It’s one of those two times of year again. Games Done Quick, the bi-annual week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins at 12:30 PM (“Noon Thirty”) Eastern Time on Sunday, July 5th, that’s tomorrow. The day after today, the 250th occurrence of that particular US holiday some people make a fuss about.
This one is SGDQ, where the S stands for Summer. If my recollection is accurate, AGDQ, the one that happens in January, is the home of Awful Block, speedruns while SGDQ hosts Silly Block. You can keep track of them by the first letter: AGDQ for Awful, SGDQ for Silly. Even so though there’s a lot of leakage between the two, and many of the games in Silly Block this time would fit in well in its Awful relative, including the infamous Snoopy game on Commodore 64, Mega Man for DOS and The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.
The schedule is here. A few games of interest, I think, are Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Kirby Air Riders (only Air Ride mode though), No More Heroes, a couple of games from UFO 50, the SNES version of Ogre Battle, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Vs. Super Mario Bros, Earthbound Beginnings, What The Golf?, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Randomizer, Gauntlet and Castlevania both for NES, and a naneinf run of Balatro, among many others.
Surprise! Today’s post is about a video from Periscope Films from sixty years ago on the fundamental building blocks of computers from way back then. Right off we’re told that computers no longer rely on primative things like electromechanical relays (gags) or vacuum tubes (wretches). NOW computers are made of TRANSITORS, and we truly are living in the future! (18 minutes)
The cool thing is, while they’re much faster now denser now, and faster, and we have much simpler ways of interacting with them, and storage, both chip and magnetic, hold much more data, and each of these things has improved by a factor of billions or even trillions, computers still basically operate on these same principles.
This video mostly concerns itself with explaining how basic computer circuts are made. It makes for fairly dry viewing if you don’t know anything about electronics or circuit diagrams, but maybe it’ll be interesting anyway, from a historical perspective.
Namco, now the merged entity Bandai-Namco for some reason I can’t fathom but oh well, has certainly gone back to the arcade collection well a lot of times. Many of their games are genuine pop cultural phenomena, either/both in their native Japan and in other countries. It was US sales that propelled Pac-Man into being perhaps the most enduring legacy of the golden era of arcade games.
It was for the original Playstation that Namco first started rereleasing home compilations of their classic-era arcade hits, in the six well-known and respected Namco Museum titles. But then their rereleases became rerereleases, and then, rerererereleases. So many collections, so many trips around the block, so many recreations, so so many. Going by the series’ Wikipedia page, the most recent entries have been for modern home consoles, the Evercade handheld retro console, and even a standalone unit.
I would despair of ever understanding all the Namco Museum releases, but for the tireless efforts of Mythic Resonance on Youtube. He has constructed an epic two hour review of every Namco Museum version, called The Namco Museum Museum! It took him over 2½ years to make! And as of this writing it only has 1.9K views, which I view as a darn shame, even if it is, right now, only nine hours old.
I don’t know how many of you have the stamina to watch all of an epic overview of these dozens of game collections, but some of you have got to be up for it, I’m sure. Good luck on retaining your sanity while weathering this massive onslaught of game information!
Now here’s something fascinating I had not heard of before Nicole Express recently wrote about it. Because of a law in Japan it was (maybe still is?) illegal to sell an arcade cabinet without a game in it.
When the market for replacement cabinets opened up, targets for upgrade kits without gutting an old machine to host them, they still had to have some game in them, even if everyone knew its PCB would be just be taken out and thrown away. It was also a way to assure a game center owner that the cabinet worked as advertised, as it could immediately be plugged and tested.
But games cost money to develop and need parts to implement, so these games have to be really simple. So there arose a micro-genre of games, usually a simplified remix of something from the cabinet manufacturer’s back catalog, using ancient processors, minuscule ROM and RAM, and the simplest means of driving the video signal possible, to fulfill this tiny and strange market need.
Sega’s Dottori-kun (image from linked site).
Nicole so far covers three such games: Sega’s Dottori-kun is a remake of their classic arcade game Head-On (remade before by Atari as Dodge ’em), a simple dot-eater where the player’s surrogate is a car that can only drive around a track one way. Taito’s Mini Vaders is a series of Space Invaders challenge boards, but with no enemy shots or sound. And most recently Konami’s Target Panic is a kind of fast reaction target shooting game, but using a joystick instead of a light gun.
Dottori-kun, a silent blue-and-white remake of a 1979 arcade game, was, via Sega’s Aero City cabinet line, a game they were publishing the year that also saw the release of their Super Scaler extravaganza G-LOC.
