Tag: magazine

LOADSTAR Compleat: Commodore 64 Disk Magazine Archives

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.

Zorphon by Nick Peck, from LOADSTAR issue 39. A rather polished space shooter! The aliens are drawn using character mode. I like the classic Astrocade-like font for the text.
Pipe’s Peak by Bob Blackmer, from LOADSTAR issue 73. It looks like an action game, but I think it’s more of a timed puzzle?
Outpost by Thomas Czarneki, from LOADSTAR issue 60. A fairly blatant Missile Command clone, but it’s well polished. The opening menu asks if you want to play to lose, or play to win. I think the difference is, playing to lose starts you on Wave 7.
King’s Ransom by Scott Elder, from LOADSTAR issue 68. An interesting little game, you control a greedy king trying to scoop up coins before they fall into the lava. When a coin falls off the bottom, a gush of lava shoots up! There’s also skulls to avoid. In one of those little touches that you sometimes find in LOADSTAR software, if you wait on the title screen you get to see a hi-res illustration of the gameplay.
Quadrilation by Dave Johannsen, from LOADSTAR issue 68. A two-player game, playable against a computer opponent with four difficulty levels. Take turns placing your pieces so they overlap with as many squares of the same color as possible.
Stream, hi-res art by prolific Commodore 64 artist Walt Harned and included as part of The Compleat Walt.

Game Informer Is Back

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

There’s lots of things that have disappeared from the world in the 35 years the internet’s been around, and very few of them ever come back. Anyone remember Happy Puppy? Midway Games? GameSetWatch?

One of those dead properties was Game Informer, a long-time video game publication that got its start as an official organ of the used game chain FuncoLand, whose ads used to be ever-present in other game mags. When they merged with Babbages to form GameStop, Game Informer went with them. In recent years you could get issues of Game Informer for free from GameStop stores.

Then, I assume as a cost-cutting measure, GameStop shut it down last year. Despite its status as a store giveaway, the publication was pretty slick, and wasn’t without its fans. And lo, it seems they are back! Not just their website but a print magazine too! The new incarnation of Game Informer is unconnected to GameStop, it having been sold to an outside group. According to the company, its entire staff returned to work on the new publication. It seems too much to ask that it be free again, but maybe it won’t be too expensive.

I will admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of GI while they were owned by GameStop. Its focus was solidly on the AAA market that we mostly steer clear of. But it’s good when people working in media get their jobs back, and we wish the staff of the resurrected company well. They’ve even kept up with their reviews, on their first day back they posted 29 reviews of games released during their absence. (It includes Echoes of Wisdom, but no sign of Balatro.) It may be worth following their Youtube channel, which continues on from their GameStop days.

Here is the announcement from the channel (3 ½ minutes):

Tombstones: Romhacking.net Calls It Quits, Game Informer Shuts Down

First:

It’s a grievous blow to the game editing community, but Nightcrawler, the maintainer of the 19-year-old hack repository and community site romhacking.net, is shutting its doors. The reasons why are the top news item on the site, probably the last new news item that will ever be posted there.

romhacking.net as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.

They mention several reasons, but say a collection of users who had offered to take up the site for disingenuous reasons. The details were not mentioned, but they mentioned by way of comparison what happened to emulator author Near, creator of higan, and that can be easily taken as a bad sign.

However, Gideon Zhi on Bluesky offers a different take, that suggests comparison to Near is greatly inappropriate, and that Nightcrawler was severely burnt out and refused offers to help. I don’t know which is more accurate, but the details are offered suggest there may be something to his version of events. Gideon Zhi isn’t one, I think, to cover something like that up. Ah well, drama.

Maintaining a hugely popular website for 19 years is a huge drain on your time, energy and finances. It’s possible that ultimately Nightcrawler needed, or even just wanted, to retire, and that’s okay.

