Well, yesterday they posted a second video on matters involving formatting disks. (16½ minutes) This time they went over a routine written, for the same drives, that can format a disk in 15 seconds.

So, how can this new formatting method be more than four times faster? In a few ways. The drive’s normal format routine writes 1 bits throughout each entire track; the 15 second formatter doesn’t do anything like that. The stock routine attempts to size the between-sector zones differently depending on how far from the center the track is, and to make that work better it performs a measurement of how fast the drive motor runs. The quick format just uses a same-sized gap throughout the disk. It still reads okay because the drive uses the sync marks to find sectors, it doesn’t try to time the length of gaps when reading, it just looks for a sequence of 10 1 bits in a row. And Commodore’s format routine verifies each track as it’s recorded to the drive; the 15 second format simply moves on, assuming everything worked out.

The result is, the quick formatter does a worse job of setting up the disk, skipping some of the niceties of Commodore’s routine. I wonder if there are some cases where the quick format produces a non-working disk? The video notes that, because there could have been data on the disk before, it could result in cases where the drive gets confused when that leftover data resembles a sync mark or other essential drive structure. Commodore History mentioned at the end of the video that they tried to create such a disk, to see if it caused issues, but was unable to make it happen.

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But the bug isn’t always at fault. The 1541 disk drive takes over a minute and a half to format a disk, but as it turns out it had good reason to, and the time consumed had nothing to do with the C64’s code because the drive does all the work itself; the Commodore 64 just waits throughout the process.

Commodore History goes into considerable detail on the process here (16½ minutes). During formatting the drive wipes out all the data that had been on the disk, lays down syncing structures, writes the disk ID to every sector, puts down the directory track and sets up the Block Allocation Map (BAM), and more. It’s an interesting, if not too useful these days, exploration of what disk drives at the time had to do to make the disk’s magnetic surface usable for data storage.

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Variable Screen Position, or VSP, is basically an abuse of the C64 hardware, a way to make its VIC-II graphics chip do something it’s really not meant to do, a way to get it to get its graphics data from memory in such a way that it does rest on the bedrock of 1K memory boundaries. Perhaps best known for its use in the 1993 classic Mayhem in Monsterland (video, 59 minutes), and more recently the homebrew C64 port of Super Mario Bros.

Without VSP, scrolling on the C64 beyond an eight pixel range is extremely processor intensive, and in fact cannot be done for the full screen in a video frame’s time on unmodified original hardware if moving color RAM is required too. Here is a page that describes it, and how to do it safely, that is, how to live with the memory corruption it causes on some hardware. I had mentioned before that it had to do with messing with the VIC-II memory refresh timing, but this page claims that it’s actually due to the VIC trying to access memory at a time when a read hasn’t stabilized.

Well anyway, here’s video of that C64 port of Super Mario Bros., so you can marvel as the system doing something that’s much easier on the NES.

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In brief:

Mode 0: Up to four independently movable backgrounds, but with some pretty serious color limitations. Mostly got used for title screens.

Mode 1: Up to three backgrounds, two with more colors. The SNES’s most-used mode.

Mode 2: Two backgrounds, with “offset per tile” on one of them that lets the system move columns of tiles vertically by arbitrary amounts. Used for certain special effects, like (along with raster-based scanline placement) the waving flag in Battlemaniacs, Super Turrican 2’s worms and rockets stages and Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack’s rising game boards. Horizontal offset per tile was also possible, but much less used due to the coarseness of the scroll.

Mode 3: Two backgrounds, one of them gets either 256 colors or, using direct color, being able to specify colors without palettes, with 8 bits of RGB value. Often used for high-color stills. Earthbound’s “THE WAR AGAINST GIYGAS!” screen uses it.

Mode 4: Has the high color first layer of Mode 3, and the offset-per-tile effect from Mode 2 for its second layer (which has fewer colors than in Mode 3). Rarely used. Puzzle Bobble uses it for gameplay, to independently shift the playfields from the rest of the gackground.

Mode 5: Two backgrounds, with 16 and 4 colors per tile respectively, but supports high resolution with 512 pixels per scanline. Can’t do transparency (but can kind of fake it with dithering). Notably, the high res menu screens in Secret of Mana use this.

Mode 6: Only one layer, hi-res like the second layer in Mode 5, but supporting offset-per-tile. Often considered completely unused, White_Pointer Gaming found out that Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals does use it during the credits.

Mode 7: The famous mode that supports scaling, shearing and rotation of a single background layer, used for special effects and fancy 3D effects in games like F-Zero, Pilotwings and Super Mario Kart. Supports 256 paletted colors or direct 8-bit RGB color.

