstar had a symbiotic relationship for about four years with Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. Some type-in magazines would offer a disk supplement, containing all of the software in an issue on a computer disk and saving users from the need to type them in. Commodore had an arrangement with Loadstar to serve as the disk supplement of their magazines. This deal lasted from around issues 11 to 61, and helped bulk out Loadstar’s issues with interesting software.

Early issues of Loadstar often hosted ports of programs that originally appeared in Softdisk. One notable series of these is the Alfredo animations, a sequence of programs that depicted the travails of a stick man trying to survive a dangerous landscape. See folks, the genre didn’t start with Adobe Flash! Long after its parent Softdisk Magazine closed up shop, Loadstar published two final, original Alfredo adventures, in two of Fender Tucker’s last issues, #197 and #199.

Loadstar never distributed the Commodore versions of GEOS, Berkeley Softworks’ surprisingly successful bid to bring a mouse-driven, icon-based, Mac-like point-and-click interface to 8-bit home computers, but starting with Issue 58 and throughout the rest of its run GEOS programs were a regular fixture on Loadstar’s electronic pages. In retrospect, GEOS was done much wrong. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Berkeley Softworks attempted to bring their OS to DOS-compatible machines with GeoWorks, only to quickly be dismissed as a budget pretender to Windows’ throne. GEOS was far from the first, and certainly not the last, Windows competitor to be steamrollered beneath Microsoft’s hardball tactics. (See: CP/M, PC-DOS, OS/2.) Judging by quantity, Loadstar may be GEOS’ biggest supporter that wasn’t Berkeley Softworks or Commodore itself.

Another company that formed an arrangement with Loadstar was Quantum Compuer Services, which served the Commodore 64 community with an online service called QuantumLink. Several early Loadstar issues came with the QuantumLink client software included on one of its disk sides. (At least one of our included issues has a copy, now useless.) Quantum eventually released a similar service for MS-DOS-based computers, and renamed themselves to America On-Line.

“AOL,” as everyone called it, become a runaway hit. They would build upon its strategy of distributing their disks far and wide, first as 3 1/2″ floppies, then as CD-ROMs, and eventually DVDs. QuantumLink was left to languish and, after a long period of decay where users complained of unmaintained upload sections and unmoderated forums, AOL unceremoniously shut it down without so much as an archive. The later history of AOL is generally known: they bought out their rival CompuServe, AOL keywords were broadcast during daytime television, it was a popular early choice for a dial-up ISP, it became the most-used ISP in the United States, and they created a hugely popular instant messaging program (AOL Instant Messager, or “AIM”). Then they underwent a disastrous merger with Time-Warner that would be hastily undone, then obscurity encroached as first the internet, and then social media, made most of it services redundant. AIM, once thought unstoppable, faded and died as more people used their cell phone’s text feature. As of this writing AOL still exists, but it’s fallen far from the days when its iconic “You’ve Got Mail!” catchphrase became the title of a Hollywood movie, proving once again, truly: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.

The Eras of Loadstar

The Early Issues
Loadstar started as a C64 counterpart for Softdisk’s self-titled Apple II magazine. Many of its earliest programs are ports of Softdisk software.

Commodore Magazine
With Issue 9, Loadstar became the official disk supplement for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. The programs from those periodicals helped to greatly bulk out their offerings. The arrangement lasted until Loadstar issue 61.

The Rise of Fender
Loadstar’s longest-serving overseer was Fender Tucker, a kind and genuine person with an engaging writing style. Fender joined up with issue 42, and starting with the next issue, Loadstar moved to two disks a month.

Jeff Jones, Loadstar 128 & Loadstar Letter
Associate Editor Jeff Jones joined sometime between issues 49 and 55 and brought some additional technical know-how to Loadstar. In addition to touching up programs and contributing software of his own, Jeff was largely responsible for Loadstar Quarterly 128, their publication catering to Commodore 128 owners, and the Loadstar Letter, a print supplement distributed along with Loadstar.

Puzzle Pages
Barbara Schulak’s first program was Jump, published on Loadstar #44, but starting with issue 60 Loadstar published a monthly puzzle section that became the magazine’s most enduring feature. From then, every Loadstar had a Puzzle Page until issue 163, but the feature continued, mostly monthly, until issue 197. Barbara Schulak wasn’t the only contributor to the Puzzle Page, and there were puzzles outside of it, but Barbara was its soul.

The End of the Newsstand Edition
Issue 7 was the last issue of Loadstar 128 to be distributed on newsstands, and issue 72 was the last issue of Loadstar 64 to be buyable that way. For most magazines that would have been the end, but Loadstar still had 16 years of life in it, sold entirely through subscriptions, mail order sales, and later via the internet, a testament to the faithfulness of Commodore users.

The European Age
At its height around 1991, Loadstar had around 20,000 monthly subscribers. Without the free advertising provided by newsstands, by 1994 that had dropped to around 5,000. As Loadstar reached issue 100 and long years passed, it became harder to find contributions from US subscribers. Meanwhile the C64 was still going fairly strong in Great Britian, and many of the games of Loadstar from this era have a distinct demoscene feel. Loadstar also published demos, and reported on Commodore hacking circles. Loadstar would also embrace the internet, and offer issues for sale by way of their website.

Dave Moorman’s Tenure
The writing was on the wall. By 2000 Loadstar had about 1,000 subscribers left, too many to just abandon, but not enough to remain profitable for their then-meager staff. Fender handed the reins off to the worthy Dave Moorman, who kept it going to 2007. Moorman was a dogged manager, and went to lengths to keep the magazine full of items, including frequently reprinting software from the magazine’s glory days. While many of Loadstar’s prior stalwart contributors didn’t switch over, Fender himself still wrote for the magazine, and kept up with it until the end.

The Tornado
In 2007 a tornado struck Dave Moorman’s house, and wrecked his Loadstar-making setup. While one more issue, #250, would eke out in 2008, the 22-year run of Loadstar, last remnant of the once-mighty field of computer software periodicals, was over. Loadstar had outlived all of its sister magazines from Softdisk (including its DOS, Windows and Macintosh publications) Softdisk Inc. itself, as well as Compute, Compute’s Gazette, Commodore Magazine, Commodore Power/Play, Ahoy, Run Magazine, Family Computing, Creative Computing, UpTime and DieHard.

(I have been reminded of the value of marketing, so I have to include the $15 Loadstar Compleat package I’ve put together with the permission of J&F Publishing.)

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Jed lost drawing straws with his villager friends, and so it’s up to him to do something about all the monsters infesting his world. The monsters move quickly and randomly, so fighting them is a mix of reflexes, strategy and luck. Clear a screen and you get rewarded with coins, and possibly a potion that you can save for later. The potion colors are green for health, blue for invisibility, yellow to be teleported back to the starting point, and red to clear all the monsters from the screen.

Jed’s world is pretty big. If you explore for a bit, you’ll find treasure rooms with lots of money inside, a place to pay for healing, buyable weapon upgrades and keys for purchase. It’s not known at the moment if there is a way to win at Jed’s Journey, but the fact that the locked doors must be leading somewhere important suggests that there is. To even have a chance of reaching the end, if it exists, you should make a map of the world, and I mean by hand.

Jed’s Journey makes use of a hardware trick, seen in some sprite-based video chips, to get free collision detection. When the C64’s VIC-II is drawing sprites on screen, if two of them would be drawn on the same pixel, it’ll note a collision between them, and note this fact in a register. There are quirks to this system though. On the C64, this is pixel-based collision detection, not using hit boxes, which might mean occasional misses for players used to hitbox detection. Only two of the possible three colors in a multicolor sprite set off the collision detection. And the collisions only register which sprites are colliding, not what they were colliding with, which sometimes means, when you kill one beast, two others that were touching each other onscreen elsewhere will also be considered slain.

Will someone finally finish Jed’s Journey after all these years? Will it be you? If you try it, please let us know!

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I would like to highlight a particular case where the C64 acquits itself fairly well: its version of Konami’s Salamander, a.k.a. Life Force in some territories.

There’s a ton of scrolling C64 games that don’t hold up well. Take Strider, for instance. It tries to be a lot more like the arcade game than the NES version, I’ll give it that, but at the cost of all of its bosses, most of its speed, and it doesn’t even end very well, it just stops, feeding the player a line about having passed a test. Urk! If you want to see what I mean, have a look (11 minutes), but frankly why would you want to?

There are good arcade, and arcade-style, games on the platform, and when they’re done well they can make the platform, quite literally, sing–the C64 has a terrific sound synthesizer chip. Ghosts & Goblins is often held aloft as a good example of a good C64 conversion, but although it has an iconic song, it only has one song, it’s not the classic tune from the arcade game, and it’s only got four levels. It plays a lot more smoothly than the NES version (7 minutes), but c’mon, Micronics made that one.

