We’ve linked them before, and more than once, but they’re one of a small number of Youtubers who consistently does great work. Here they look at the effects in a number of games and reveal how the programmers coaxed surprisingly complex effects out of the hardware for each of them. (25 minutes)
The games and effects covered this time:
Art of Fighting on the PC Engine, zooming in and out from the fighters as they approach and draw away from each other
Road Rash on the SMS, which created a startling effect of a road undulating and going over hills for 8-bit hardware
Ranger-X on Genesis/Mega Drive, artillery shots firing into the distance in the background and multi-plane parallax scrolling
The Lawnmower Man on Genesis, SNES and Gameboy, fast 3D virtual reality scenes (well, slower on Gameboy)
Donkey Kong Country 3 on SNES: vertical stretching of a boss
Contra 3 on SNES: rotating both a large boss, the background and the player on the screen at once when the SNES only had one hardware scroll background layer
I’ll admit, I’ve sat on this one for months. After posting about U Can Beat Video Games, I started to worry that this blog might get a bit repetitive if I kept posting about video game walkthrough series, and they take a long time to construct because there’s so many links, but it’s been a while since then, and VG101 has been around for years now.
Video Games 101, a side channel of a Let’s Play channel, covers much the same ground as U Can Beat Video Games. Some of the specific games are different. VG101 is a bit more about entertainment than the specifics of beating games and the strategy involved. Professor Brigands has three “TA” characters that assist him: Scary Gary (covering bosses), Blaze (a surfer who goes over the available items in each game) and Fluff the cat puppet, the most fun of the group, who explains game trivia and history.
I’m just putting it off still further at this point. Here is the intro video to the channel, followed by the list of every walkthrough VG101 has posted to date.
A while back I linked to a video showing the obscure “Data Over Flow” error in Mario Paint. Here’s the post, and here’s the video (1 minute):
It occurs because Mario Paint’s SRAM is only 32K in size, which isn’t large enough to store every possible creation. The cartridge uses data compression to squeeze everything in, but the thing about data compression is, it can never be guaranteed to work. Every possible compression format has data that will cause it to take up more space. It’s a fact about the universe we live in. It just is.
If you only use the canvas, or only use the “Animation Land” motion option, then there is enough RAM, but using both in one composition means the software relies on compression to make everything fit, meaning, some kinds of data won’t fit, and that’s when Data Over Flow happens.
But as it turns out, while if you’re using Mario Paint in the way most people it’s unlikely you’ll trigger the error, it isn’t actually difficult to cause it. Creating a random mess of all the colors of pixels in a stamp, then filling the whole canvas and all the animation frames with that stamp, seems to be enough to do it. Mario Party doesn’t use a particular complex compression format. Maybe if it used something lossy like JPEG it might be able to do it, but rather it uses bit-perfect compression. That kind likes repeating patterns and areas of solid color, and doesn’t like what I’m going to call rainbow snow.
So here, watch a user start from a blank project, on real SNES hardware recorded through video capture, and go directly to the Data Over Flow error. Sorry! Our RAM is too sick to contain your masterpiece, it has vomited it all up, please try again (3 minutes):
As it turns out, as explained by the below video (here’s a direct link, 10 minutes long), the NES and SNES have very similar control setups. Both controller ports have seven lines, and both read them using a shift register that can be used to read arbitrary numbers of buttons. The SNES basically just has more buttons to read.
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.
There is a subtle flaw in SNES art creation tool Mario Paint. It has 32K of Save RAM, which is not technically enough to save an entire project, normal and animation canvases included. The program uses data compression to get everything to fit, and the compression is good enough that most of the time everything can be squeezed in, but such is the nature of data compression that it is not guaranteed to work on all possible data.
What happens when Mario Paint can’t fit everything into its save file? This:
A comment on the video gives purpose to the numbers the robot displays as it counts down. 100-25 is compressing the image; 25-12 is erasing the save RAM, and 12-0 is copying the data into save RAM.
Awesome Mario trivia blog Supper Mario Broth noted on Mastodon that Super Mario World is extremely inefficient in displaying Mario’s score.
There is more information on SWMspeedruns.com, but in brief, SMW stores the player’s score as a 24-bit value as hexadecimal digits, and converts that value to decimal when it’s time to display it. There is no good way to do that that doesn’t involve figuring out the entire arithmetic, but Super Mario World does it particularly slowly: it starts with a copy of the score, then sees if it’s over 1,000,000. If it is, it increases the millions digit of the displayed score by 1, subtracts a million from the work value, then repeats. When it runs out of millions it repeats with the hundred-thousands, and repeats until it finishes with the tens. At least it doesn’t try it with the 1s, seeing as how nothing in the game awards single points!
In a worse-case scenario, with a score of 9,999,990, the code goes through this whole process every frame, consuming up to 8% of the time available for game logic.
What could the game have done to accomplish this better? It could have found out how many of each digit there was once instead of looping and incrementing. It could only figure out the score when the value changes. Or it could save the value as the digits themselves in decimal, just increment them by the right values when its needed, and then copy that figure to the screen. That’s largely what 8-bit games would do.