Notably though, Mode 7 can’t actually do 3D effects on its own; it has to use another feature called HDMA. It uses a raster effect to change the horizontal scale of the background on each scanline. As it turns out, the calculations to do this on each line are substantial, which is probably why so many games that use Mode 7 to a significant degree use one of the SNES’ coprocessor chips, like the DSP or SA-1, to help the processor out. The video then rounds out with a discussion of the Mosaic function used in such places as the map transitions in Super Mario World and Final Fantasy IV (II).

Elsewhere, Retro Game Mechanics Explained did a 16-part series covering the SNES’ hardware feature in considerable depth.

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MARCHintosh has a website that organizes it, and even offers a style guide. It was created as a fruit-flavored adjunct of similar month-long pun-inspired retrocomputing celebrations DOScember (website currently down for a redesitn) and SepTANDY (doesn’t seem to have a home site at all). Should there be more? VICtober? JUNIX (thanx Ben Zuddist)? I vote yes, regardless of how terrible the pun is! Let’s fill the year with crackling, smoking old tech!

There is lots to find exploring the hashtag #marchintosh, this is just a few items. Level 2 Jeff emulated the original Macintosh on a microcontroller (15 minutes):

Michael MJD emulated Windows on a PowerPC Mac (32 minutes, but running, it should be said, OS/X, not classic MacOS):

Retro Repair Roundup did an hour-long video where they talked about old Macs:

It’s from back in 2019, but Ron’s Computer Videos showed off a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Hypercard stack! (1 hour 16 minutes) They have a whole MARCHintosh playlist too.

More MARCHintosh projects can be found through the #marchintosh tag on Bluesky and Mastodon.

MacOS Timeline

1976 Founding of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), release of Apple I
1977 Release of Apple II
.
. 6 years
.
1984 System 1, release of the original Macintosh
1985
1986 Systems 2–4 (sometime between 1985 and here)
1987 System 5
1988 System 6
1989
1990
1991 System 7, a.k.a. MacOS 7.6
1992
1993
1994 Switchover to PowerPC hardware
1995
1996
1997 MacOS 8
1998 Initial release of iMac, the beginning of the revival of Apple’s fortunes
1998 MacOS 9
1999
2000
2001 Mac OS/X 10.0 Cheetah (“OS 10,” now called MacOS), initial release of iPod
.
. 24 years
.
2026 Today

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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.

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That’s it. That’s all for today. It’s 39 minutes though, so it should keep you going for a while. If you’d like to avoid Youtube and its various vagarities, you can also get it directly from the event website.

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The C64’s VIC-II video chip is a product of many compromises. The C64 could contain so much memory affordably because it used dynamic RAM, which requires periodic refreshes, and one of the tasks of the VIC-II was to handle that. It also needed access to main memory in order to build the display image.

But both of these actions conflict with whatever the processor needs to do, so the computer is designed to actually put the 6510 to sleep when the VIC-II needs to access memory. This is why, when the screen is blanked, the machine runs a little faster and more consistently, and that’s why the screen is blanked when a connected Datasette is loading programs from cassette tape.

VIC-II and FLI timing (part 1 of 3, c64os.com)

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The process is to boot the Gamecube and Gameboy Player with the GBA plugged into it with the cable. Then turn off the Gamecube leaving the Gameboy Advance on, disconnect the GBA cable from the GC, then plug it into the Gamecube adapter plugged into a USB port connected to the Switch. If the GBA is still powered on, it should be usable as a Switch controller at that point, until it’s turned off!

If you don’t have them all that kit, a modded GC or Wii will also suffice for the Gameboy Player. It’s all demonstrated in NotRealEric’s video. There is also some alternate hardware usable, including third-party adapters and connectors. The video is ten minutes long, but the setup is in the first 3½ minutes of it; the rest is demonstrating some use cases, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

The hardest to find of these devices now, if you don’t use modded hardware, is the Gameboy Player, which is quite expensive used. But if you do happen to have all the pieces, it’s quite the hack. It seems to work due to a controller-emulation program the Gameboy Player (or modded GB or Wii running mGBA) sends to the GBA, which, amazingly, is Switch compatible.

Maybe you have a magic combination of gizmos lying around to use this trick, and use a GBA as an extremely limited Switch peripheral? Yeah, let’s not kid ourselves, this is pretty silly and doesn’t have a strong use case, considering that Switches come with two Joycons, but it’s amazing that it works at all.

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This “ultimate” talk is ultimately about the hardware, its internals and quirks, and tricks that can be pulled off in it. Sure, it’s very technical and extremely geeks, but that’s pretty much the standard around these parts. Enjoy!

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Arcade Command didn’t have bad music at all, but Ron Hubbard’s score is generally regarded to outshine it. The two hardware platforms are really different: the C64 has a 6502-workalike and the legendary SID chip, while the arcade version used a custom platform. This is a first video in a projected series, so at this point we don’t even know if he’ll be successful. Let’s hope.