The C64 version of Life Force also only has four levels, but they’re very remarkable levels, impressively like the arcade game. It has a different tune for each stage! They actually sound like the arcade game! And one of the levels is the “Prominence Stage,” the most eye-catching part of the arcade and NES games, and it holds up (11 minutes), the flaming solar surfaces are animated, and the solar flares are just as deadly as in the other versions. It even exceeds the NES version in a couple of ways: your ship tops out at three Options instead of the NES’s two, and the Ripple and Laser beams are impressively flicker-free, since they’re drawn with background tiles, a feat the NES has trouble duplicating due to its background tile drawing limitations.

Is it equal to the NES version? Well… I can’t say that it is. And the Famicom version lets you have three Options, so the C64 version loses ground there too. But look at it! For the levels it has, the C64 really does its best to match the arcade. (If you’re surprised that the second level is different, the Famicom/NES puts the vertical mountain level there; the C64 sticks more closely to the arcade game, where the second stage is an asteroid belt.)

So even though the C64 port is about as good as you can expect from a 1983 computer with only eight hardware sprites, the Famicom/NES port is also great. Oh well, C64 users can content themselves to having a much better version of M.U.L.E., the NES version stinks.

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This is something I’ve been trying to make happen for some time. But then some work I put into it hit an unexpected snag (the maker of a library I had been depending on decided he wanted to be paid a subscription fee to use it or else he was going to put a nag screen on people’s projects), then other things came up, and so the project languished for months.

So now, on the premise that it’s better to get it out there and available and add features and fix things later, instead of sitting on it and potentially nothing happening with it ever, I have put up on itch.io ⅘ths of the run of classic Commodore 64 computer disk magazine LOADSTAR, with the blessing of owner/long-time managing editor Fender Tucker.

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned LOADSTAR in these pages. The magazine’s name came from the commonly-entered command on Commodore 64 computers LOAD”*”,8,1, to load the first program on disk into memory, and sometimes also to run it. LOAD”(star)”, you see. I packaged one of its programs, Dungeon, for sale on itch.io for $5 some months back and mentioned it here. This is an opportunity to get the collection it was drawn from. I recognize this is a bit self-serving, but I don’t do it very often, and there’s so much on LOADSTAR that the world deserves to know about. The price of $15 is because that’s what Fender has always sold it for. The issues can also be gotten for free elsewhere, yes. This is mostly an opportunity to get them all at once, and with the Fender’s approval: the person most responsible for all of it, the driving force behind it, the one who always believed the most in LOADSTAR, its very heart and soul.

I had been working for an explorer program for getting the contents of issues and searching through them without having to load each issue individually, but it had been stymied by the issue I mentioned in the first paragraph. Something else I’d like to do is supply an emulator that will run the issues directly, with sensible defaults. The version that’s up has an absolutely ancient copy of VICE for Windows with it. It’s so old that I’m not sure if there might be security issues with it; I should probably just remove it. In any case, current versions of VICE are available for many platforms and are free and open source.

To start an issue, you first start up your copy of VICE. The Commodore 64 emulator included is x64, or else x64sc; the Commodore 128 emulator is x128. Under the File menu, choose “Smart Attach…,” then pick the issue from within the LS64 folder for Commodore 64 issues, or LSQ128 for Commodore 128 issues. Make sure to click the Autostart button: it’ll load the Presenter program and run it automatically! You’ll find both 1541 (*.d64) and 1581 (*.d81) disk images. 90% of the time you’ll want to load the 1581 version, because those disks were much larger and a whole issue could fit on one of them! The 1541 versions (which while growing up I had to put up with) are split up into four disk sides, and are a hassle. By the way: the 1541 disk drive was excruciatingly slow. If you press Alt-W, you can toggle “Warp Mode,” which will speed up loading greatly! Just be sure to toggle it back off once your program has loaded!

And something the collection really needs is a list of highlights of interesting things on each issue, and also a directory of the people who made this unbelievable wealth of software. Here’s a few names to watch for: Jeff Jones (Assistant Editor), Barbara Schulak (Puzzle Maven), Ian Adams (Mathematician), Maurice Jones (Card Game Implementor of Great Skill), Jim Weiler (Third in Command), J.C. Hilty (BASIC Game Programmer who never let it get him down), Nick Peck (Creator of A Couple Of Awesome Games), Jon Mattson (General Gamesperson) and Walt Harned (Pixel Artist Extraordinaire). If I could affix all their names in the stars for the world to see forever, I absolutely would.

To construct the itch.io page I needed some screenshots, so I dipped into a few issues to make them, and got the names of their makers along the way. Here you go, but understand this is only a tiny fraction of what’s included.

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Funny, I thought I had made a post about this, but it doesn’t seem to have saved. Well, I’ll try it again.

Everyone knows Balatro now right? It’s won several awards, and was nominated for a handful of others. It was also developed entirely by one person, LocalThunk, who, gasp and shock, seems to be a decent person. And it was written in Lua for the LÖVE framework.

What’s more, there’s now several ports of Balatro for unexpected platforms. I presume they aren’t all entirely faithful to the original, but it’s fun to see how others iterate upon the theme.

For the Nintendo DS (Github, GBAtemp article):

For the Commodore 64 (itch.io):

For the Commodore Plus-4:

Oh wow, for the Commodore PET, and before you ask, this is the best that system can do, it had no color, only beeps for sound and its graphics were locked in ROM:

The Playstation Vita and Apple Watch also have ports, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original. Note that the PET and Apple Watch versions don’t appear to be public yet, and may never be. The Watch one particularly looks difficult to play.

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Grey is what the subject line says: a FPS, running at an acceptable framerate, on a Commodore 64, without a Raspberry Pi or other hardware to help it out. Here is its thread on Lemon64. Have a look (24 minutes):

How is it possible? Well, it’s not running 60fps for one. Updating the whole screen in one frame on a C64 is hugely challenging, but fortunately FPSes can look satisfactory running at slower framerates. It’s not Quake-level graphics, or even Doom, it’s more like Wolfenstein 3D in ability, and it’s confirmed that it uses that style of raycasting. And on top of all of that, it doesn’t use hi-res resolution, which would be really slow on an unmodified C64. It seems to use character tiles to fake a kind of low-res display. But when you’re trying to get a game running on a 1 MHz machine with 64K of RAM, tricks and shortcuts are not only necessary, but rather laudable. What a hack!

This is a work-in-progress, with a demo of the game available in a recent Pateron-available issue of Zzap 64. No source code is available yet. Let’s hope for continued development!

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I make it available with some trepidation. Dungeon has a few significant bugs. For example, it supports two disk drives throughout, but if you use its Dungeon Maker then you need to set it for single drive mode, or else you’ll encounter a Disk Error just at the worst possible time: when saving your project. Its randomized “Lost Worlds” often create dungeons that strand your character in impossible situations, and while there is a way out of them, it involves loading the Guild menu 15 times.

But I’ve played a lot of these random dungeons, and I think overall David Caruso II made a clever little game system, and I think his ideas are worth building upon. That’s why I’m working on a remake/update of Dungeon, that I’m calling Dungeon DX.

I’m making it in Python using the Pygame library. I’ve tried making a game with Pygame before and had some problems with it (I may bring myself to talk about that experience someday), but using it now I’m pleased to see Pygame 2 has become a lot more performant, and that’s even before trying to compile it into a faster form. I’ve built for Dungeon DX a kind of bespoke terminal emulator, but one with support for loads of cool graphics effects. I’ve made dungeon art and monster images for it using the website Fontstruct, which gives the images a low-tech, but distinctive look.

I’ve been working very hard on it, to the extent that I can feel myself getting my hopes up that a substantial number of people may actually play and enjoy it. Most of the times in the past that I’ve done that I’ve had those hopes get crushed, but hey, maybe the nth+1 time’s the charm?

