The MSX standard was something devised by Microsoft, a specification for a Z80-powered 8-bit microcomputer for the home market. In the style of CP/M machines, and later PC compatibles, any company could make their own MSX machine, and in Japan over 20 different companies did, along with succeeding standards like the MSX2 and MSX+. It made a bit of headway in Europe too, though not nearly as much. The US space had already been taken up by the Apple II line, the Atari 8-bit machines, and especially the Commodore 64. It causes me to wonder, if Jack Tramiel hadn’t made the C64 so inexpensive, selling for around $200 for most of its life, then the MSX could have easily come over here and become a thing.
Note that, despite the friendly play button circle, this is not an embed. Clicking on the image will take you off-site.
Information on the MSX and the wealth of games for it has become better known in the West in more recent years. Konami, especially, backed MSX machines heavily, and a number of games like Castlevania, Gradius and The Goonies had MSX versions, which often had substantial differences from their Famicom cousins.
Today’s find is a 54-minute video on the MSX’s history and legacy by re:enthused. It isn’t on Youtube this time though! This time it’s hosted on the Peertube instance fedi.video. So you won’t have to worry about ads this time. Still though, nearly an hour. There’s a lot of interesting information in there!
Peertube embedding doesn’t seem very viable in WordPress, so I’m going to scrreenshot the thumbnail and link it to the page. Here:
Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is one of the best explainers of the quirks of NES games on Youtube. It’s not afraid to dive into the assembly code itself if need be, but its videos can often be understood by people without deep technical backgrounds.
Watch the video for the full spiel, but here’s a summary.
Once upon a time, in the waning days of the Famicom, Konami planned to release a game called Arc Hound in Japan. It was going to be another of their trademark run-and-gun shooters, along the lines of Contra. It even received coverage in enthusiast magazines in Japan, and it probably would have used one of Konami’s bespoke mapper chips like the VRC6 that the Japanese version of Castlevania III used.
Arc Hound was likely far into development when the decision was made to not release it in the Japanese market. Producing a game cartridge requires a substantial investment in parts and marketing, of course, and they must have judged that they couldn’t make enough of a profit off of it in their home territory: the Super Famicom was already out, as well as Contra III on that platform. But the NES still had a little bit of life left in it in the US, so they decided to give the game a shot over here, as a title in the Contra series
A big problem there was Nintendo’s policies towards manufacturing NES games. Nintendo demanded the right to build all the licensed software for the NES, and further restricted most (although not all) publishers to using Nintendo’s own family of mappers. Konami had been forced to revise their games to use Nintendo’s mappers in other games: Castlevania III famously used a different mapper in Japan, one that offered greatly expanded sound capabilities that worked through the Famicom’s sound channel pass-through, but was incompatible with the NES.
Extra sound channels are nice, but the primary use for most mapper chips is bank switching, swapping different sections of a cartridge’s data into the Famicom/NES’s 6502-workalike’s 64K address space, and also potentially making different sections of the game’s graphics data visible to the PPU graphics chip.
Behind the Code’s examination of the game program reveals that a large portion of the time of each frame is spent in setting up bank switches. Whether it was coded poorly, or just that Konami didn’t want to pay to include a mapper with more a more efficient bank switching mechanism, the game wastes a lot of time just pulling in different banks of data to be visible to the NES’s hardware. So it is that Contra Force could have run a lot better, but Konami either didn’t want to expend the coding effort, or pay for the the mapping hardware, to allow it to do so.
Presumably, somewhere in Konami’s archives, there is a version of Arc Hound that uses a VRC chip to handle mapping, and that runs much more smoothly. Maybe someday it’ll come to light, although I wouldn’t lay any bets on it. More likely perhaps is that someone will hack up the code and make such a version themselves. Who knows?