G-LOC, Dottori-kun’s sibling. (Image from Mobygames)
Nicole goes into detail about each of these games, possibly the most attention any of them has gotten outside of their creation, including their internals. She really knows her stuff, and dives into the implementation of each game. All three run on Z80s or variants. Only one of the three games, Mini Vaders, accepts coins. All three articles make for fascinating reading, at least to my fevered mind, so please click through
It’s not well known (but is becoming better known) that the NES’s PPU graphics chip has an unutilized feature. It has a way to pipe graphics into it from another PPU, giving the two chips a combined output. The Famicom and NES both ground out the pins that would allow using this interesting feature, making it impossible to use without desoldering and some other changes, but Youtuber decrazyo performed the necessary modifications (5 minutes) and thus made a system capable of hardware parallax scrolling, 128 sprites with up to 16 per scanline, and additional color flexibility.
The existence of this feature implies that the PPU was intended for greater things at some point in its development. A lot of the limitations of classic hardware end up being due to economic and complexity tradeoffs prevalent at the time of their making. I find it intriguing to imagine the PPU’s chip designers anticipating a future where it could have been daisy-chained like this.
It’s been going around the gaming bigsites (PC Gamer, Time Extension, Kotaku, Eurogamer and others) that due to a quirk of US copyright law Richard Garriott, who begin the Ultima series in June 1981, may finally be getting back the rights to his now-ancient series from the corporate behemoth, Electronic Arts, that has long owned them.
The details of the story are that this only involves the copyrights, not the trademarks. But trademarks are different from copyrights, they must be continuously defended and expire if not utilized. Every so often Electronic Arts attempts to do something new with the Ultima name, but none of them usually turn out that successful. The sole remaining example of classic Ultima is the venerable MMORPG Ultima Online, older than World of Warcraft, even older than Everquest. It’s possible that EA could use its unbelievable continued existence as a pretext to keep hold of the Ultima trademark, but UO is incredibly ancient itself nowadays and doesn’t have the large userbase it once did.
I have no love for the monstrosity Electronic Arts has become, the memory of their enlightened early years under Trip Hawkins fading after decades of stagnating sports lines chained to big leagues licenses, and piles of brown and gray military shooters. They sit on countless classic computing properties, doing nothing with them while people who fondly remember them age and die off. Yet I choose to believe this isn’t out of spite, more that they can’t be assed to do anything with properties that aren’t gigantic sellers.
Ultima is one of the few cases where a piece of their gigantic lucite block of IP shows a crack that could be broken away. Richard Garriott has maintained his wealth from the time of Ultima’s success, and may have the resources to fund a revival. Whether it would be successful… I can’t say. Garriott has tried making multiple games since leaving behind Ultima with varying degrees of quality. His Tabula Rasa from NCSoft, from nearly 20 years ago, didn’t do well; I’m not apt to hold that against Garriott though, considering how badly they treated City of Heroes.
Every so often Richard Garriott comes up with some new concept, but truthfully it’s been a while since he’s made waves. I personally sat at a talk he gave at DragonCon a few years ago where confidently held forth on the direction that he saw gaming going, but then failed to go. I’ve tried Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues recently, he was involved with it but has long since left it. I bounced off. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but Garriott’s most recent project involved NFTs, which seems like a huge danger sign.
My personal opinion is that Richard Garriott should immediately approach Digital Eclipse, developers of the terrific remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and together start making something along those lines. Richard, if you’re somehow reading this, please consider it! They do great work. Maybe something involving Ultima III, IV or VII? Any of those would be amazing and could open up this long-neglected series for a new generation of players.
Anyone else out there have personal experience with how amazing this game was?
I’ve heard that Garriott is going to be at DragonCon again this year. I plan on reporting on it on-site. Despite what you might think from what I wrote two paragraphs above I’m still rooting for him. Ultima is the most shamefully neglected classic RPG franchise out there right now, and I’m excited to think that it might make a comeback, no matter how unlikely that might seem right now. I didn’t think Wizardry could make a comeback either! Let’s all clutch our ankhs tightly and hope.
MUDs, and their sibling games MUCKs and MOOs, now almost forgotten except among a rapidly-aging userbase, used to be the biggest gaming draw on the internet. When MMORPGs became big, it was largely by using the lessons of MUDs and applying them to a 3D graphical world with action gameplay. Everquest (admit it, you haven’t heard that name for a while) and World of Warcraft would never have become big if it hadn’t been able to stand on the shoulder of MUDs. And now, with WoW’s memory receding in the minds of many users, I think it’s well time to go back and find out what the originals were all about.