Besides not having all of its bugs, why do I think this project is worth working on? These are the things I find appealing about the original Dungeon, the reasons that I played so much of it myself, things that I don’t generally see in CRPGs these days:

• It’s not a game but a game system. It isn’t a single huge campaign that you play and finish, and it isn’t a single story. Your characters can keep going so long as there are adventures to be had.
• In structure it isn’t like a novel, but it’s more like a series of short stories. Each dungeon is a single screen, that fills out as your character explores it. That may sound a bit like a classic roguelike, and there are some elements of that, but the feel is subtly different. Each single-screen dungeon usually has more adventure packed into it than in a single roguelike dungeon level.
• It’s like a collection of short stories, but that stars your character as they progress through it. The focus is more on the development of that character as they continue their adventuring career. Like how the Conan the Barbarian novellas are each an episode in the life of a single adventurer.
• It features what’s known in some circles as slow character growth. D&D has rapid growth, and it’s gotten even faster as the system has changed through the years. 5th Edition characters advance to second level absurdly quickly, after earning only 300 XP, and that advancement practically doubles their power! 0th-level Dungeon characters (it starts counting at 0) have a lot more durability, but it takes them more time to advance to Level 1, and when they gain it their power only increases a little. In this, a lot more of a Dungeon character’s life is decided at character creation. But it also means, as they increase in power, you know it’s due to your own efforts.
• It’s more simulationist that CRPGs have become as of late. A lot of CRPGs have crept towards gamishness, which generally is okay, I mean they are games after all. But I think RPGs work the best when you can imagine them as being the adventures of real people, so as their power has crept up, and their abilities have gotten more abstract and arbitrary, they have come to feel more and more like playing pieces than living people.
• While there’s a random dungeon maker, you can also make your own adventures for it, and give them to other people! That’s potentially a very great thing. It reminds me of EAMON, an 80s CRPG game system that people could create their own adventures for. (There are still websites devoted to EAMON! It’s a rabbit hole worth exploring, but that’s something more suited for its own post.)
• And finally, it’s hard. Characters die frequently. You can revive them up to three times, and if you don’t mind reloading the guild menu 15 times you can turn the game off to preserve their life, but defeat is frequent without very careful play. You often have to play like a scavenger: take what easy-to-find rewards and successes you can, build your power over time, seek out easy adventures, and don’t take unnecessary risks. Dungeon characters are not heroes, not at first anyway, and if they’re ever to become heroes you’ll have to watch their steps.

Because these are the aspects of Dungeon that I like, they’re the elements that I’m focusing on in making Dungeon DX. My plans aren’t to make it quite as hard, but to still emphasize that these people are not demigods, not yet. A character’s career may be the story of the creation of a demigod, like how Conan, through countless trials, eventually became king of a great nation. It’s kind of a lie that people who rise to greatness frequently do so because of their own efforts, but it’s a pleasing lie, and it makes for a fun saga if you don’t take it too seriously.

My other plans for Dungeon DX, which may change, for while progress has been rapid (because Python is awesome), I’m still iterating over lots of things:

• A retro look, kind of akin to how Dungeon looks on a C64, but still with enhancements. It doesn’t use pixel art, instead using vector graphics created in Fontstruct.
• Dungeon was all one-on-one fights. Dungeon DX should have parties of three characters, fighting enemy groups that can be larger than that.
• Dungeon doesn’t let characters keep items between adventures. For the most part, characters only advance through gaining experience. DX should let characters have a persistent inventory.
• Dungeon doesn’t have any money system at all! DX should both have money and a shop where basic necessities and equipment can be obtained.
• Dungeon doesn’t simulate much of the basis of exploration. My ideas for DX let characters rest in the dungeon, for example, but they must consume food to do so.
• Dungeon has very little graphical splendor. Dungeons themselves are just blocks of green, with black tunnels dug through it, and once in a while a graphic character. That has to change.
• Dungeon’s encounter model isn’t scriptable at all, which limits what can be done. It’s a lot more flexible than you might think it would be, given the C64’s memory limitations, but the edges of what’s possible are still easily reached. I want to change that.
• Dungeon’s magic system is very interesting for its own sake, a collection of 16 spells that are more useful outside of battle than in it. Only one of those spells that does direct damage to enemies! Magic is much more of general utility. While my design has more damage-doing magic than that, I want to keep that feeling that magic is not primarily for harming monsters.
• Dungeon doesn’t let characters learn spells themselves: all magic comes from items that contain it, and depletes with use. There’s interesting things about that system, but it kind of means that high-Intelligence characters aren’t very viable if the dungeon constructor doesn’t give them any magic to use early on.

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One solution was what I am told is now called semigraphics, which means using generic characters that are pre-defined by the system in combination with each other, piecing together larger images from symbolic building blocks.

ASCII Art, that fading art form created to make imagines on terminal displays, is a form of semigraphic. The IBM PC character set supported semigraphics mostly through its famous Code Page 437, which provided a variety of line-drawing characters , but looking at it it’s evident that it wasn’t intended for general graphic use.

Different platforms from the time varied widely in their support for graphic characters. Let’s take a quick look at what the options were.

Apple

The base Apple II had a very limited character set:

The Apple II’s character offers little opportunity for graphic use. Of course the Apple II is a miracle through and through for being designed almost entirely by one person, Steve Wozniak, and that includes its character set. Note that it doesn’t neglect reverse video, and even has hardware support for flashing characters. Still though, not much you can do with it other than repurpose punctuation and letters.

PETSCII

The PET and successors, by contrast have an excellent character set for makeshift graphics. The image above is of the Commodore 64 version, but the same graphics are used on old PETs, the VIC-20, the Commodore 128, and even the TED-based machines, the Plus-4 and Commodore 16.

While they’re not reflected in the above image, the whole character set can be reversed too. These machines reverse characters by, simply, duplicating the whole set in ROM as negative images.

PETSCII contains:

• Four playing card suit glyphs
• A decent set of line-drawing characters, with all intersections both sharp-edged and curved corners
• Diagonal slopes, diagonal lines and crossed diagonals
• Horizontal and vertical lines at different places in the character cells
• Frame corners, which combined with the lines can make decent rectangles
• Horizontal and vertical bars at several different widths
• Half-tone checkerboards and half-character checkerboards (on PET systems these have a single-pixel grain, but on later machines the checkerboard squares are 2×2 blocks)
• 4×4 blocks in enough combinations that, combined with their reverse versions, can be used to approximate a 80×50 pixel display with plain characters
• Symbols for English pound and Pi

PETSCII is one of the most versatile character sets from the time, and you can do a ton with it with some thought and ingenuity. There used to be a Twitter account (in the days before the Muskening) that posted images of robots made out of PETSCII characters. And because the character set is included in ROM, one doesn’t have to create their own character graphics, using up 8K of system RAM to hold them, to have rudimentary graphics. (In fact, the original PET didn’t even support redefining the character set, so PETSCII was all you got.)

ATASCII

Did Atari consciously follow the naming of PETSCII, with their own self-branded ATASCII? Both are riffing off of ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. So I guess PETSCII, going by Commodore’s own claimed meaning for PET, means “Personal Electronic Transactor Standard Code for Information Interchange,” which is pretty terrible. But the ATA in ATASCII makes even less sense, since ATA obviously is just the first three letters in Atari.

While it has nowhere near the sheer number of graphic characters that PETSCII has, it had a decent number, including line drawing, slopes and diagonal lines and playing card suits. Of particular note is that the Clubs symbol has the same hole in its middle that it does in PETSCII.

TRS-80

Wikipedia doesn’t offer a screenshot chart of all the symbols of the TRS-80 set, but it does an HTML Table display, which the above is excerpted from. The only graphic characters it has are these off 2×3 cells, which are like the 2×2 blocks in the Commodore set but with an extra row. This gives its screen slightly finer resolution.

The TRS-80 had fairly basic graphics, it seems: those characters appear to have been it as far as graphics goes. The page I saw that described its capabilities even had a name for those blocks: squots. I think that’s a perfectly fine name for these kinds of boxes, whether it’s on a TRS-80, Commodore 64 or other machine.

Sinclair ZX-81

The ZX-81 had a very limited character set. While it has checkerboard and 4×4 block characters, their inclusion comes at the cost of an apostrophe, an at-sign, and even an exclamation point.

The following Spectrum removed the checkerboards, but added the exclamation point and apostrophe, as well as a lowercase alphabet. Still no @ though.

DOS Code Page 437

This is the one that most of you probably already know. It has its own version of squots, but they’re incomplete: it doesn’t have quarter-box or squot-grained checkerboard characters, tlhough it does have three forms of half-tone, a rather extra assortment of double-lined box characters, playing card suit glyphs, and a number of unusual characters up above that will be very familiar to anyone who played PC Rogue.

DOS Code Page 437 was in many ways the end of the venerable tradition of character set graphics. Neither the Atari ST nor Amiga had much use for general purpose character graphics, instead choosing to use their sets’ spare capacity for international characters, a noble offering, but less useful for graphic use.

It is worth noting some of the characters in the ST’s set, though:

Some miscellaneous glyphs like arrows, an X mark and checkbox, a bell and musical note, the Atari logo in two characters, a bunch of digital readout numbers, and four characters that seem to form a face. Here, I’ll piece it together for you:

Who might this handsome person be? It’s a little hard to make out at this scale, but it’s intended to be a pixel-art representation of “Bob” Dobbs, icon and symbol of the Church of the Subgenius!

It’s not a good set of squots, but it’s not bad.

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There are a few bugs in Dungeon, now basically impossible to fix, that I’m trying to track down and document, and I’m also working on improving the documentation, as well as provide some useful goodies with the system, like a disk of monsters, equipment and magic items. That’s useful because Dungeon has a special feature where it’ll take the monsters and items on a “Data Disk,” and scatter them around a dungeon map of its own creation. It calls these randomized adventures “Lost Worlds.”