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But everything that happens in a processor is the result of simple logical operations: ANDs, ORs, NOTs, XORs and memory, all connected in different ways. And there’s some redundancy in that list: some of those logic gates can be constructed out of the others. The whole point of computers is you can perform billions of simple operations in a second, and complex operations are made out of lots of simple ones. When you’re working with binary numbers, all you need are simple operations.

Because of this, computers can actually be built out of physical parts, without even electricty, they’ll just be much bigger, and slower, and less durable, and may need some motor attached to them. Mechanical calculators have existed since the 1700s, and in the 50s-70s were common sights in offices. Arguably the first general-purpose computers, Charles Babbage’s Difference Engines (Wikipedia), were made from mechanical parts, but they had the disadvantage of not being made out of colorful pieces of plastic.

Shadowman39, an artiste who works in the medium of K’nex, has made a number of devices out of those construction toys, but an ALU, an Arithmetic Logic Unit that can increment, add, AND and XOR two binary numbers, is probably his most “practical” creation. He shows it off in this 15 minute Youtube video:

This ALU is one part of a larger processor project that’s still being built. I hesitate to call it a “microprocessor,” maybe we should call it a macroprocessor. We wish Shadowman39 the best, and hope he has enough time, energy and parts to realize his wondrous, ludicrous dream.

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Some of the info revealed:

• The game tracks five objects every frame. The player’s base, their shot, and three invader shots. The invaders don’t “count” as moving objects; the Mystery Ship temporarily replaces one of the shots, meaning, while it’s on-screen the aliens can only have two shots on-screen instead of three.
• Only one of the shots is “aimed” to fall on or near the player. The others are just dropped wherever.
• There is a bug where the player’s shot hitting the rightmost shield on the right edge of the screen can be misinterpreted as hitting the last invader on the very left edge.
• The reason the invaders speed up as their numbers are diminished is because the game draws the new position of exactly one invader into the framebuffer per frame. Fewer invaders means each gets to move more often, until the last one gets to move every frame.

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The video mentions that powering the clock and oscillator causes Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal cartridges to run out of battery power, and lose their saved game data, much faster than other Gameboy carts with save game battery. Sorry to break it to you; your Pokemon are probably gone by now. Poor out a health potion for Pikachu.

Another interesting fact revealed is, the clock works by recording raw time since the game was last powered on, and the actual date and time are fully updated when the game is started up. If you wait a long time between plays, over 511 days, the timer can wrap around and lose track of how long it’s been.

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First thing. I’ve mentioned this on social media, and I want to spread the word as much as I can about it, because this is going to catch people by surprise, and this way as many will find out about it going in as possible. In addition to costing $450 at launch, $500 with bundled Mario Kart World, and possibly more if Trump’s moronic tariffs stick, as stated in the direct, the Switch 2 uses a special incompatible variant of Micro SD cards, called Micro SD Express.

They’ve been out for a while, but uptake has been slow, mainly because their chief benefit is transfer speed, and Micro SD is fast enough for most purposes. But since its use in the Switch’s has been a performance bottleneck, Nintendo went with SD Express, which has the advantage of being faster, but the disadvantages of being both way less ubiquitous, easy to confuse with normal Micro SD cards, and of course, being more expensive. Ars Technica did a rundown, revealing that Micro SD Express cards are actually more expensive than SSDs at an equivalent price-per-gigabyte. It’s not a proprietary format, but consider that it’s possible that the only SD Express cards you’ll be able to find in a store that you buy your Switch from will be Nintendo-branded, and more expensive, it feels like it effectively is proprietary for now.

How to tell a standard Micro SD card from a Micro SD Express card? Express cards have an EX logo on their label, and they also have more contacts, as shown by this illustration from an SD Association whitepaper:

It’s true the Switch 2 has much more internal storage than the Switch. But many users will also be bringing their Switch digital libraries with them, meaning it’s possible for that storage to be full on day one. I have a 256 SD in my Switch, and I already have to make hard decisions about what I have installed and what I leave in “the cloud.” That will be my reality as soon as I transfer my eShop purchases to the Switch 2.

I mused a bit on Nintendo’s stating that the Switch 2 will be mostly backwards compatible with the Switch 1, meaning, not everything on the original Switch will work with it. What gives?

Nintendo has a page listing games that aren’t Switch 2 compatible. At first glance, it seems that all the issues are with games that are physically incompatible. Like, the Labo VR Kit isn’t compatible, because the Switch 2 is larger than the Switch 1, and it can’t actually fit into the cardboard goggles. Several other Labo kits are similarly “incompatible.” WarioWare Move It is mostly compatible, but the Switch 2 JoyCons don’t have the infrared camera the right JoyCon on the Switch 1 has. You can still pair Switch 1 JoyCons with a Switch 2 though, so if you have them laying around you can still play IR-requiring games. This also affects Game Builder Garage and some Labo titles.