I’ve made frequent use of romhacking.net over the years, both in researching two romhack ebooks and the Romhack Thursday feature on this site. While what the maintainer of romhacking.net says in their news post, that there isn’t as much of a need of a centralized site for collecting and presenting romhacks as there was back in 2005, I still found their site extremely useful, and I think it served a vital role. I will greatly miss it, but I understand their wishing to move on. They took the step of uploading the whole site contents to the Internet Archive, which is a forward-thinking move that I applaud.

Will they ever return to updating the site? Anything is possible, but I expect not. Will another site arise to take its place? Who knows, there’s definitely demand for it. I wish Nightcrawler well in any event, and thank them for their service.

–

Second:

Kotaku reports that Game Informer, the oldest game magazine still in print in the US (dating back to 1991) is shutting down. It was originally a production of the classic game retailer FuncoLand, who would advertise, in turn, in classic 90s gaming magazines, and the publication changed ownership to GameStop when they bought FuncoLand out in 2000.

Game Informer’s site, as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.

Since then, GameStop has kept the magazine going as a house publication, at times distributing issues for free to customers. It seems the announcement was sudden, with management sending out a tweet about the publication’s closure while staff was being notified of the ending of their positions.

There are older game magazines in Japan, of course, and US game magazines lately have had things pretty tough with competition from the internet. It’s surprising that they’ve managed to keep going for this long.

Commodore Free Magazine

My already distorted psyche feels pulled in multiple directions lately. In addition to packing up Dungeon for itch.io, creating the manual for it, finishing up a huge update to my Mystery Dungeon book for Limited Run games, researching (meaning: playing) Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, and looking into other things, it’s made it difficult to keep up with the blog. But, keep up with it I am!

Keeping aligned with the C64 angle, Today’s find is COMMODORE FREE Magazine, a long-running Commodore 64 magazine in PDF format that’s been going since late 2006. It recently published its 98th issue, meaning, #100 should be bursting forth before too long! Until then issue 98 features include a history of Commodore’s 8-bit line, a comparison of versions of Commando for their favorite machines, reviews of a Commodore port of Sonic the Hedgehog and the classic title The Sentinel, and a long piece of personal non-fiction by Leonard Roach.

At 15 years running, that starts to put it in striking distance of LOADSTAR’s run! May it keep on keepin’ on.

COMMODORE FREE Issue 98 – Homepage

Super Play Magazine’s Top 100 SNES Games

Lists of the best games for various platforms has been a fixture on the internet since it was opened up to the general public. Every big gaming site, those still with us and those gone (R.I.P. Joystiq) feel the urge to make them periodically. After all, they combine several popular article themes: they’re listicles, they’re about video games, and they make definite-seeming yet inherently subjective statements about things that geeks have over-strong opinions about. They’re the ideal hit-getters for pop culture sites really, whether they focus on games or not.

Even in print, these lists weren’t rare things. Super Play Magazine, from the UK, did such a list in April of 1996, which was reproduced in HTML text by the site RVGFanatic in 2010.

Why would such a list interest us now? Well, most of these lists have a strongly US-focused vibe, and the UK had a somewhat different scene than we (me being American) did. So there are a number of very interesting games on the list that generally don’t appear in other places, including a few Japanese ones. And they included SNES Rampart, so I’m automatically kindly disposed to it.

Of particular note, besides Rampart: three Parodius entries, two Micro Machines games, Pop’n Twinbee, Cool Spot, Samurai Spirits, Hebereke’s Popoitto, Spike McFang, SNES Side Pocket, Xandra’s Big Adventure, Pugsley’s Scavanger Hunt, NFL Quarterback, World League Basketball (made by HAL!), The Chaos Engine, Street Racer, Super Smash T.V., Lemmings II: The Tribes (but not Sunsoft’s excellent SNES port of original Lemmings?!), Sensible Soccer, R-Type III, U.N. Squadron, SNES Civilization, Out To Lunch (I hadn’t even heard of this before!), Mickey’s Magical Quest, Cannon Fodder, Plok (the Pickford Bros. rule) and Equinox (also Pickford-made, and also highly underrated).

Super Play Magazine’s Top 100 SNES Video Games (RVGFanantic)

Page 6 Public Domain Atari ST Archives

Quick intro this time, because I don’t really know much about the Atari ST, but there’s a huge trove of public domain software for it from the archives of Page 6, as well as magazine archives!