Why would someone make something like this? I’m glad they did though. It’s fifteen minutes long, made for a pair of Japanese Sharp-produces home computers. Note that the proper name for this is not ASCII-art, as it makes heavy use of Japanese characters. Also note that enemy shots don’t ever seem to contact the player’s ship despite appearing to contact it in multiple places, so I don’t know how accurate the conversion is. Also also: no music, and only the occasional beep for sound. And, after the second level, it loops through some basic terrain forever with no enemies, with no Moai Stage, so you can stop watching after the second Big Core blows up.
(The Japanese description to the video notes that there’s no hit detection and no enemies after Stage 2.)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
On Youtube, Triforcefilms has made it their niche to sing music from various game and other media properties a cappella, that is, entirely with voice doing the music.
They have lots of videos, and are still going today, but the one I’m choosing to call out is from nine years ago, their rendition of music from one of the lesser-known NES efforts: Konami’s Blades of Steel, which despite the name isn’t a fantasy hack-and-slash game, but a hockey game, actually a conversion of an arcade game of the same name, both with unexpectedly atmospheric visuals and music.
Here’s a link to a playlist of the NES soundtrack. The highlight I think is the game setup menu. While a zamboni resurfaces the ice for the upcoming match, one of the better menu tracks in the NES library plays in the background. It’s the first of three pieces in Triforcefilms’ video (2 minutes), which are the menu theme, the match start theme, and the intermission. They don’t adapt the triumphant victory theme, but I’ll take what we get.
Note, if you’re confused by the unexpected appearance of Gradius towards the end, that’s from NES Blades of Steel! As a minigame, sometimes you get to shoot at the Big Core during intermission. Win or lose, it doesn’t affect the match, and you still get the advertisement for other Konami properties.
Hardcore Gaming 101 is one of the most important game history sites on the internet, and site creator Kurt Kalata writes on a wide variety of games for consoles and computers alike. Recently they’ve been on a Metal Gear kick, and that means covering the black sheep of the series, Snake’s Revenge.
Snake’s Revenge is the forgotten Metal Gear game, an NES sequel made without Hideo Kojima input, to the NES port of Metal Gear that he also had nothing to do with. It has a reputation for being terrible, but that’s really unmerited. As Kurt Kalata notes, while it has its flaws, is ignored by later Metal Gear games, and it has a story based on the manual scenario for Metal Gear written by Konami’s crazy American writing staff*, it’s technically proficient and has good music.
* The American manual for NES Life Force says that the evil planet-eating monster Zelos was the proud progeny of “Ma and Pa Deltoid.” In the description of Dracula’s Heart in the manual for Castlevania II, it warns: “Careful! The heart attacks.” These were not means isolated occurrences from Konami’s US staff.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
While there are examples of excellent music from the classic era of arcades (Frogger comes immediately to mind), I don’t think there is much that can equal that of Gyruss’ arrangement of Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. Here it is, isolated from the rest of the game’s soundtrack, from Youtube uploader StyleK226 (1 1/2 minues):
Wikipedia tells us that the arcade arrangement is reminiscent of a version of the song from the British band Sky, titled just “Toccata” (4 1/2 minutes):
If you only know Gyruss from the NES port, you might be surprised that it’s an almost entirely different arrangement from the arcade version! Maybe it was changed because of the similarity to Sky’s version. Some people prefer that one, it’s got a bit more variety, although I think the arcade’s is a bit better. Judge for yourself (3 minutes):
The Toccata is only used for the intro and the first warp on each planet, which is a bit of a shame, the rest of the music isn’t bad, but it’s not Bach. In Japan, Gyruss was a Famicom Disk System game. The FDS had extra sound hardware, and the result is an upgraded version of the NES soundtrack (14 minutes in all):
There’s been a number of fan versions of the Gyruss soundtrack, although most of them seem to be inspired by the NES port rather than the arcade original. Here’s a metal medley of that particular musical mutation (3 minutes):
As commenter @Fordi says, “What I love is that Intro / Stage 1 is a genre cover (metal) of a game’s adaptation (Gyruss) of a genre cover (Sky – Toccata) of classical music (Toccata and Fugue in Dm).”