Ring Fit Adventure and Nintendo Switch Sports use accessories that you insert a Switch 1 JoyCon into, and Switch 2 JoyCons won’t fit into them. And 1-2-Switch has a unique issue: the Switch 2 has more subtle rumble, and it seems a 1-2-Switch minigame uses that rumble to communicate information to players, which could end up being an issue.

But… that isn’t the whole story. It turns out there’s a good list of Switch games that have issues on the Switch 2, software issues, but you have to click through to a couple of PDFs to find out about those. Here’s a list of games with “start up issues,” meaning probably they won’t load. And here’s games with issues once they’re running. These lists may shrink over time as bugs are found and stamped out, but that might take a good while; it took years for the Wii-U to run the WiiWare game LostWinds.

Some notable games on the not-starting list: a selection of NeoGeo and Arcade Archives titles, Another Crab’s Treasure, Fornite (although I suspect there will be a Switch 2 native version), Nintendo’s own Fitness Boxing, Doom Eternal, Pizza Tower(!) and River City Girls Zero. Some of the games that play, but with issues: two Tetris The Grand Master games from Arcade Archives, Factorio, Fall Guys, Mega Man Legacy Collection and Stumble Guys.

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But I’m putting the commentary up front, instead of where it belongs, as part of an in-sequence point-by-point reaction to the video. But about those….

Set Side B updates every day at 10 AM US Eastern Time. I like that the site updates in the morning, but not too early, to give people a chance to come to it throughout the day. But this poses a problem with responding to Nintendo Directs, which tend to appear at nearly the least opportune time, right when the blog updates.

We could change our posting time when Directs hit, and may end up doing that. But honestly, up-to-the-minute commentary that tries to get in ahead of other sites isn’t our forte. That’s the kind of thing tryhard sites, who can afford a whole team of writers, SEO, and flashy sports cars for their upper management, would do. We’re a tiny three-person operation, and I rather think that’s some of our charm.

Because of this, instead of responding to everything in the video, or even trying to, here’s just my comments on certain highlights.

So, here is that video (1 hour):

There’s also an Ask The Developer article on Nintendo’s website with more information.

The first game up is

Mario Kart World

Right off the bat, it’s never been more obvious than in Mario’s initial “Lets-a go!” that Charles Martinet’s time as Mario’s voice is over.

I have quite a lot, the most of the whole show, to say about this game, but it’s of an aspect of it that few remark upon or even care about. I’m going to save all of that for tomorrow, in fact, since it’s way off the subject. Please look forward to it. (bows)

In the meantime, features include free roaming, “knockout races,” cross country races and up to 24 karts in a race. More details… argh… in yet another Nintendo Direct, on the 17th.

Presenters this time out: Kouichi Kawamoto (Producer), Takuhiro Dohta (Director) and Tetsuya Sasaki, Hardware Design Lead. Nice to see people who actually worked on the system!

Hardware Features

• GameChat, activated by the new C Button, for voice communication between players, and with optional game screen sharing
• Camera accessory for facetime-style chatting (didn’t we have that back on the Wii-U? but this works during games)
• GameChat requires a Switch Online membership, but will be free unti March 31 2026.
• Local Multiplayer with only one copy of a game. Clubhouse Games is used as an example; it’s really a feature that it should have shipped with, IMO, but better late than never.
• Larger screen, 1080p support on built-in screen
• 4K resolution when docked, up to 120fps
• HDR support
• magnetic Joy Cons (we knew that)
• Joy Cons can be used as mice (that too)
• built-in adjustable stand (and that)
• an extra USB C port
• 256GB built-in storage
• fan built in to the dock

Interestingly, Switch backward compatibility is only supported with “compatible” games, implying some games aren’t compatible.

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour

A game made specifically to show off the system features. The internet has been complaining greatly about the fact they’re charging for it, when it serves little purpose other than to show off the hardware.

Other Notes

Switch 2 uses the same shape of cards as Switch 1 games, but support faster data transfer.

Of special note, Switch 2 only works with Micro SD Express cards. This means current cards will very likely not work with the system, regardless of their capacity! This is going to bite lots of people, count on it. You may not even be able to get non-Nintendo branded SD Express cards for a while, and you can bet they’ll be charged at a premium. Pretty damn crappy, Nintendo.

There’s a new Pro Controller with extra buttons. No info on if Switch 1 Pro Controllers will work. My guess is they will (Nintendo has gotten better about controller compatibility in recent years), but of course they won’t have the new features like C button, and new programmable GL and GR buttons.

