Tag: galaxian

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

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

It was known that there’s unused text in the cartridge ROM of Star Battle identifying Iwata as its author. Robin of 8-Bit Show And Tell had a look at the code in a monitor (27 minutes), and discovered that there’s a section that would have printed the credit from Iwata and HAL Laboratory to the screen but for the flag that would have triggered its display not being set. A change of a single byte from 0 to 1, and Iwata’s name gets printed to the screen in flashing colors!

While examining the code, Robin discovered a place where it reads the states of the two Shift keys and the Commodore key, and loads a 1 if they’re all pressed at once, but then throws the value away without doing anything with it. He speculates that this was the trigger for the easter egg showing Iwata’s name and HAL Laboratory, but for some reason was removed before release. Robin figured out a way to restore the egg by changing just a few bytes, and lo, in the modified version it works!

I remember the title screen for Pinball Spectacular on the C64 has a credit for HAL Laboratory. Whether Iwata coded it too is, I fear, lost to the ages. But how weird is it that the future president of Nintendo, the interviewer of all those Iwata Asks articles, originator of the Nintendo Directs and long time programmer for HAL got his start coding those little cartridges for Commodore. They just don’t make them like that any more.

About Arcade Game Startup Displays

I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.

Yesterday they broke their silence with an examination of the startup routines of arcade Galaxian, Teddy Boy, Joust 2, Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. It’s “only” 41 minutes, but it’s hugely informative of the necessities of how and why arcades games go about arcading:

I will summarize. The main task an arcade machine must do upon startup is test as much of the hardware as it is able and confirm that it’s operational. The main part of this is testing the various memory types comprising the machine’s storage systems: audio, video and work RAM, and program and graphics ROM. Not just to test them, but to stop operation and alert the operator if something is awry. The garbage often shown on-screen on powerup is a direct result of writing and reading 0s and 1s to and fr0m every bit in the video RAM. The system must also check the contents of the ROM, which is usually done by adding all the values in each bank and comparing them to a known total, literally called a “checksum.”

It’s a fine explainer, even if they didn’t cover my personal favorite game startup, that of Twinbee and Gradius with the Bubble Memory system . The storage media of the game was unreliable unless it had physically warmed up, so when turned on it would play music while the game was making itself presentable, known fondly as the Morning Music. I posted about this way back in 2022! Here it is again. It would be an excellent tune to set a wake-up alarm on a cellphone. Just saying.

Adrian’s Digital Basement Uncovers Famicom Galaxian Cheat

Let’s get the link out of the way right off (27 minutes).

Famicom Galaxian, never released in the US until Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1, is a tiny program, even by Famicom/NES standards. It may be the smallest Famicom game; the ROM is only 16K large, taking up just half of the addressable cartridge space.

But even such a little program can hide secrets. Adrian found a multicart with an alternate version of Famicom Galaxian with rapid autofire, and that he preferred to play that than the official one.

And I don’t blame him! Galaxian nowadays, whether a port of the arcade original, is a slow and clunky thing to suffer through, but even back then there were some people who scratched their heads at its popularity. One of them was Craig Kubey, author of the classic-era arcade book The Winner’s Guide to Video Games, who called it the Worst Popular Game. But these problems evaporate if you can just hold down the button and annihilate the aliens, like you were playing Centipede.

Namco must have realized how much better the game would play with more shots, as they made your ship in Galaxian’s successor Galaga fire faster, and can have two shots on-screen at once. four with the double ship. Maybe as a result, Galaga is a lot more fun to play, even today.

Adrian got to wondering about that alternate version, called “Galaxians” in the pirate cart’s menu. He found a ROM image of it online and had a look at its code in Mesen’s code analysis tools and found the first thing the “classic” version of the game on the cart does is write a zero to a specific address in zero page. This, as it turns out, is to ensure a secret cheat is disabled. If a one is written there instead, it produces behavior exactly like the rapid-fire version, which in addition to being able to fire much more quickly recolors the logo on the title screen red.

Is this a disabled cheat function on the original cartridge? Maybe, but maybe not. Adrian found another version of the Galaxian ROM online that doesn’t have the cheat function, disabled or no. It’s unknown if this is an alternate official release, or the only official release. Maybe the version on the pirate cart was hacked to put the code in, or maybe it’s an obscure unreleased version, or else maybe it’s the Famicom Disk System version?

Geez, the mysteries abound concerning this sucky little game! Find out about it yourself here:

Retro365: Apple Galaxian, Star Craft and the Beginnings of Brøderbund

Pretty dry today, a tale on the blog Retro365 about the creation of Apple Galaxian, early action gaming hit for the Apple II, and how it helped establish classic computer publisher Brøderbund, who’d licensed it from the Japanese company Star Craft. It was sold in Ziploc bags, and was an immediate hit.

Here’s what Apple Galaxian looked like in action:

Brøderbund would go on to release many more wonderful programs for home computers, eventually publishing Lode Runner and Myst. Star Craft was still in operation in Japan until 1995. Anyway, please follow the link, it’ll help make up for me having to enter the crossed-o in Brøderbund’s name so many times!

Apple Galaxian: The Vital Japanese Connection (Retro365)

Namco’s Sci-Fi Arcade Timeline

Galaga bugs (image from ricedigital.co.uk)

According to the people at Rice Digital, many of Namco’s games set in the future, including Galaxian, Galaga, Gaplus, Bosconian, Baraduke, Burning Force, and many more, are all part of a common timeline! Namco calls it the UGSF History. Due to the inclusion of Kissy from Baraduke, which was named to be Susumu “Mr. Driller” Hori’s mother, it also drags in the Mr. Driller games, and even Dig Dug! You can read about it on their site here. Namco’s own site concerning it is here.

Hiromi Tengenji of burning force (image from ricedigital.co.uk)

According to their timeline, the earliest game chronologically is Ace Combat 3 (which is not an arcade game), and the latest is Galaga ’88!