That Antiquarian article is pretty amazing. In the original MUD, if you got enough experience points you could become a wizard, basically a moderator yourself. If you killed another player they had to start over from scratch, and you got 1/24th of their experience points. Other ways to gain points was to find treasure and drop it into the swamp. Once treasure was swamped it was gone until the next server reset, which only happened when nearly all the treasure was so disposed. While you could find and use weapons, there was a limited number of most of those in the game so most players had to be satisfied with basic stick weapons.
But despite these limitations, players managed. Wizards could crash the game easily (there was a command specifically for doing so!), so mostly they didn’t. Customs were decided on; it was improper to kill a player more than two levels below yours. The game continued, and players largely came up with their own solutions to social problems.
The CRPG Addict explains that the original MUD is still in operation at british-legends.com, and that you can even join him there to play today! Times are in his post.
The Game Display tells us of an interesting kind of secret in Super Mario World that few know about. Once in a while in that game, a 1-up Mushroom just randomly seems to appear, flung into the air, sometimes in such a way as to seem to encourage you to leap off a cliff to go after it. Here is their video explaining what’s going on with those (9½ minutes):
There are some locations in a few levels that have four invisible spots in the background that can detect your presence. If you touch the four in order, the extra life appears. They’re found throughout the game, and they’re supported in code to the extent that, if you find one in a level, the game sets a flag for that level so it won’t appear again in that play session. You have to exit your game and load it back up again before you can get another extra life by this means from that level.
Many of these locations are arranged so that to trigger them in order, you’ll have to move in a loop around some location. This is similar in concept to the stakes in Super Mario 64 that, if you run around them a few times, cause them to generate coins to collect. Another kind of weird secret in a Mario game. I feel like Shigeru Miyamoto must have been lying awake at night brainstorming ever more obscure things to put into them.
I’ve talked here before about my efforts to preserve and make available the archives of the long-lived disk magazine Loadstar. Please forgive me for linking to that once again, but sales of it help me obtain food: Loadstar Compleat. If you want to see more past posts on Loadstar, you can check the helpful Loadstar tag.
Loadstar and its side project Loadstar 128 were made for the Commodore 64 and 128 home microcomputers. They were disk magazines, a niche of publisher Softdisk, distributed by mail, and for a while even on newsstands. Even after it became untenable to keep distributing by retail Loadstar managed to retain enough subscribers to keep going for a while longer.
Loadstar lasted 22 years, from 1985 to 2007, an amazing run lasting well into the Internet Age. It hasn’t been 22 years since 2007 yet. In that time they published more than 6,700 items. Sure, it had its ups and downs, and towards its end its last editor, Rev. Dave Moorman, had to struggle to find things to fill its four disk sides with. Its last year only saw two issues, but Dave was determined to keep it going, aiming for 256, the number of possible values in a byte. Sadly a tornado hit his home and destroyed his issue-making setup. (We talk sometimes about reviving Loadstar and making the last six or seven issues ourselves to fulfill Dave’s ambition. We have most of the tools, and it’s much easier to find new Commodore software now than in 2007.)
Loadstar wasn’t Softdisk’s only product. I can legally distribute Loadstar because of a special carve-out for it. Loadstar is still owned by its longest-running editor, Fender Tucker, who used to sell physical CDs of the issues, with an old version of VICE on it to run them in emulation. I have one of those CDs myself, and it serves as the base of the version of Loadstar Compleat we sell with Fender’s permission.
The company that originally published Loadstar was called Softdisk Publishing. Founded in 1981 by Jim Mangham, it was a similar product to Loadstar but for computers in the Apple II line. It was also successful, lasting (I believe) for 166 issues (Loadstar went for 249), and given the popularity of Apple IIs could probably have lasted a bit longer, but for a lamentable fact: Apple IIs were refreshed several times during the series’ life, as Apple II+s, Apple IIes. Apple IIcs and then Apple IIGSes. Early issues don’t even run on Apple IIs after the + line; later machines, especially the GS, have much greater capabilities than the original, so a stock II owner would have to upgrade to get the most use out of the final issues. Unlike Commodore 64s which cost $200 for most of their life, Apple IIs were always pricey, and eventually an owner would have to decide whether to invest more money in a line of computers even its manufacturer didn’t seem too interested in anymore, or switch to one of the teeming IBM PCs types that were everywhere by then.