Save Point brought a whole bevy of Japanese arcade music games to DragonCon this year. I am of two minds of them: it’s definitely niche and I’m in favor of that, and it’s nice to see a genre like this represented well. But they brought so many of them, and they were stationed close to the board gaming area, which made it very difficult to be heard there. Throughout most of the con you had to nearly shout to be heard in that area! I couldn’t get into any board games because of it. Hopefully next year they’ll find a way to better isolate the music games from attractions more suited to a quiet atmosphere.
Still, I will set aside my grudge against wrecking my Le Havre experience this year in order to document, via my cell phone, the many music games that appeared in 2023. Here we go:
StepManiax, played by the requisite bikini girl“Jubeat” here has been at DragonCon several times before. It’s got an unusual form factor, and no screen?“Pop’n Music,” from Konami’s Bemani series. I don’t get the significance of the “Pop’n” appellation. Is it related to Pop’n Twinbee? Is “Pop’n” a good thing in Japan?I think this picture was from Pop’n Music.I am uncertain how proper it is to make fun of the blatant Engrish in the title of “Sound Voltex Exceed Gear” here. The game has been at DragonCon many times, and every time the word Voltex makes my inner editor cringe. Maybe the title was intentional, but I doubt it. Anyway, it features the usual kind of anime girl characters that are so common in the art for these games.From another Konami game whose name I don’t seem to have recorded. The penguin mascots are unmistakable relatives of Penta, introduced way back in 1983 in Antarctic Adventure for the MSX, and Pentarou from the Parodius series.One of Namco’s Taiko no Tatsujin drumming games, rarely seen in the US. Donkey Konga on the Gamecube was part of this family.Of course there was a Dance Dance Revolution machine, how could there not?Groove Coaster, mostly a rhythm game where you tap a button as a cursor reaches designated points in a line. I think Rhythm Heaven does it much better in principle.Technica 3 here asks, why be satisfied with one screen when you can have two?“WACCA” (?) here is one of two games to use a washing machine-inspired cabinet design.This one, whose title I didn’t catch, is a washer/dryer comboThis mutation of the theme of DDR, and the next one, are so old as to use the old Konami twin stripe logo, which I think is much better than the following “company name on red background” one.Dance Maniax 2nd Mix. Konami really saturated the market with these for awhile, didn’t they?Almost the last one. I can almost hear the overwhelming din in my ears now.The last one, Rhythm Heaven! Of course the most charming and unique of them all was the one I could barely hear at all, its volume was turned so far down. It was almost unplayable, but it still had a lot of people try it out!I mean just look at this! How could you not want to play it? What’s up with that stylin’ monkey? Why is that giraffe in the shot??It’s blurry but I had to include this one, from the attract mode. The Rhythm Heaven games have so much love and care poured into them. Of course many of the staff also worked on the WarioWare series.
That just may exhaust what I can milk from my DragonCon attendance this year. Back to our usual beats!
The Suck Fairy is a mischievous spirit who visits the beloved properties of our youths so that when we return to them they’re much worse than they were when we first found them. That is surely the explanation; it’s not that we’re much more knowledgeable and mature readers/viewers/players now than back then. It can’t be that our horizons have expanded. It can’t be that the thing we liked back then was never really as good as we thought it was.
The Suck Fairy as a concept has been with us for a while now. I think it was introduced to the world in a September 2010 article on Tor.com by Jo Walton. There’s lots of weird concepts like that that litter internet culture (my favorite is the “Crazification Factor,” from a post on Kung Fu Monkey in 2005, long enough ago that its mention of Obama’s election refers to his Senate run), and sometimes we don’t even know the first time it arose.
Gek is maybe an odd choice for a visit from the Suck Fairy; surely, all of its suck was predispensed? But it was still beloved by some, many of them purchasers of the failed 3DO system on which it originated, one of those consoles with few games, and even fewer that could be called good. (The best, probably? Star Control II.)
The writer of this Destructoid article, still liked it for itself, but finds that it’s one of those games where context given by its manual kind of ruins the game’s premise by giving it an adverse context.