Lost Worlds operate as a kind of quasi-roguelike. The Dungeon software creates a random map and places random items around it, but once created it becomes a Dungeon adventure that any created character can explore as many times as they like. While it doesn’t have roguelike tactical combat gameplay or random item identification, it does have a form of permadeath. Characters only get three lives to advance their level as far as they can go.

Lost Worlds are interesting places to explore, but there are some bugs in them. It is possible, in fact pretty easy, to get stuck in a part of the dungeon from which one can’t escape. Sometimes a one-way door leads into an area that can’t be escaped, and sometimes a passage-blocking trap will strand the player’s character in a dead-end. And once in a while a Lost World is downright unfinishable, its goal item disconnected from the parts of the dungeon the player can even reach.

While there are spells (Passwall and Teleport) that can release a trapped character, if they aren’t available the character is not completely lost. If you turn off the C64 (or close the emulator), then return to the Guild screen, the character will be marked as GONE. Over time, measured in loads of the Guild menu, the character will eventually find their way back on their own. It takes quite a while for this to happen though: I counted 15 loads, saving the game each time, before a GONE character returned.

This video (23 minutes) is is something I recorded myself as a demonstration of both Dungeon’s gameplay, and its Lost World adventure generation. It uses a set of 30 low-level monsters and items based on the stats of the old Basic edition of D&D, and a set of magic items I created for usefulness and to show off Dungeon’s spell set.

So, why would someone want to play this game, when there’s so many other newer CRPGs out there to play?

• The idea of rolling up a character and taking them through scenarios made by other people, to try to get their level up as high as they can get before they die three times, is great. My hope, perhaps misplaced, is this release will inspire other people to make dungeons for others to play, and I look forward to seeing them myself.
• The magic system of Dungeon, while it doesn’t allow for characters to learn spells themselves, is unique in that most of the spells are utility spells! There are spells for passing through walls, for teleporting anywhere on the map, for revealing terrain, for seeing in darkness, for giving oneself a damage shield, for locating the goal item, for disarming traps, and more. There is only one direct damage attack spell! Spells are more like tools than something you use to pound through the enemies.
• The dungeon model allows for dark areas, traps that block exits, two-way and one-way teleporters, secret doors, one-way doors, and decorating dungeon maps with PETSCII graphics. The simplicity of the dungeons, all of them fitting on one screen, works in Dungeon’s favor. No dungeon can be too large since they must all fit within the bounds of the map grid.

There are unique design considerations for making Lost Worlds too. Even though the computer creates the maps unaided, since it populates them from the monsters, items and traps that are on the Data Disk, the difficulty of the resulting dungeon is affected. The various doodads are distributed without apparent heed for what they are; I wonder if the generator actually cares for their identities or if it just checks how many of each type are on the disk, so as not to exceed that number.

If there are more easy monsters, more powerful items, and more weak traps on the disk then the dungeon will be easier due to their corresponding numbers being greater, and vice versa. It occurs to me that one of the flaws in the dungeon generation I mentioned could be alleviated, by not giving it one of the wall creating traps that could trap a player in a dead-end, but that also makes the dungeon a bit less interesting, so I’ve left it in the mix I use.

I recognize that, if I let myself, this might become a Dungeon blog. Rest assured, I’m not going to take it that far. But I really hope that some people give Dungeon a chance. While sure it has its inspirations (one person on Mastodon said it reminds them of Phantasie, a somewhat less obscure early CRPG), I think it’s pretty unique, and deserves for more people to have a look at it. I’m particularly pleased how well the sample monsters and items I made work in the Lost World framework, and I’m trying to think of ways that it might be improved. More on this later… but, not immediately, I think.

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The talk is intended for a technical audience… literally. When the speaker asks who in the audience has coded in assembly before, practically everyone raises their hands. It’s recognized that we at Set Side B veer wildly between the most surface-level populist material and in-depth treatments for those with gigantic capacities for technical discussion and the attention span of a Galapagos Giant Tortoise. We like to think this is charming, and will listen eagerly if you tell us that you agree.

Anyway, here is that talk. I already mentioned that it’s 53 minutes. If that’s too long, there’s a speed-up function on Youtube. If that’s too technical, well, I don’t know how to help there. Maybe a read through pagetable.com’s documentation on the 6502. Oops! I’ve made it worse, haven’t I. Well, if you like, you might console yourself that the 6502 is really a simple processor to learn to code in. I’ve done it myself! There’s no memory management, there’s only three general-purpose registers, the stack is fixed in place, and all opcodes are one byte. It’s so simple that an extremely motivated child could learn it. Guess how I know?

27c3: Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU (Youtube, 53 minutes)

Here’s a description of the talk from the conference web site.

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It’s been months now since I announced my plans to release some project involving LOADSTAR, a 17-year computer magazine on disk, either here or on itch.io, or both. I’m still working on them.

In the meantime, I present this, a packaged-up release of Dungeon on itch.io, a complete old-school RPG gaming system for the Commdore 64, as it was released on the disk magazine LOADSTAR back in 1990.

Written by David Caruso II, Dungeon is a way of creating adventures for others to play, and a system of creating, maintaining and playing characters in those adventures. It was kind of a throwback even in 1990 (the SNES was released that year), but it definitely has charm, and an old-school kind of appeal.

You start out on the Guild screen, where you create a character from one of five fantasy races, then venture out on adventures stored on floppy disks, which in this release are provided as C64 1541 disk images. Fight monsters to earn experience points, find the object of the quest and then return to the Guild by the exit to have the chance to advance in experience level. If your character dies they’ll be revived, but only up to two times! If something happens and you don’t make it back, but don’t die either, your character will be marked as “GONE,” meaning they’re stuck in limbo until they make it back to the Guild on their own!

Your character advances in level between adventures, but they don’t get to keep any items they found on their journey. If they advance in level however, they get to permanently improve two of their stats. Getting to the maximum score of 25 grants them a special ability, but it’s really hard to get there!

This presentation of Dungeon is being made with the permission of Fender Tucker, owner and former Managing Editor of LOADSTAR. It isn’t free, but for $5 you get the Dungeon system and five pre-made adventures for it, culled from the 240+ issues of LOADSTAR. I include a stock copy of the open-source Commodore 64 emulator VICE, configured for playing Dungeon. (If $5 is too much for you, rumor has it Loadstar issues can be found online elsewhere. Dungeon was first published on issue #74.)

If you want to know more about it, I have constructed this 40-page PDF of documentation on Dungeon, from the disks of LOADSTAR in 1990, along with the instructions for the adventures and further notes on playing it from me. Here:

(file size: 2.6 MB)

The document refers to an itch.io release, that’s what I’m currently working on. Late in the document there are some spoilers for a particularly difficult adventure using the system.

Dungeon was created by someone named David Caruso II. Neither I nor long-time LOADSTAR managing editor Fender Tucker knows what became of him. I have what is almost certainly an old address for him. It’s been 33 years, and I suspect that Dungeon itself is a couple of years older than that, so it’s possible that Caruso has passed away by now. If he hasn’t, though, I’d like to talk with him. I think (hope?) he’d appreciate that people are still thinking about his creation even now.

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This is an ad, on the first page of the first issue of Compute Magazine, for “the pet program” from “softside software,” names all in lowercase. I have no idea if any copies of these programs remains in existence in our universe, but two places to look would be zimmers.net’s FTP archive and the Silicon PET Archive, and even in this era of the internet there are a fair number of PET software archives remaining.

Softside was far from the only company to put out its hopeful shingle through the pages of early computer magazines. At the time, magazine publishing worked with a lead time of several months. It is possible that Softside Software had gone under even by the time this ad saw print, but then again maybe not. A forum thread on AtariAge mentions several BASIC games sold by a “SoftSide,” apparently an Atari 8-bit magazine-on-disk, but they were based in New Hampshire, and the Softside of the ad was in New York.