I’d like to tell you more about Softdisk the magazine, but I’ve never used it! Just now, today, I’ve finally been able to obtain a mostly complete set of issues from the Internet Archive, in Softdisk Supreme. Doing so was an adventure involving an ISO using the Mac HFS filesystem (so standard ISO-manipulation tools proclaim the disk image to be corrupt), the website Infinite Mac, and having to dodge several annoying quirks of both Infinite Mac and Classic Mac OS itself.
Softdisk Supreme was the product of a company called Syndicomm. Distributed on CD much as Loadstar Compleat was, Syndicomm was owned by Eric Shepherd, who transferred it to Tony Diaz in 2011. Diaz passed away in 2021 (source), leaving ownership of Softdisk’s properties uncertain.
Or are they? There is a note in a PDF supplied with Softdisk Supreme that tells us that Syndicomm didn’t own Softdisk the Magazine, but just licensed it from the company:
According to Wikipedia, “Softdisk, LLC” is another name for the company of Softdisk Publishing, probably adopted after they stopped making disk magazines and settled into their late life as an ISP.
Softdisk made more magazines than just Softdisk and Loadstar. For the PC they made Big Blue Disk and Gamer’s Edge. I’ve found a mention online that parts of Softdisk’s legacy were sold in pieces to other companies. My Abandonware doesn’t distribute several notable games from BBD’s issues that were made by the id Software people, like Catacomb 3D, pointing people (but not directly) to GOG. Here is a direct link. It’s $6 for six games, and in the style of GOG retro releases they’re packaged with an emulator capable of playing them out of the box.
Catacomb 3D is listed as made by “id Software, Softdisk Publishing” and “Catacomb Games.” It’s the only product by Catacomb Games on GOG. They have a website. They’ve opened the source code to the whole series and uploaded it to Github. While their website doesn’t list a point of contact, their Github account page has an email address, which I sent a polite request to just a few minutes ago. I hope they can clear up the question of ownership, and if they can, that it’ll illuminate a path towards offering a package similar to Loadstar Compleat for Softdisk’s other products.
I believe that all software has value, but Softdisk’s output easily exceeds that low bar. The Catacomb games don’t need my pitiful efforts at preservation, but Softdisk published lots of other stuff that’s in serious danger of being lost forever. In addition to the work of their in-house programmers they accepted submissions, and bought software from a wide range of programmers. Many of those coders are aging, or are no longer with us. Attention must be paid! They cared about their work, and so must we. Wish me luck.
Proclaiming something for sure in the realm of vidyagaems is just asking to be challenged and possibly humbled. Yet it seems likely that the first true video RPG, as pointed out by -Eclipse14- in this video (10½ minutes), is the Atari 2600/Supercharger game Dragonstomper.
I have played Dragonstomper, in fact I wrote about it in an ebook on 2600 games here, and it’s quite an interesting game. Defining an RPG these days is rife with complication, but then it a bit more obvious: statistics, character building, equipment, exploration and turn-based combat. Dragonstomper has all of these things and more.
The Supercharger was a peripheral that allowed games to be loaded off of cassette tape. The unit itself housed an amount of RAM that held the games that the system would run. The Atari 2600 didn’t have write lines leading out to the cartridge, so the Supercharger had to load the code itself, which looked like normal inflexible ROM to the Atari. But the Supercharger could handle multiload games, making it much easier to make large games for the console. Dragonstomper was stored on the tape in three segments, corresponding to three stages of the quest.
The first section, and the most open-ended, involved exploring the kingdom, fighting monsters, finding items and trying to build your character’s power. A complication to this is that five magic items, a Charm, a Cross, a Potion, a Ring, a Staff, have randomized functions that change every time you begin a game. (There is no saving; the Atari has no way of writing to the tape.)
To get to stage two, you must get past the guard to town, either by showing him an ID, by bribing him, or by defeating him in combat. (They have more health than the dragon!) Town is kind of a break area where you shop for items to help you in the final part of the quest: the tunnel to and fight against a dragon waiting for you in its cave.