Paid Upgrades

A paid upgrade to Super Mario Party Jamboree that offers new features. The business with paid upgrades will become a theme throughout the show.

Zelda Notes is a Switch 2 specific feature in upgraded versions of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. It works in conjunction with the smartphone Switch App to mark locations of interest in the game, and lets you share your TotK constructions via QR code. Interesting, but it doesn’t seem like a feature that needs Switch 2 hardware to support it?

Kirby in the Forgotten Land gets an upgrade that adds a second story, which seems like a more suitable use for a paid feature.

Metroid Prime 4 and Pokemon Legends Z-A are both getting Switch and Switch 2 editions. This would seem to imply that Nintendo suspects the Switch 2 won’t see tremendous uptake immediately, and are hedging their bets.

Upgraded Switch 2 versions of prior-owned Switch games are being sold as “Upgrade Packs.” The end of an era: at long last, Nintendo has abandoned the “Pak” spelling.

Other Games

DRAGxDRIVE: A mouse-controlled wheelchair-based basketball game with stunts. A cool idea honestly! May end up being the ARMS of the Switch 2, which isn’t a bad thing, I think.

I’m going to skip commenting on some of these, I’ll just list them out: Elden Ring Tarnished Edition, Hades 2, Street Fighter 6, with Switch 2 exclusive modes, Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion, Split Fiction, Hogwarts Legacy.

EA Sports, the company I most love to hate, is also releasing games on Switch 2

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is a remake of two classic skateboarding games. I observe that skateboarding video games have, over the years, evolved into something that’s not really a lot like real-world skateboarding? They’re more like exploratory games with tricks added in and a coat of “hellow fellow kids” paint? Boarders don’t seem to be affected by realistic gravity, and regularly grind on services that no physical being could rightly grind upon. Anyway, near the end there’s a “A Few Moments Later” card stolen directly from Spongebob Squarepants, and the copyright notices for the game mention Spongebob, so I guess he’s making a Shrek-like appearance.

Hitman: World of Assassination: Signature Edition, now with added James Bond, Bravely Default, Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut.

Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment again asks us to imagine an alternate universe where you can make the events of a game we’ve already played not happen, or at least I presume it will. It looks like Zelda may be the main character this time; it takes place in the past she time traveled to in TotK, so Link might not even be in it.

Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack on Switch 2 to get Gamecube games: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Soulcalubur II (the one with Link in it) and F-Zero GX (the really really hard one Amusement Vision made, during the fifteen seconds during which they bubbled up from the surface of Sega). Others promised for future: Super Mario Sunshine, Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, Super Mario Strikers, Chibi-Robo, Luigi’s Mansion, Pokémon Colosseum. They also promise a Gamecube-styled wireless controller. Isn’t that properly called a Wavebird? We don’t know if the Smash Bros GC adapter will work with it yet.

Deltarune Chapters 1-4: A predictably silly trailer, but that’s why we love Toby Fox. To be available on launch day! To some, this will be the biggest announcement in the show, and I’ll admit I’m looking forward to it.

Borderlands 4, Civilization VII (Offers a paid upgrade from the Switch version, but it’s to get mouse controls, argh!), WWE 2K & NBA 2K, Survival Kids, Enter The Gungeon 2, Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (keep milkin’ that cash cow, Squeenix), Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, Goodnight Universe, Two Point Museum, Wild Hearts S, Witchbrook, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S, (inhale).

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, Marvel Comic Invasion, Star Wars Outlaws, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening Complete Edition, Fast Fusion, Shadow Labyrinth (yep, the grimdark Pac-Man reboot), RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army, No Sleep For Kaname Date — From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES, REANIMAL, Fortnite (were you expecting it not?), Arcade Archives 2 Ridge Racer, Professor Layton and The New World of Steam, Tamagotchi Plaza, Human Fall Flat 2, The Duskbloods (From Software)

And my favorite part of the whole show even though we learned very very little about it besides that it releases this year:

KIRBY AIR RIDERS, directed by Masahiro Sakurai

Kirby Air Ride might be the most underrated game on the Gamecube, for while it doesn’t offer a Grand Prix or other campaign mode like nearly every other racing game, it does have City Trial, one of the best multiplayer experiences on the Gamecube. If you attended DragonCon in 2023 and went to one of their Gamecube nights, you might well have seen me playing Air Ride there! If all Air Riders offers is a greatly upgraded City Trial, perhaps with more than one city to explore, then it’ll be well worth the purchase price, and Sakurai is smart enough to recognize its greatness so I think we’re in good hands.

The last game was Donkey Kong Bananza. A new 3D DK title with destructable terrain. It also uses the updated Donkey Kong design, but it really works here, Donks shows a lot more personality and expressiveness here than he has since before DKC.