Notes on the programs proffered:

1. Graphics Pac 2: I’m not sure what they mean, as the reference I’ve found claims the PET didn’t have a bitmapped display, but there were several models, and further add-on cards that added bitmapped displays, an 80-column mode, and even (gasp) color. A simple “Microsette” itself would not be enough. We are near the end of the PET’s reign as Commdore’s core product though.
2. Assembler 2001: It is easy to laugh this off nowadays when assemblers are mostly free software (and thank frog for that), but this was before that, and before the internet. $16 is a great price for an assembler from that time.
3. Bike. Apparently it was a Hammurabi/Lemonade Stand style game, where you made business decisions through simple menus and entering figures. Maybe someday someone will write such a game about running Commodore. You might scoff at the warning that “Bike is dangerously addictive,” but standards were lower then. It was 1979; Wizardry wouldn’t be published until 1981. “Worth a million in fun, we’ll offer Bike at $9.95.” I admire their chutzpah.
4. Pinball. “Dynamic usage of the PET’s graphics features” would have meant using its hardcoded, unchangable ROM graphics character set, with no sprites. “With sound!” That would mean its simple piezoelectric speaker. Don’t expect Raul Julia’s voice, or even Gorgar’s, to talk to you from the machine.
5. Super Doodle. Certainly of no relation to Omni Software’s popular Commodore paint program. Super Doodle lets you use any number of colors so long as they’re black or green, and a resolution of 40×25 characters. “Why waste any more paper.” Well probably because loading your notes off of tape would take too long.
6. Driving Ace. Offers two games for $9.95. The description doesn’t give a good sense of what they were like, but there are essentially only three kinds of racing game: scrolling in one direction (Monaco GP style), one screen or scrolling all around (Sprint style), and 3D (Pole Position through to Ridge Racer to F-Zero). I presume one of these is like Sprint and the other is like Monaco GP; I don’t think the PET was capable of even a slight approximation of 3D, but then, Pole Position’s hardware shouldn’t have been capable of what it could do either.

The ad is from Compute Magazine, most often stylized as COMPUTE! with an exclamation point, grew out of The PET Gazette in 1979. That former publication centered around the computing devices from Commodore International’s subsidiary, Commodore Business Machines. CBM had been around for over two decades up to that point as a maker of typewriters, adding machines and calculators, but in a maverick move by its co-founder and president Jack Tramiel, they bought MOS Technologies, which had just startled the nascent computing world by creating an ultra low cost microprocessor, the 6502. Tramiel had learned from a bit of a bastard move by Texas Instruments, who used their ownership of much of their supply chain to release a line of calculators that sold for less than Commodore’s production costs. Now, Tramiel owned the company that produced the chip that would soon launch the personal computing revolution, and could make other chips too, and Commodore was set to soon pull off Texas Instruments’ trick on the home computer industry with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.

But until then they made other computers. They made the KIM-1 “single board computer,” and the PET 2001 and other machines with the PET branding. The PET Gazette’s audience was originally those machines, but burgeoning success convinced them to publish a more generalized 6502-focused magazine, and that magazine was Compute.

I have more to come on Compute, which in many ways was the archetypal type-in program magazine. It was far from the only one; other magazines offering type-in software at the time, names now even more obscure than Compute’s, were Creative Computing, Family Computing, and Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power Play. Compute would for a while languish somewhat in the shadow of its own sister publication, borrowing part of its name from its predecessor, Compute’s Gazette, which focused on Commodore’s computers, the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, and later the Commodore 128.

The PET Gazette was founded by Small System Services Inc., and was published out of a shop, the Corner Computer Store, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Presumably that changed as the subscription rolls increased. Eventually Compute would be sold to ABC Publishing, a subsidiary of the broadcast network, and it would continue happily for several years. When its fortunes began to wane it was sold, first to Penthouse Publishing (really!), where its logo was redone to resemble that of its own publication Omni, then later to Ziff-Davis, who only wanted its subscriber list anyway; I don’t think they ever published an issue. As it became clearer that the future would be MS-DOS and Mac, its focus shifted, but they kept up their small systems focus for surprisingly long. I don’t think the Penthouse era provided any coverage that wasn’t DOS, Windows or Mac, but it would take time to check. Corrections later, if necessary.

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The Man Behind Jumpman: Retro Gaming Revealed (Youtube, 58 minutes)

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The Commodore games that won out are Ballblazer, Castelian, Die Hard (but the C64 version’s really different), Ghostbusters, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Q*Bert and (surprisingly) Smash T.V. Decent C64 games that nevertheless lost are Blades of Steel, Commando, Donkey Kong, Mighty Bomb Jack and Super Mario Bros. (rated were both the similar Great Giana Sisters and the recent fanmade version of SMB that uses advanced scrolling tricks). Gyruss, Mario Bros. and Pac-Man were rated at a tie.

Nintendo vs Commodore 64, 28 Games Compared (Youtube, 46 minutes)

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In 1987, programmers Robert Germino and David Todeshini wrote a weird and obscure Commodore 64 game called The Red Obelisk. It barely made a dent in the market, which is kind of a shame. It’s nearly entirely unique, which is a difficult thing to say of any game 36 years after its publication.

Part of why it’s not remembered much today might be how unique it is. It’s mostly a game about alchemy, but not as much in an Opus Magnum kind of way. You’re given an object, kind of like a gemstone, found in an asteroid belt. You shock it with electricity, zap it with lasers, and shoot sound waves at it. All of this is depicted in an illustrated laboratory, with surprisingly atmospheric graphics and sounds. Doing these things may increase its value. You can sell it at any point to earn energy proportionate to its value, which you need to run your ship and guard against hazards, and points. Your real goal though is to create a Red Obelisk

An earlier work of theirs was Sentinel, of which there’s even less information online.

I played a bit of The Red Obelisk and uploaded a recording to Youtube. I don’t do too well. Here is that video (7 minutes):

Both The Sentinel and The Red Obelisk, and another game I think they made called Phaserdome, were included on a disk called Master Blaster put out by Keypunch Software. Keypunch wasn’t a great organization; there are tales of them taking freeware games, scrubbing them of information by which their creators might be identified, and then selling that on a disk. It was before the widespread adoption of the Internet, the World Wide Web was still three years away, so it was easier to get away with that sort thing than it is now.

Later on The Red Obelisk got picked up for an issue of Loadstar, and the veracity of its editors I vouch for completely. I haven’t yet checked their products for the other games. Sentinel is also on Loadstar. The documentation I retyped below suggests they have another game on Loadstar as well. Both The Red Obelisk and Sentinel are on the Internet Archive, but you can get legal and paid-for copies for $15 of the first 199 issues (Loadstar was amazingly long-lived) via LOADSTAR COMPLEAT, still sold by its long-time Managing Editor, my friend Fender Tucker. The Red Obelisk is on LS64 issue 58.

The game is fully described in its instructions, below, so I’ll just give you some of my own impressions. It’s interesting! It has to have something to it for it to have persisted in my memory for so long. I think the game is implemented in BASIC with some machine code routines to handle the real-time portions. This is a perfectly valid way to implement a game; I did it often myself back then. It’s pretty much the only way to get the smoothly-moving asteroids and slick sound effects the game has.

What I remember the most is the Object Mode, where you zap various objects on your workbench in the hopes of creating a hugely valuable Red Obelisk. Everything you do costs energy, and running out destroys your ship, so efficiency is a must. In order to succeed you must take notes as to how each object behaves. Basic directions are given in the instructions: get the Tolerance below 100 with electricity, and the Temperature above 500 with lasers. Is that all there is to these tools? It has been too long for me to remember, but I do remember finding a string of Red Obelisks at one point, so there must be some process to it. Experiment to see what you can find.

The other thing I remember is the noise that your ship makes when you collect an object. All of the sounds in The Red Obelisk are effective, but that noise found a home in my brain when I played it decades ago, and it has never left. I think it probably never will.

What follows are the instructions to the game as included on Loadstar 58, as written by Fender himself, with section headings and minor formatting added by me.

THE RED OBELISK

by Robert Germino and David Todeschini

One of the safest bests of the 21st Century is that treasures will be found in space in the form of small meteors. They may be grey and drab-looking on the outside but inside will be jewels and precious gems, just waiting for the mining engineers to extract them. But it won’t be easy.

If you are a veteran of the universe of STURGRAT (on LOADSTAR #54) you will have an idea of the complexity of 21st Century space mining.

Setting

In THE RED OBELISK you are in control of a mining company. You must gather some object from space and by using the powers of your factory, you can ‘sell’ them for the maximum profit. Your goal, as is any capitalist’s, is to garner as many shekels as you can.

Let me describe your ship first. It is a Sturgrat space mining/laboratory and short-range fighting vessel. It operates in three modes, the Object Mode, the Mining Mode and the Attack Mode. You begin in the Object Mode (which is the inside of your laboratory) where you get a readout of all the capabilities of the Sturgrat.

Object Mode

The most important thing to keep your eyes on is the POWR rating in the lower right of the screen. If this gets too low, you will lose your ship, and, as is shown right above the POWR display, you only have two, not counting the one you begin with.

But your power is running down so you can’t tarry too long making decisions. And believe me, there are a lot of them to make.

You begin with an object on the conversion table. Its type is shown on the left. The idea is to process this object and then convert it into SCORE and POWR. You have to get the tolerance down and the temperature up.

These two values are shown on the left, TOLR and TEMP. You hold down the E key (for the electrodes) for a short period of time and notice that when you let up the TOLR has gone down. Get it down below 100. Press L (for the lasers) the same way to get the TEMP above 500. Since your POWR is going down all of the time, it pays to do these two things quickly and efficiently. They MUST be done for each object.