There’s all kinds of interesting things you can do, that helps give the game a lot of replayability. For example, you can hire fighters in town to accompany you against the dragon. There are traps around but also items that can reveal their locations to you. You can fight the dragon in melee, or by firing a longbow at it, or you can even avoid fighting it all together by figuring out how to get the gem its guarding without fighting it. There is a GameFAQs guide to it (contributed as late as 2023) that gives a good rundown of how to play and win.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
We’ve not done a Romhack Thursday* for a while. Found by way of a Bluesky post by bro3256, of the website Famibro, this is a brilliant romhack by jroweboy (SMBArena page) that not only puts Mario into Zelda II, but also subtly remixes the game to allow for his different moveset.
While this is a hack to Zelda II, not Super Mario Bros., Mario’s physics and jump have been faithfully recreated in the engine. Mario doesn’t have Link’s sword, and without certain spells his only means of attack is his trademark jump! But all of the enemies that Link could employ his downthrust move against Mario can stomp. This makes some enemies much easier to beat, like the Dairas in Death Mountain, but it makes Stalfos and Ironknuckles almost impossible to defeat without some aid. It takes a lot of familiarity with the original game to notice it, but a couple of enemies have been removed in order to provide a better play experience.
I’ve found it to be unusually well-balanced and implemented for a romhack, especially one with such a unique premise. The game plays a lot like if Nintendo had made it themselves. When Mario is reduced to two bars of health he loses his Super status and becomes small, just like in the SMB games. There are certain advantages to being small; a few keys require a difficult running ducking jump/slide to get when Mario’s big, but if he’s small it’s simple to collect them.
The spells have been redone to fit Mario’s abilities, and the implications of the new rules make the game seem fresh even to Zelda II obsessives like me. The Shield spell doesn’t reduce damage taken, but instead gives Mario a floating shield that acts like Link’s shield. Mario already has a great jump, so the Jump spell is replaced with a spell called Tanooki. Tanooki gives Mario his tail from SMB3; he can’t fly with it, but he can float down from jumps and, crucially, he can use it like Link’s sword if it were limited to low attacks. Unlike all of Link’s spells, Mario’s Tanooki and Fire powerups don expire when the scene changes, but instead lasts until Mario becomes small. I think there are other changes too but I haven’t gotten far enough to find them.
I do need to warn you of one issue though. On my first attempt at playing the game, one of the keys in the first dungeon didn’t register when I collected it, softlocking me and making it impossible to finish the Parapa Palace (the first dungeon). I suggest you save often in case something like this happens to you. It was lucky for me that it happened so early in the game, and starting over didn’t lose me much progress. There’s another place where you appear to be softlocked, in the third palace, but I managed to overcome it by getting the item out of it then setting it aside and exploring ahead, and sure enough, soon after I got an ability that let me go back and finish it.
Despite those issues I’m having a great time trying to puzzle through Zelda II’s huge challenges with this different moveset. If you’re a Zelda II fan too (I hear there are a few of your out there at least) you should check it out!
* Why, you may ask, a Romhack Thursday? It’s because I wanted to do a weekly romhack feature but there aren’t any days of the week beginning with the letter R! You may also ask, why a picture of a frog wearing sunglasses for its header image? They’re the cool frog of the swamp, they know how to edit rom files and give them to all their friends. If you look closely at the cartridge in its hand, the label may look slightly familiar if you’ve played a lot of classic arcade games….
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
It’s got every level of the original Lemmings, including variants from different versions, and the first Holiday demo collection, along with a smattering of extras with more on the way. Picotron of course is the successor to the popular Pico-8 fantasy console, more of a fantasy workstation, but you can still play Picotron Lemmings without buying the $20 tools.
It doesn’t have music or many of the sound effects (including any digitized voices), but it does play very well. It’s smoother than the original and even has visual indicators for Climbers and Floaters, which the originals didn’t have.
Lemmings is a true classic from the 16-bit era and even without music this version is a fine remake. And it’s free to play!
One of those ports we mentioned was a web-based port from 2004, DHTML Lemmings, still online after all these years. Back then it was amazing to see a game like that without even needing Shockwave or Flash. We’ve come a long way, for better or worse, but Sophie’s version is destined to be a highlight among the legends of the Lemmings.
What is that? Some of you may not know what Lemmings is? It’s a classic computer game from DMA Design in the early 90s, originally for the Commodore Amiga but ported to many other systems including the SNES. A bunch of green-haired numbskulls march forward through a huge variety of dangerous landscapes. As kind of their benevolent god, you give them skills to help them get through the terrain and also prepare the way for their friends. In the original you had to have a certain percentage survive to progress to the next level, but in this version you can play them in any order you choose. Give it a try, it’s just as brilliant now as when it was first released in 1991.