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It is true, this one’s for hardcore geeks and programmers only. I love reading about stuff like how to do large 48-pixel graphic displays, useful for score readouts or title screens, even if I probably won’t ever use that information myself. Or on Bank Switching, which reveals that, since there’s nothing in the system’s tiny cartridges’ ROM space that indicates which bank switching scheme is being used, emulators scan through the executable image looking for signature bytes to determine when to map parts of it to the processor’s address space, and homebrew games try to give them appropriate hints so they’ll work smoothly.

There’s a page, Introduction to Processor Hardware, that gives us the surprising information that some EPROM chips, when used with the 2600, may act unpredictably when used in a dark room. That quality esoterica right there.

The Atari 2600 Technical Wiki

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Due to this, there’s homebrew NES software that’s made to use the SNES mouse, and even emulators that will convert your PC’s mouse into simulated SNES mouse signals, which will be fed into the emulated NES and the software running thereon. (It isn’t all buttons, but it sends the displacement as a binary number.)

The video comes to us from the account of CutterCross, who’s making CrossPaint, an NES art program that uses the SNES mouse. A demo can be gotten from itch.io.

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The Sony Playstation (16m):

The Nintendo 64 (18m):

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I won’t keep you waiting for the link: here it is. And here is my grossly simplified summary, intended to inspire you to go to the original article, if you have the time, and get all the deets.

Guardic Gaiden, known in the US as The Guardian Legend, uses a weird trick to put its status bar at the bottom of the screen, instead of, as usually seen in an UNROM game, at the top. To create a fixed status window requires stopping whatever the processor is doing at a very precise time while the display is being drawn to the TV, and then changing some PPU registers to display the status.

More complex and versatile mappers, like the MMC family, have the ability to trigger interrupts at specific screen lines, but Guardic Gaiden/Guardian Legend doesn’t use an MMC. It doesn’t even have a raster line counter, so the game simply doesn’t know where on screen the raster beam is drawing.

There are still lots of games on the system that have status windows, even with MMC chips. The PPU has a built-in feature called Sprite 0 Hit, where the chip can signal when Sprite 0 (of the system’s 64 sprites) is being drawn on top of non-transparent background data. So what older games commonly do is put Sprite 0 in an unobtrusive place at the bottom of the status window at the top of the screen. When the Sprite 0 Hit register indicates a collision, the code knows it’s time to set up the PPU to display the main portion of the game screen.

There is a really big problem with this setup, though. Sprite 0 Hit doesn’t trigger an interrupt. It doesn’t stop the code to let it switch the graphics. It’s not even proper to say it “sends a signal.” It’s up to the code to check if Sprite 0 Hit has been triggered. If it has, then it’s time to set the scroll register to the right place, and maybe switch to the proper background tileset, and do whatever else needs to happen, and the code can then be off to run essential game logic, the actual game part of the game.

If it hasn’t… then, the code has to check again, and immediately. And if it hasn’t triggered then, to do it again. It has to literally check as quickly as it can, because if it delays in its check, the game screen might not get set up at the right moment, which will be perceptible as the bar straying down one extra line that one frame. Not the end of the world, but it looks glitchy. And this code will be running every frame, so if it strays down once, it might do it again, which is a more perceptible glitchiness.

Sprite 0 is set to trigger its hit at the top of the screen, because the code won’t have to spin its wheels checking the hit over and over. It wastes time, but not that much. This is why UNROM games put their status lines, with the score, timer, health bar and life counters, at the top of the screen.

Well, The Guardian Legend is an UNROM game, and maybe because creators Compile wanted to show off, they decided they’d put the bar at the bottom of the screen. And yet, their game doesn’t waste most of each frame just in maintaining the status bar.

How? And what does that have to do with the Twin Famicom? For that I’m going to direct you to Nicole Express’ blog post. May you find it as fascinating as I did!

Nicole Express: Is the Twin Famicom Flawed? The Case of Guardic Gaiden

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It’s only about nine minutes long so you can guess that it doesn’t go into deep detail. Essentially the NES is split into two parts, the CPU and its memory, and the PPU graphics chip and its own memory. A lot of classic consoles and microcomputers had to take special measures to support their display, which often ended up being the most complex part of the unit. Think about it: you have what amounts to a deluxe broadcast character generator right there in a box on your desk, shelf or floor, with lots of extra bells and whistles besides. (In fact, home computers were often used to generate current events channels for local cable companies, and an Amiga was essentially the basis for the old Prevue Guide channel.) It’s like a tiny special-purpose, single-receiver TV station just for your own use.