If you just play the game, Gex is a fairly shallow game about a lizard mascot character, in sunglasses no less, romping through a series of worlds based on media properties, uttering trite digitized quotes at various times.
If you read the manual, you find out that Gex is wallowing in sorrow! His dad was an astrogecko working for NASA! He lost his life in a terrible accident! Gex, unable to face the world, retreated into television! It’s the only way he can handle living! And, although Gex thwarts the villain’s plot to use him as a mascot character (a thing he already is really), nothing at the end of the game indicates that his mental state has changed.
The first of six manual pages that lays out the reason for Gex’s media obsession.
I think the writer may be overthinking things a bit. Often manual stories were written as an afterthought by people who had nothing to do with the making of the game. Have you ever seen the manual for the NES release of Konami’s Life Force? It claims that the evil gigantic space creature Zelos, huge enough to devour planets, was the proud offspring of alien beings named “Ma and Pa Deltoid.” The manual for NES Metal Gear claims that the villain wasn’t Big Boss but instead “Colonel Vermon CaTaffy.”
These days, if you’re playing a game with multiple versions, there’s usually one specific version you want. For pre-Crash games, if there’s an arcade version, most of the time, it’s the one you want. After the Crash it becomes less definite. Super Mario Bros. at home is a much more playable game that the arcade version. Vs. Super Mario Bros., which is hungry for those quarters. For games like Smash T.V. though you still usually want to play the arcade version.
The arcade and PC Engine CD version of Gradius II though are a much closer call. In a couple of places this home version is actually slightly better, or slightly harder, than the arcade original. It also contains an extra level that’s missing from the arcade.
Inglebard Gaming on Youtube has played through both games entirely and shows them to you side by side, so you can decide for yourself!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
My cell walls are feeling kind of rigid at the moment due to a computer issue that caused me to lose the first draft of this post. All of my witty remarks, lost to the electronic void. You missed out on my entertaining usage of the phrase “odoriferous blorpy.” Truly we are in the worst timeline. It’s all left me feeling kind of cranky, let’s get through it quickly this week.
Tyler Wilde, also from PC Gamer, on a $2,000 game on Steam and what it’s about. Summarized: it costs $2,000 but is short enough that people can finish it within the return period, and it amounts to a screed against women. Blech!
Zoey Handley at Destructoid on the 10 best NES soundtracks. The list is Bucky O’Hare, Kirby’s Adventure, Castlevania 3 (Japanese version), Contra, Dr. Mario, Super Mario Bros. 2, Mega Man 2, Castlevania II, Journey to Silius, and… Silver Surfer?
Gavin Lane and the NintendoLife staff on the 50 best SNES games. The list is compiled algorithmically from reader scores, and can change even after publication. At this time, the top ten are, starting from $10: Donkey Kong Country 2, Earthbound, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV, Super Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island, Final Fantasy III, Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Mario World on top.
Tom Phillips at EuroGamer mentions that the original developers of Goldeneye 007, recently rereleased after 25 years on Switch and Xbox platforms, were a bit miffed that they weren’t asked to participate in the festivities. At the time most of its developers were completely new to the game industry, and they’ve been generally snubbed by its publishers in talking about the new versions. Does feel pretty shabby, Nintendo and Microsoft!
Andrew Liezewski at Gizmodo talks about the graphics in an upcoming Mario 64 hack made by Kaze Emanuar. I’ve followed Kaze’s hacking videos quite a bit (I think one’s been posted on Set Side B before), and the optimizations they’ve made to Mario 64’s engine are amazing, not only eliminating lag but great increasing its frame rate and making it look better to boot.
And, at Kotaku, Isaiah Colbert reports on various things being done to celebrate Final Fantasy VII’s 26th birthday, including official recognition in Japan of “Final Fantasy VII day” and a crossover with Power Wash Simulator. Maybe they can do something about cleaning out all the grunge from Midgar, that city could use a bath.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
First, I’d like to fill you in a bit on the world of supplemental chips included in cartridges.