Even worse, if Luigi is the active character, the game does this twice: it figures out and prints Mario’s score, then it does it again for Luigi’s score, placing it onscreen in the same place.
While printing the score is just one thing the game does each frame, the effect is great enough that complex scores can lag the game, enough that speedrunners take the score into account to avoid it.
This adds to the evidence that Super Mario World development was rushed. It’s already known that a lot of the code in SMW is buggy, allowing for some truly heroic exploits like programming a text editor in SRAM purely by manipulating objects in an early level.
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).
It’s yet another Youtube video post, but the subject is pretty notable, U Can Beat Video Games at last tackling the highlight of the Metroid series, Super Metroid for SNES, in an epic-length episode. Often big games get split up into multiple parts, but this time the whole game is covered at once. These videos can’t be easy to put together, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them!
As usual UCBVG covers the entire game, including all items and known cheats, and alternate endings. If you’ve ever wondered why GDQ players, hosts and audience ever shout “Kill the animals” or “Save the animals,” the ending to this video should fill in the blanks to an acceptable degree.
NES Party and SNES Party are sites that do a think that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago: they make it easy to pick out NES and SNES games, load them into the browser from the Internet Archive, and not only let you play them yourself but share a room link with another person and enable internet-based multiplayer. It’s all as simple as that.
Well, mostly. When I tried using it, emulation was much faster than normal. The game load screen suggests, if this happen, that you reduce the refresh rate of your display, which seems like kind of a kludgy solution. But on the plus side, snes.party has Rampart!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s not easy to find romhacks that measure up to our exacting standards, that strike me in just “that way,” but a conversion of the NES Legend of Zelda, one of the few mainline Zeldas never to have been really remade in any form (unless you count the abandoned Satellaview versions), fits the bill like a duck in well-made dentures.
This screenshot may look nearly exactly like The Legend of Zelda. In fact it is the Legend of Zelda, just converted, nearly exactly, to the SNES.
Link doesn’t wait for the transition to finish to start climbing out of caves.
The question has to be asked: why? I mean, to a degree it is kind of pointless. There’s been nearly exact (although always unofficial) re-implementations of The Original The Legend of Zelda since Zelda Classic (Set Side B). All of Nintendo’s own rereleases, from Virtual Console to Gamecube bonus disks to a stand-alone Game & Watch unit. But recreating it on SNES does have certain uses. First, it fixes a handful of issues with the earlier game, notably it doesn’t have flicker or slowdown. It also uses the L and R buttons to allow for quick inventory cycling without having to go into the subscreen.
The colors are slightly better as well. And the top of the screen display labels the buttons Y and B, instead of B and A.
It speeds up game transitions: it uses the Link to the Past-style iris in and out effects, using the SNES’ display masking feature, instead of the slower curtain closes and opens from the NES version. It allows you to use custom soundtracks via MSU-1 support. Health refills instantly instead of pausing the game for up to 15 seconds while all your hearts load up with red. And the sound is very slightly different: by default the low-health beep is less insistent, there’s an extra sound when you kill an enemy, and the candle sound is a little higher in pitch.
But perhaps the best reason to convert it to the SNES is, SNES emulators are nearly as common as NES emulators. You can play this modestly improves version of LoZ on anything with an SNES emulator, which isn’t something you can say of Zelda Classic.
Yes, I used this hack as an excuse to play completely through the first quest again. And yes, I did it without dying. I still got it.
I’m kind of an outspoken fan of the original LoZ, I still think it’s well worth playing today, although I think you should seek out its manual should you do so. (The opening demo even tells you to look there for details!) You’ll die a lot, it’s true, but there’s little penalty for it except for going back to start or the beginning of a dungeon, and having to go refill your health before you try again. It takes real skill to weave around its fast-moving enemies and projectiles, but it’s doable, and you don’t need speedrun skillz to do it.
It is rather difficult to find it through search. It’s not on romhacking.net. Creator infidelity’s announcement was on Twitter, where he offered only a direct download.
Satellablog is a blog dedicated to preserving content from one of the least-documented portions of Nintendo video game history, that short period in their life where they distributed software via satellite broadcast, over the St. GIGA service.
Bounty Sword, Satellaview version (Images from Satellablog)
Most of this stuff only exists, maybe, in company archives deep in the halls of Nintendo, and the data from the last broadcasts saved on aging flash memory cartridges held by subscribers. It is believed that all of the dumps that have been made available have come from those cartridges, and Satellaview is dedicated to finding them and making them available.
Elfaria II demo
There are a number of interesting finds in this batch, including lost Dezaemon shooters, a cut-down version of Super Famicom RTS Bounty Sword, a non-playable demo of Elfaria II. But the most surprising thing in the collection is a number of dumps of a Satellaview version of Nintendo’s website circa 1999, one of the last things they made available over Satellaview! I had no idea that the service survived that long!