Graphics hardware is extremely timing sensitive. It has to generate the signal for your TV to display according to standardized picture generation requirements, so special requirements are often necessary. In the Commodore 64, for instance, the VIC-II graphics chip has the power to actually put the 6510 CPU to sleep, so it can have unrestricted access to the computer’s memory, without fear of bus conflicts, when it’s needed. This reduces the overall speed of the processor by a bit, and it’s why C64s turn off the screen when loading programs from cassette tape, in order to keep the CPU timing consistent relative to the data being streamed in off the tape.

The NES gets around this by giving the PPU RAM and address bus for its own exclusive use, and to put stuff in it the CPU has to use the PPU as an intermediary. And what’s more the NES exposes both the CPU and PPU’s address busses through the cartridge connector (which is why it’s got so many pins), allowing carts to supply dedicated ROM and RAM to both chips.

Even though it’s just a high-level overview, I found it a worthwhile use of those nine minutes, and you may very well enjoy it too.

NES Hardware Explained (from NESHacker, on Youtube, 9 minutes)

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Game graphics in the 8- and 16-bit ages often came down to tricky hardware manipulation. The art of doing raster effects, changing the registers in the video hardware so as to divide the screen into different sections, ultimately comes down to timing. On the Atari VCS/2600, nearly all the graphics had to be done that way, but it was still a useful technique for over a decade after that.

A lot depends on the specifics of the video chip, a custom-built piece of silicon developed for the express purpose of taking graphics defined in memory and folding it, like electronic origami, into a shape that the TV would perceive as a broadcast signal. At that time, while it might still have been possible with clever coding, CPUs weren’t nearly fast enough to do that job themselves and still produce acceptable graphic quality and run game logic. (If you want to see what it would be like, I refer readers interested in doing it the very hard way to the amazing Freespin demo, which runs on a 1541 disk drive, and no video hardware at all.)

Older NES games used a supported bit of hackery called the “Sprite 0 Hit,” a signal the PPU would send at the moment the first of the system’s 64 sprites began to be drawn. By watching for it, games could do rudimentary raster effects on a system not designed for them. The issue there was processor time: the Sprite 0 Hit feature wasn’t hooked up to an interrupt line, so the program had to continually watch for it, checking a memory location repetitively over and over until it changed. Some games spent large portions of their runtime in a tight loop checking for the Sprite 0 Hit. Since, from the program’s perspective, the signal might come at any time, the loop needed to be tight, meaning the game couldn’t spend that time doing other work or else it might be delayed in responding to the extremely time-sensitive signal.

The MMC3 mapper had a special function though that could time out when a programmable scanline was reached, and send the processor an interrupt request at that time, greatly freeing up the processor for doing other things with that time. But not all programmers understood the best way to use it, which is why Mega Man 3 has some scanline glitching in a couple of very visible places, in the pause window and on the level select screen.

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series, which we’ve linked to multiple times in the past, has done an exposé looking into how Mega Man III’s glitches happen (28 minutes), and even wrote some code that erases all trace of them. As usual for Behind the Code, the explanation is fairly technical, especially of the fix, but the first half of it is fairly comprehensible. No one says you have to watch the whole thing. Or, indeed, any of it, but I always enjoy them!

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A Game Dad is a frankly awesome idea! It’s any portable, pocket-sized game-playing device that has a focus on emulation. I myself would say it needs physical controls, not a touchscreen, to control well, but that’s not part of the “official” spec given by Dan over at gamedad.club. It looks like site owner Dan agrees with me to an extent.

Game Dad is not a brand name. No company yet calls their device a Game Dad, it’s more an adjective that you can apply to things. Two special cases: A Steam Deck is not a Game Dad because it’s not pocket-sized. A smartphone is not a Game Dad because it’s not dedicated to playing games. Game Dads shouldn’t be something you do work on, or will pester you while you play. Game Dads don’t host apps. Game Dads don’t try to feel you algorithmic bullshit. Most Game Dads, when you turn them off, they don’t go to sleep. They turn off.

The picture here, from the site’s header, might help to fix the idea in your head. Notice that unlike a Gameboy it has four buttons and dual analog sticks, but it otherwise looks a lot like a Gameboy.

Lots of companies make Game Dads, or Game Dad-adjacent devices, and you should be able to get a pretty good one for around $70. That will typically get you something capable of playing up to PS1-era games. N64 games are a little more challenging since its processor was weirder. But as the site says, the best Game Dad is the one that plays the games you want to play. Dan’s site is full of advice and opinions, and all of them are good. The one he has personally is an Anbernic RG353V/RG353VS. Both run Linux, but the V version also has an Android partition and a touchscreen, two features that Dan considers inessential to Gamular Dadiness, and lowers the price by $20 to about $78, but the more expensive one also has more RAM and built-in storage, if those things matter.

At this moment a lot of the interest in retro gaming circles is in FPGA devices like the Analogue Pocket, which will be more expensive than this. This isn’t a device for complete cycle-accurate recreations, it’s for inexpensive, pretty-nice emulation for good-enough gaming fun.

