startup – Set Side B

A Way To Make A PC Startup With The Pokemon PC Noise

rodneylives — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000

isithran on Mastodon came up with a grub boot line that can make your PC’s speaker (or whatever substitute it may have) play the classic Pokémon PC startup noise (3 seconds). A demo can be tested here. “PC” obviously stands for “Pokémon Container.”

This sound right here.

grub (properly lowercase) is a bootloader for some Linux machines. I can’t tell you if it’s easy to add it to a computer’s startup files, but if you know how to do such things, please enjoy.

rodneylives

About Arcade Game Startup Displays

rodneylives — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0000

I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.

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.

rodneylives

Space Harrier Theme on Japanese Master System Hardware

rodneylives — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Fact 1: the Japanese version of the Master System had an add on that provided FM synthesis sound synthesis, and greatly improved its music. Many US-released games have support for the add-on, but it was never released over here so that feature remained unused.

Fact 2: A later revision of the hardware in Japan (there called the Master System) had the FM chip built in. This version could even mix together the system’s default sound with the FM chip. And, if you turned the system on without a game inserted, it played a special version of the Space Harrier theme, programmed to take advantage of both chips.

This is that:

rodneylives