In the bottom left hand corner is the value of the object (VALU). As a true capitalist, you will want this figure as high as possible before you convert it into cash (SCORE).

You can increase the value of the object by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. Press U and then push the joystick forward and listen to the pitch of the sound. Press the firebutton and the VALU will increase by a certain amount. If you want to increase the VALU faster, push forward on the stick, the pitch will increase and so will the amount the VALU increases when you press the firebutton.

You can get too greedy with VALU. If you’ve increased it too high, the object will be destroyed and will disappear from the screen.

A good Sturgrat miner will write down the TYPE of object and try to discern the maximum VALU an object of that type can attain WITHOUT destroying itself at conversion. Write this figure down, too.

If you convert at too low a VALU, you will only get the VALU, but if you convert it at just below the ‘peak’ VALU of an object, it’ll be transformed into the incredibly valuable RED OBELISK, which, in more ways than one, is the name of the game. It’s up to you to determine each object’s ‘peak’ value.

You cannot do much more in the Ultrasonics mode. Press U to toggle out of it (if you are in it) and then you are ready for conversion. You do this by pressing RETURN. You’ll either (a) convert it for the present VALU, (b) create a RED OBELISK (which pays off handsomely) or (c) find yourself looking at a dreaded FALSE OBELISK. If you see one of these, you have to act quickly and destroy it by firing Caps at it (the F key) or by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. If a FALSE OBELISK is left to itself it will destroy your current ship and its cargo.

Mining Mode

Which brings up the question: Where do objects come from?

You have to space-mine them. Press the SPACE bar to go from the Object Mode to the Mining Mode. You’ll see your Sturgrat drifting through a meteor field. Use the joystick to maneuver around the meteors trying to capture the small, shining object that is floating slowly across the screen. The object must be captured DIRECTLY in the Sturgrat’s scoop. Even a small bit off-line will cause your ship damage.

You have a tractor beam which you can enable with the firebutton. It will draw the gleaming object up the screen where the action is less hectic.

As a matter of fact, the top of the screen is a safe place where you can scoop up hydrogen molecules with your tractor beam and slowly boost your POWR if you are running low.

You can gather up to nine objects at a time or you can gather just one and head back to convert it. To go back to the Object Mode, press RETURN.

Attack Mode

You begin your stint as space-miner with 3 ships and 3 Caps, but as your POWR gets higher (above 1500 megajoules) your Sturgrat becomes more attractive to marauding space-hijackers. When you least expect it you will be attacked.

The message says that you have lost the object on the conversion table and that the marauder wants to know if you surrender or not. If you surrender, you won’t lose your ship but you’ll have to continue with what you have. If you answer N to the surrender prompt you go to the Attack Mode.

This is the arcade portion of your mission. Move the joystick so that the cross-hairs are on the middle of the attacking ship and press the firebutton to fire. Keep an eye on your POWR level. If you are in danger of losing your ship you can weaken or destroy the marauder with a Giga-Gem by pressing the G key.

Giga-Gems can destroy any cargo that the attacker may have, so you should use them only as a last resort. When you have bludgeoned the attacker into submission he’ll ask if he can trade his cargo for his life. If you feel in a benevolent mood (or in a greedy one) you’ll probably do better accepting his offer and letting him limp off into space.

If you choose to destroy the enemy, you may be able to salvage some of his Caps. If you let him live you may get CRGO (objects), Krystals or Giga-Gems. Base your decision on what you need most.

The Krystals (KRYS) cam be converted in the Object Mode by pressing K. A Krystal is mainly a bonus score you get for defeating a marauder and being kind enough to let him slither off alive.

That’s about it. It will take a little practice with the controls of your Sturgrat but soon you will be grabbing objects and converting them like crazy hoping to find a level for each TYPE of object that will give you a RED OBELISK. As your POWR rating goes up you will have to fight off space-raiders more. Try to get the highest score so that you can head back to Earth a rich man.

As for the trip back to Earth, that’s another game, but one I’m sure Bobby and David will be creating soon. Sturgrat rules! Long may it run.

DISK FILES THIS PROGRAM USES: RED BOOT, RED BOOT 2, RED OBELISK, SPR1, T.RED BOOT

**** End of Text ****

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Look at that title and marvel a bit. Doom on a C64! What an idea. How could it even be possible? What an age we live in. It is a time of wonders. Children are our future.

Of course there’s more to it than that. There is a whole class of “retro” game that amounts to implementing the actual game on separate hardware, and using the supposed host platform as a glorified display and input device. That’s what’s going on in this case. Doom is really being run on a Raspberry Pi in a plug-in cartridge on a processor that’s underpowered by modern standards but far outpaces that of even Doom’s base configuration, and is thousands of times more powerful than the Commodore 64 to which it pipes its output.

But there’s still some technical interest in the means. The device that runs it is a “RAD Expansion Unit,” a DIY device that emulates a C64 RAM expansion, and apparently can even take over from the 6510 CPU and drive the system’s hardware directly. It works by writing to the VIC-II video and SID sound chips itself.

There was still a lot of coding work required to make this possible. A C64 has somewhat decent sound hardware, but the VIC-II chip has severe limitations on what it can display. The Raspberry Pi has to take the game’s display and port it, in real-time, to a graphics chip that can only display up to four colors (out of only 16) in each character cell, and that’s by sacrificing half of its horizontal resolution. Doing that on the fly itself is a noteworthy hack.

Could it be possible to run DOOM on a C64 without such assistance? At native resolution, ha ha ha: no. The memory limitations are too grievous, so at the very least you’ll need a RAM expansion.

I’ve mused at times on whether it might be possible if one uses the character screen as a kind of super-low-resolution graphics mode, each 8×8 character block representing either a 2×2 pixel grid (so, a resolution of 80×50) or a single pixel (40×25). Even at such a resolution 60 fps is probably out of the question, for it takes a lot of cycles to change every tile every frame, but maybe at 30 or 20? 15, 12, 10? (60 is divisible by a lot of numbers.) I will leave that question to people who are more current with C64 assembly coding.

Here is a demonstration video:

Doom on C64 – A playable tech demo for the RAD Expansion Unit for Commodore 64/128 (Youtube, 19 minutes) – Github repository

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According to this forum post, classic Commodore 64 database and information archive site Gamebase 64 has been stricken by the death of their webmaster Steven Feurer, and unless they can find someone to replace him soon, and likely provide alternate hosting too, their site will follow him into the Great Beyond.

As time passes, these kinds of events will happen more and more often, so please, if you maintain a website, of any kind sure but our remit is games so let’s say game-related site, please take measures to ensure its continuity in the unfortunate event of your passing. And if you can help Gamebase64 out, please consider it?

Bye, bye, Gamebase64?

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There are three current ways to play M.U.L.E. One is Planet M.U.L.E., an official port sponsored by Ozark Softscape, which is several years old, and I was certain I had posted here about before. It’s a proper update with new graphics and a lot of character. A thing about M.U.L.E. is that the original versions were intricately designed in a lot of ways, not just in game rules but the little details. The way the phase ending noise speeds up, the exact difficulty of catching a Wampus, the speeds with which players walk through terrain, the many details of auctions, even the time it takes to outfit a mule and leave/enter town, it’s all finely calculated. You can tell that Dani cared deeply about the game, and it’s a polished as any game I’ve ever seen, and that’s the old 8-bit computer versions. Planet M.U.L.E. isn’t as polished, but it’s still very nice, and you can tell its makers thought hard about it. It offers both local and online play.

Sadly, Planet M.U.L.E. seems to be on life support. While games can still be played, and the automated best player posts still go up on its blog, it’s not gotten an update in years, and it’s even possible they’ve lost the source code.

One legacy of Planet M.U.L.E. is a wonderful Youtube video they made that explains the game and how to play. It’s a great introduction:

M.U.L.E. Returns was a mobile port. It has a website, that’s still around, but apparently none of those versions are available. It’s got a page for a Steam version, but it’s not available despite the original game being released in 2013. The site claims it may come back some day, but it cannot be purchased currently.

Then there’s the new roboanimal on the block, M.U.L.E. Online, which is on itch.io for a very reasonable $5. It has the blessing of Ozark Softscape, and is a near match for the Atari 800 version. You won’t get any improved graphics or sound here, but you will get a game that copies the original very closely, which is perfectly fine in my opinion. It offers local single and multiplayer, as well as internet-based online play. They also promote a board game version of M.U.L.E, which I’ve long wanted to try!