The greatest advantage of cartridges as a software distribution medium is that you can include extra hardware in the cart that extends the capabilities of the system. The inclusions, ranging from a few extra logic gates controlling banking to static save RAM and batteries to supplemental microchips to entire coprocessors, goes back to at least the Atari VCS/2600, where they played a major role in extending that console’s lifespan. The VCS only had 128 bytes of RAM, a ROM address space of a mere 4 KB, and didn’t even have lines going out to the cartridge for writing to external memory. In spite of these fairly dire limits, regularly games for the system would far surpass what was expected by its creators, culminating in the DPC chip used in Pitfall II.
It’s not true that you can do anything with extra hardware in a cart, but you can push the limits quite far. The inclusion of extra circuitry in the cartridge is what allows Champ Games to make their amazing Atari arcade ports (such as Mappy and Scramble).
After the VCS/2600 fell out of popularity the NES came along, and extra chips of this sort became almost mandatory. The tales of Nintendo being hampered by the chip shortage at the time of the NES’s popularity limiting production are true, but are also somewhat self-inflicted. Legions of popular games required at least a MMC1, a chip that could have been included in the base console, or supplied in an add-on peripheral like a pass-through cartridge. But instead Nintendo chose to include one with every game that required it, and also MMC3s, some MMC5s, and a handful of other chips.
Then the SNES came along, and more extra chips entered the picture, most notably the DSP, the SA-1, and most famously the SuperFX. The SA-1, basically a coprocessor for the machine’s overworked Ricoh 5A22, a variant of the WDC 65C812, which was itself a 16-bit version of the venerable MOS 6502, is our focus here.
Extra chips in SNES carts weren’t nearly as essential as they were for most NES games, but there were still a good number of them. In the early days of the SNES extra chips like these were not hugely common, although a DSP was used even in one of the system’s launch games, Pilotwings. On the other hand F-Zero, a game remembered fondly for its great sense of speed, didn’t use any special chips.
The SA-1 was one of the more powerful of these chips. It was basically a second 65C812-type chip running at triple the main CPU’s clock speed, with a small amount of dedicated memory and some other minor features. Most famously it was used in Super Mario RPG, but it was also used in both of the SNES Kirby games.
The SA-1 wasn’t used in that many games, and it wasn’t even available for use, I think, in the system’s early days, which was a shame. The power of the SA-1 was quite great, if used correctly. SNES hacker Vitor Vilela has made a growing number of hacks that recode classic SNES games to use its calculatory prowess, and the difference is often quite dramatic.
There’s a lot of stuff there on his Github page that I’m going to save to present later, but one of their earlier projects, and one of the best I’d say, is his conversion of SNES Gradius III to use the SA-1. Gradius III is probably the SNES game in which slowdown is the biggest problem, it is not hard at all to get Gradius III into a state where the game slows down to half speed, or even one-third speed, simply by loading up on Options and powerups. As a difficult game where slowdown makes it much easier (and it may have been designed around it), and as a SNES launch title with great graphics and sound, it’s still playable without the SA-1, but you can nearly hear the processor creaking under the weight of all those projectiles and effects.
With the SA-1, all of that slowdown is just gone. It makes the game a fair bit harder, but also a lot more fun to play. See for yourself:
And now, look on in horror at a deathless playthrough of Gradius III with this hack:
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Gradius for Famicom and NES is a well above-average port of a game for very different hardware than the arcade original. It was good enough that it was converted right back into arcade game, released for Nintendo’s Unisystem arcade hardware as Vs. Gradius. Graphically and aurally, it is quite similar to the arcade game.
It’s similar, but not identical. Now this hack doesn’t change the major downgrades from arcade Gradius. There is no vertical scroll in levels two or three, and you still can only have two Options at once. But in a variety of subtle ways, the game looks a bit nicer. In particular, the game’s text fonts being changed from the boring old font used on the NES back to the arcade’s snazzy line-drawing affair is a nice change.
The original version of this is quite an old hack, created back in 2000, but it has been periodically updated over the years, most recently changed in 2018. That’s a long period of support for a romhack!