By the way, Dan is on Mastodon as @ifixcoinops@retro.social. Yes, I’m still using Mastodon. You should too! I’m on Bluesky because I feel like I have to be, but I’m on Mastodon because I want to be.

gamedad.club

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The explanation: Did you ever play around with a 32X? Evidently not a lot of people did. It was straaaange. Unexpectedly powerful! A bit misjudged! Hosted a port of DOOM! Had a port of Virtua Racing that compares favorably with the Saturn version! Had that crazy hard-to-play Knuckles game that gave us Vector the Crocodile!

Have you ever hooked one up though? Its hardware is odd. It’s like a completely separate console to itself. The Mega Drive wasn’t made to support add-on processors and chips like that, so Sega used a clever solution: the 32X has its own video output, and also a video input. You plug the Genesis’ output into the 32X, and then the 32X into your TV. The 32X mixes the Genesis’ signal into its own, as if it were chromakeyed. Since the 32X cartridge supplies the program running on the Genesis as well as itself and they can talk to each other, the two processors and graphics chips should be able to sync perfectly, if awkwardly.

But: because the Genesis’ video signal emerges from that console through this external wire before reentering the 32X, it’s possible to do things to it while in transit. The Genesis supplies video timing information that the 32X relies on, so you can’t get a signal from the add-on without the Genesis’ AV plugged into it, but the Genesis does produce a viewable video signal that you can see on its own.

All the details are in the video, which has been embedded below for your convenience and amusement.

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You might think that all the music on the Wii is just streamed, either from audio tracks or files, but it isn’t. The Wii has fairly little NAND storage, and music is a major consumer of storage space, so a lot of its music is sequenced, essentially MIDI files played with sample banks, with optional effects added. The video is a great overview of its features and capabilities.

* Of random interest: Wii Music’s data is amazingly small! Of that 4.7GB DVD it resides on, it uses less than 10 MB!

The Wii’s Music Is A Bit Complicated (Youtube, 24 minutes)

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Episode 1 (15 minutes):

Episode 2 (17 minutes):

That removed BCD feature. Why? The video notes that the circuits are right there within the chip, but have been disabled by having five necessary traces severed. The video notes that the 6502’s BCD functionality was actually patented by MOS, and asks, was the feature disabled because of patent issues? Was Ricoh trying to avoid paying royalties?

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I’m not one of the people who complains about not understanding the controller or how to hold it. That part’s pretty easy to understand: you hold it one way, with the central prong in your left hand and the right handle in your right, for games that use the control stick like Super Mario 64; you hold it with one handle in each hand for games that instead use the Control Pad. It makes sense that Nintendo still wanted to feature the Pad prominently since it was one of the defining characteristics of the NES and SNES era.

The Control Pad is durable and easy to use, even if it does result in bruised thumbs when pressed with force, as can happen in challenging games. What’s not so durable is the N64’s signature control device: the Analog Stick. A special design that didn’t see much update after the Nintendo 64, because of the “white dust of death,” a mysterious fine powder that emerges from the inner workings of the stick after heavy use. Along with the powder always came degraded control performance: the stick would lose some of its tight feel, wobbling when shaken, and would no longer recognize the full extend of its range. All official N64 control sticks would succumb to the dreaded dust with time.

During the console’s life the source of the powder wasn’t common knowledge. It turns out it’s the result of the control stick grinding against its housing and actually rubbing itself in a fine dust. The looseness came from the powder getting into the tight confines of the stick’s mechanism, and from the pivot chamber getting looser as it was ground away by the joystick.

Some games were notorious for decreasing a controller’s working life. The Mario Party series was infamous for demanding rapid spins of the control stick, that could produce the dreaded dust and wobble after surprisingly few games. But with use, it seemed that all the official joysticks would succumb to it eventually. Third-party sticks, such as the then-ubiquitious MadCatz sticks, didn’t suffer from the problem, but their control sticks weren’t as sensitive, and required a smidge more force to push. For demanding play, the official sticks are a must.

This has resulted in a big problem. Since all the Nintendo-made N64 sticks degrade eventually with use, and Nintendo isn’t making them any more, speedrunners playing on original hardware have few options for playing games the way they were intended by their designers. Some jealously hoard pristine sticks, which have become expensive, while others work to make replacements.

Retromeister on Youtube has made a 24-minute video explaining the problem, and the lengths to which runners have resorted to keep themselves playing. And this, following, is that very thing:

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A while back the site HackADay did a teardown of the NES, going through how to take it apart and reassemble it, and going through some of the elements of its assembly. It doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but that lets it be fairly short, at only nine minutes.

NES Hardware Explained (HackADay post, Youtube video)

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