Or there’s emulation. Back in college I played M.U.L.E. with roommates via an Atari 800 emulator burnt to a Dreamcast disk, a great way to play if you have the system, controllers and means to construct the disk because the Dreamcast has four controller ports. (M.U.L.E. is by far at its best when you have four people playing.) The Commdore 64 and IBM PC versions were also made by Dani and the others at Ozark Softscape. The C64 port is close to the Atari 8-bit version. I don’t know about the DOS PC version. I can say that the NES version made by Mindscape is a terrible version, while sadly possibly the most-played because of the great popularity of the NES. If you tried that version and wondered what the fuss is about, you should seek out the Atari 8-bit version and play it before writing off the game entirely.

World Of Mule is a fansite dedicated to M.U.L.E. in all its forms. For its 40th anniversary, they’ve published a long retrospective on the game, its history and the new versions. (That’s where the above image comes from.) It’s a fitting tribute to one of the most influential computer games ever made.

Long ago, on primordial wiki-like site everything2.com, I personally wrote a long examination and play guide to M.U.L.E. While my writing style back then was pretty crazy, I think the information holds up. If you have an interest, you may want to take a look.

Planet Mule ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)

M.U.L.E. Returns (versions currently unavailable)

M.U.L.E. Online (itch.io, Windows, Mac and Linux, $5)

World of M.U.L.E. (carpeludum.com)

M.U.L.E. The Board Game (boardgamegeek item page)

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The C64 had a lot of graphics features, made possible by the machine’s powerful VIC-II chip. All of the home computers of the time had tricks one could use to get extra mileage out of their bespoke graphics hardware. The Atari 8-bit computers had display lists, for instance. The VIC-II had a powerful raster interrupt facility, the ability to share memory with the processor (at the cost of delaying the whole machine while it did so), eight surprisingly large hardware sprites (in double-width mode they could fill a whole scanline, something the NES’ sprites could only dream of doing), and a collection of interesting and flexible graphics modes.

Most of the time the C64 was in character mode, which was the standard kind of tile-based mode that pretty much all home computers at the time used by default, suitable for displaying messages, coding and some graphics. The ’64 three such modes: the standard mode where each character had a single color along with the screen-wide background color; a multicolor mode that gave a character its own color, up to two colors shared throughout the screen and that background color, and (mumble mumble). Sorry, what’d I say? I’ll get to that later.

The system also had two bitmapped modes that worked similarly, just directly viewing a region of memory instead of using each byte as an index into a character set. One mode was like the standard character mode, where the 1s in the bitmap were colored and the 0s were the background color; the other was multicolor mode, which similarly worked like it did in multicolor character mode: one color per 8×8 region, two colors shared throughout the screen, and the background color.

The problem with multicolor mode was, you had to trade horizontal resolution to use it. The big limiting factor to many computers’ graphics then was memory use: finding a way to encode the graphics information so the chip could access it and convert it into a video signal quickly enough to meet the needs of the display. So, to fit an 8-pixel-wide section of screen into the single byte it needed to be squeezed into, it could either use a one-to-one dot to screen ratio, or sacrifice two bits for one extra-wide pixel of up to four possible colors.

UNLESS

The Commodore 64 had a fifth graphics mode. The one I mumbled over earlier. The much-ignored Extended Background Color mode.

It was another character based mode that, instead of forcing you to make use of one background color over the whole screen, gave you up to four such colors. Every cell on the screen could display a character using its full 8×8 resolution, but could also pick which of those background colors it could have. Useful!

Well… not as useful as you’d think. There’s always a tradeoff, and Extended Background Color’s tradeoff was a dire one. How does the VIC-II chip know which background color to use for each character cell? It uses the two high-order bits of each character byte. Meaning, while you could decide which of two colors would be used in each cell with a lot greater nuance, you only had 64 characters to work with! A full screen of 1,000 characters is a lot to fill with just 64 possible tiles. A lot of repetition would be unavoidable, which is probably why it was so little-used.

It essentially was either this:

or this

These images are a little misleading, because I used the Commodore 64’s default ROM character set to make them, and the second half of its characters are just mirror images of the first half. But if you define your own characters, which basically any game worth its salt will do, it greatly reduces the number of tiles at your disposal. There may be some sneaky ways around it, sure, but they all involve their own tradeoffs.

I explain all this because Extended Background Color Mode is my best guess as to how Trap Door and Popeye do their graphics.

Here’s video of a playthrough of Popeye. It’s about 21 minutes, but it shouldn’t take long to get what I mean. It’s not Nintendo’s Popeye, it’s a completely different game.

And here’s a playthrough of Trap Door, with graphics by the same person:

Look at those huge characters! How could this be possible, and with that color depth? The C64 can have huge sprites, but only at the cost of making all their dots twice as tall and/or wide. And the pixels aren’t even multicolor mode wide. I can’t quite make sense out of it! Unless, maybe the games are displaying their large characters using the character set, which explains why they jerk along the screen? And the colors are using Extended Background Mode? That might explain the simplicity of the backgrounds, with only 64 characters to work with that means a lot of reused tiles.

I guess the point of this post is: what gives?

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Back on my Commodore coding days I became very familiar with these characters. I think they’re much more universally-applicable for graphic use than the IBM equivalent, the famous Code Page 437, although that’s mostly because PETSCII doesn’t bother defining supporting so many languages. Code Page 437 also uses a lot of its space for single and double-line versions of box-drawing characters, although on the other hand it doesn’t waste characters defining reverse-video versions of every glyph.

PETSCII has:

• A space and reversed space, of course.
• Line drawing characters for boxes of course: vertical and horizontal lines, corners, and three- and four-way intersections. There are also curved versions of the corners.
• More line-drawing characters for borders.
• Still more horizontal and vertical lines, at each pixel position within their box.
• With the reverse-video versions, enough characters to effectively do a 80×50 pixel display, as if it had a super low-res mode.
• Different thicknesses of horizontal and vertical lines too.
• Diagonal lines, and a big ‘X’. Note that on the PET and Vic-20 these lines were all one pixel wide, but on later computers with both better resolution and color graphics they were made thicker, which means diagonal lines have “notches” between character cells.
• Other miscellaneous symbols: playing card symbols, filled and hollow balls, and some checkerboards for shading. On the PET and Vic, the shading characters were finer, while on the other 8-bit computers they were made of 2×2 boxes.

There are resources that let you use PETSCII to create old-school computer art, like this PETSCII editor, Petmate and Playscii, and for a bunch of examples of what you can do with it you can browse through the Twitter account PETSCIIBots. And this blog post from 2016 both makes the case for PETSCII as a medium for art and provides some great examples of it.

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Aah that’s a screen I haven’t seen in a long long time.

1982 saw the founding of the Apple II computer magazine-on-disk Softdisk. Soon after Softdisk Publishing produced disks for other home computers too. One of them, Big Blue Disk, has gone down in history as previous employer of some of the original principals of id Software, especially John Carmack and John Romero. But another of Softdisk’s legacies was their Commodore 64 product, Loadstar, probably the longest-lived Commodore 64 software publisher. They published C64 software from 1984 to 2007. And most, if not all, of it is available online!

Loadstar is yet another of those computer gaming stories that must be told, and I’m in a pretty good place to tell some of it, because I beta tested for them for many of those years, and sold programs to them as well. Yes, several of their releases bear the programmer name John “The Mad Gamer” Harris. You have to understand, this was long before the word gamer reached common usage. In fact, as someone who may have primacy over the use of the term, I hereby forbid its use by anyone with misogynistic, anti-trans or racist intent. It is so decreed, hey-nonny-nonny!

Loadstar was lots of fun. Every month they’d send you two disks in the mail with several new pieces of Commodore 64 software on it. Under the watchful eyes of Fender Tucker and Jeff Jones, and later on Dave Moorman, it’s not that they grew an empire of Commodore programs, but they did manage to sustain that platform for a small but avid userbase for far longer than you’d have thought possible.

I plan to start doing Loadstar reviews eventually, but in the meantime, you can try out some of the later issues of this important piece of computing history at the site linked below. Note that you’ll have to have a means of running C64 software to use them, of course. The emulator VICE is known to work well. And if you want to hear the words of Fender, Jeff or Dave yourself, all three are on Facebook.

The LOADSTAR Library

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Let’s make it quick this week-

Oli Welsh at Polygon tells us what we already knew, that No Zelda Game is Closer to Breath of the Wild Than The 1986 Original. We can’t recommend it whole-heartedly though because it gets in some digs on the older game, saying it’s nowhere near as much fun as Link to the Past, a statement I disagree with.

Hope Bellingham at GamesRadar tells us that U.S. Customs wrecked a sealed-in-box copy of Pokemon Yellow valued at over $10,000. I rather disagree with that valuation too. I thought all the misguided young people were losing their money in crypto these days? (Note: GamesRadar is one of those sites that waits until you start reading an article then puts up a blocking box begging you to subscribe. Hint to GamesRadar: NO, and if I were interested in subscribing my generous impulse would have been destroyed by your prompt!)