Now that’s what a website should look like!

Page 6: Atari ST software collection – magazine archives

Loadstar!

Now is the beginning of a fantastic journey!

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

Type-in Games in Magazines

This is another huge topic that I should come back to later, but in the meantime here’s an article, mostly about the British type-in scene, from Wireframe Magazinne last year. It mentions the longest type-in game ever, Axys: The Last Battle (Youtube), an Amstrad program that had to be printed in five successive issues, and what it calls the best type-in game of all, Crossroads from COMPUTE!, although I’m dubious about that claim, there were lots of type-ins. It’s definitely great, though. It’s worth a read if you have the time, although who has enough of that these days?

This is Crossroads, yet another thing to add to the stack of future topics. If you like this, you might be interested in Forget-Me-Not, for iOS and Google Play and Windows (on itch.io)

The Rise and Fall of Type-In Games Listings (Wireframe)

A 1982 Issue of Compute Introduces the Commodore 64

Overseeing the early days of computing was Compute! Magazine, properly stylized with an exclamation point. They got their start as The PET Gazette, changing over to Compute as their focus spread into more types of home microcomputers. Compute stuck around as a multi-platform for some time, but ultimately spun off a couple of manufacturer-dedicated magazines. One of these was Compute’s Gazette, whose name harkened back to those PET-exclusive days. It focused on Commodore machines, and would then outlive Compute itself by some years.

The early years of Compute magazine are joyous. They’re filled with esoteric data, geeking out over low-level coding matters, and lots and lots of type-in programs. But it is depressing to me, reading over the early issues, knowing how numbered are its days. This whole genre of computer magazine, that encouraged users to type in programs, that offered coding tips, sometimes even offered add-on disks of software, is now only a memory. We are all poorer for it.

The writing on the wall for this style of magazine could perhaps be seen as early as September 1982, when Compute published an article about a great new upcoming product from Commodore, the Commodore 64. Not because of the style of the article or anything specific about the computer. Just that, by being so greatly popular, the C64 greatly expanded the magazine’s audience, which would inevitably steer it towards becoming more “mainstream,” which ultimately would be the death knell for a publication like this.

Still, it’s fun to look back on. Here is that article in image form, or you could find it on the Internet Archive, where the archives of Compute live on, for a time.

An extra, from that issue, is an ad for one of Microsoft’s first peripherals, a memory card for the Apple II:

Gaming Alexandria’s Magazine Scans

90s Japanese game magazines look so cool! I wonder about those huge pink pauldrons and other jutty bits though. Doors may be a problem for her.

Gaming Alexandria is a treasure, and lately it’s been uploading scans of 80s/90s Japanese game magazine PC Engine Fan to the Internet Archive! Even if you can’t read a word of it, the artwork and screenshots alone make it a joy for the eyes. If you remember and love the look of the early days of Nintendo Power, when its layout and illustration were done by Tokuma Shoten publishing, you should appreciate these.

The PC Engine, a.k.a. Turbo-Grafx 16 (a much worse name really), sits at a sweet spot between old-school pixel art and 16-bit splendor. It was arguably a less capable system than Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis, but it could show more colors, and its games looked a lot more vibrant in print. To a kid in the U.S. at the time, it exuded a strong sense of anime coolness, and I can’t help but feel a bit of that old excitement.

I have to stop myself from filling this post with page after page. Here’s a few choice examples:

Gunhead, a.k.a. Blazing Lazers (August 1989):

Compile really designed some crazy powerups for this game!

Double Dungeons (July 1989):

We present the Gary Gygax weapon collection, curated by Dr. Pumpkin Boy.
I have it on good authority that this game is nowhere near as cool as this page makes it seem.

Beast King’s Chronicle, a.k.a. Altered Beast (July 1989)

The style of this page serves to make the reader forget the game is just plain ol’ Altered Beast, the lackluster pack-in for the Mega Drive/Genesis. Even in the arcade it wasn’t that great.