At the Guardian, the very British-named Oliver Wainwright reviews Super Mario World, not the game but the theme park in California, a part of Universal Studios Hollywood. The verdict: 8/10, good graphics, some replay value. I’ve been in a melancholy frame of mind as of late, so seeing those brightly-painted dioramas makes me wonder what they’ll look like in twenty years, when Universal Studios’ attentions have drifted to another big thing. Nothing ages quite as badly as a happy prop painted in primary colors.

I said I was going to make this quick, let’s keep moving. Maya Posch at hackaday talks about a project to build a Commodore 64 using new parts.

Ollie Reynolds found some Donkey Kong design documents on Twitter, from the days when it was planned to be a Popeye game. He found them retweeted by blogfriend Mike Mika of Digital Eclipse, who in turn found them looking through Mario history site Forest of Illusion.

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Lucasarts went on to have a long legacy of adventure games, and while it’s gone now and most of its progeny is owned by some mouse creature, it survives in a number of forms, like the upcoming Monkey Island re-revival.

Another legacy of Lucasarts and SCUMM is what is possibly the first graphical MUD, called Habitat.

What? You don’t know what a MUD is, or a MOO or a MUCK? A lot of knowledge is in danger of being lost, but we don’t have time to remind you of rudiments here.

Habitat was an early experiment in online communities, a server-based virtual world whose clients were Commodore 64s. In appearance it looks a whole lot like a multiplayer version of Maniac Mansion.

It never went public, but did eventually become a paid feature, in modified form. on the C64 online service QuantumLink under the name Club Caribe. Then, with the wane of the Commodore 64 as a viable platform, QuantumLink closed their servers and rebranded as America On-Line, a.k.a. AOL. And that is not only history at this point, but ancient history. Read more about it here.

While there was still competition in the dial-up online service space, two creators of Habitat, Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar, partnered with Fujitsu to have another go at a Habitat-style service, this time called WorldsAway. They partnered with AOL competitor CompuServe, and didn’t do badly for a while.

There’s all kinds of things to talk about here, and I have rather more knowledge than most because I was involved with this, I was volunteer staff at the flagship WorldsAway world, called Dreamscape. I was a participant in the CompuServe forum before the main service even opened, I spend an entire night on the phone as a teen, our old 486DX running Windows 3.11 downloading the client software.

WorldsAway was basically my life for a few years. It could be incredibly addicting, and spirits were high in the early days. There was a feeling of being at the forefront of something. The Internet was just starting to become really big. Who knew what it would become?

What happened to WorldsAway is a story, one that I’m probably not qualified to tell. I know there were problems with business management even from the start. The world staff was constantly said to be fighting with higher-ups, who wanted to cheapen or diminish the project. In size, certainly, the initial world Dreamscape never got anywhere as large as what we hoped for. Even compared to the size of its Commodore 64 predecessor Club Caribe, it was pretty small.

It’s said that they were a west coast operation, and many of their staffers were queer. One of the eventual spinoff worlds that WorldsAway would spawn was explicitly queer-friendly. Given the successes and continued struggles of queer-friendly media on the internet today, I feel like WA’s acceptance of alternate lifestyles should probably be better known.

I still have a couple of friends from those days. Others I’ve sadly lost touch with. A few friends from that time, notably Tiggles, Esme, and Rosaleah, have departed our physical world as well. Maybe some comfort could be had in the idea that maybe they’re users in some higher-order reality, who may have logged-off of our world, but are still out there in a more profound form. If they’re out there and somehow seeing this: please spare a thought for me. I’ll be back out there some day.

The Reno Project is a website devoted to preserving as much of those early projects, those ancient times, as possible. You could immerse yourself in the screenshots there, and dream of a past era that barely was. One of its competitors at the time, which is a bit better known today, is The Palace. One other service that still exists that competed with it is There, although good luck making an account (I tried). And Second Life of course continues to chug along. All of these things seem to me like more worthy projects than Zuckerberg’s latest progeny.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

It’s been a bit difficult getting consistent signals from Earth lately, and what has gotten through hasn’t been of too much interest to my gelatinous brain. Maybe some of this might pique your interest?

Jonathan Bolding at PC Gamer says that playing dual-screen with a Steam Deck proves the Wii-U was a good idea! I knew it! What they’re talking about is the ability of a Steam Deck to play dual-headed via HDMI out. This play style is explicitly supported in Wii-U emulator Cemu. The article also notes that Valve has stated that the Steam Deck has out-performed sales estimates, which is good! After the Steam Link and Steam Controller were put on sale for ultra-cheap, I was feeling bad about scooping them up as Valve was clearing out stock. Not too bad, though.

Here’s some news from a different source than usual. At romhacking.net, creator Michael Nix has been working on a pair of GUI rom editors for Super Mario Bros. 3! One, SMB3-Foundry, is for editing levels, and the other, SMB3-Scribe, edits overworlds. A game like SMB3 is a bewilderingly complex beast under the hood, and the strictures of platform, rom space and development time sometimes force unorthodox decisions, like hardcoding some object placements. There is an article to be written some time about the lengths NES carts had to go through to encode their data, which was usually done using a kind of domain-specific data compression.

I have been avoiding linking CBR.com for a bit because of some excessively clickbait headlines, but a recent device change has reset my killfile, so they’re back. Shane Foley from there reports on series nadir Metroid Other M having one level that made it worthwhile. The “level” in question is in fact the entire postgame; up until the main boss, the whole game is heavily on rails, with full exploration only possible afterward.

At Polygon, Nicole Carpenter mentions the content warnings on new indie title I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, which has a number of traumatic events in the game, but is quite upfront about what will occur, going so far as asking the player if they’d like to be spoiled regarding which characters die, or may die. It is a heartening development.

Keith Stuart at the Guardian has a retrospective on gaming on the Commodore 64 at age 40. That old huh. Naw, that doesn’t immediately paralyze me with fear.

(Note: the Guardian is in one of those phases where they nag you with a huge yellow subscription ad. It can be easily closed, and not nearly as bad as some sites out there, but it happens. One article I checked this time-I will not link them-had autoplaying overlaid videos in the corner, which resulted in them being ejected from this post. Bad web designer, no biscuit!)

Shaun Musgrave at Touch Arcade lists the best recent iPhone game updates. Mentioned are Baba Is You (yay!), Genshin Impact, and Mini Metro (yay again!).

Destructoid’s Chris Carter lists Switch games that make substantive use of the right Joycon’s IR sensor.

Blogfriend Kyle Orland at Ars Technica reports on Fabrice Breton, creator of indie game Brok the Investigator, and their efforts to track down Steam key scammers, curators who would ask devs for free Steam keys but then sell them. As usual from Kyle it’s great and informative reading!

From Alice Newcome-Beill at The Verge, a report on a new version of a Switch Pro controller from 8BitDo, who seem to make good products, although they note they have not yet received the controller for testing.

And for our weekly eyeroll exercises, it’s been reported everywhere but GamesRadar hasn’t been seen in these pages yet so let’s give the link to them: Benjamin Abbott relates that Disney is releasing a Magic: The Gathering style trading card game going by the name of (roll your eyes now!) Lorcana. I’m already brainstorming jokes to make about it as they leak its features over the coming weeks!

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The always great Indie Retro News mentions, from Pretzel Logic, a Commodore port of one of the best Odyssey 2 games, K.C. Munchkin (itch.io, $0)!

Why is this interesting? The machinations of the old old days of video games are so easily forgotten now. K.C. Munchkin was a big seller for the underdog in the second-generation video game sweepstakes, but was taken off the market by court order way back then for being too similar to Pac-Man. Although Magnavox managed to come back a bit with sequel K.C.’s Krazy Chase, they remained a distant third in the market.

The C64 version has multiple modes, including a random maze mode and editor like the original, also has an arcade mode with 96 mazes!

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The always terrific 8-Bit Show And Tell shows us some secret codes for old cartridge-based C64 games that reveal they were developed by Andy Finkel. These are recent finds! I had the C64 port of Lazarian growing up, and much later I was surprised to find out I prefer it to the arcade version, the C64 version feels more polished and has better music!

Along the way we’re also taught about the super-obscure Commodore product the Max Machine, which is like a severely stripped-down C64 with a bad keyboard, no ports for storage devices, and only 2K of RAM, but including the C64’s iconic VIC-II and SID chips. It was designed solely to run cartridge software. The Max is mentioned on the C64 Programmer’s Reference Guide, where I saw it long ago and had to wonder what the heck that was about. Turns out the Commodore 64 has a compatibility mode that lets it run Max Machine carts!

The Max Machine only saw release in Japan, where it was very obscure. Just think, if Commodore had put a full 64K into that, maybe it could have supplanted the MSX? Well maybe not, but it’s interesting to think about!

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