The Flipside of Gaming
Displaced Gamers’ excellent Being The Code series on Youtube looks into what causes Nintendo’s NES Tetris to crash at really really high levels, over level 150. In the process, it goes through how that game displays and adds scores together. Have a look (22 minutes)!
This one’s crazy. The Gameboy does not have external video output. In order to get its display to appear on a screen other than its built in LCD dox matrix, you absolutely have to at least crack open the case. Don’t you?
Well, actually, yes, if you always want a perfect image. Sebastian Staacks (an awesome name) figured out a way to do it that mostly works. It’s a cartridge that goes into the Gameboy, that itself has a slot into which you plug the cartridge that you wish to play. Simple, right?
No, no, wait. There’s a problem. The Gameboy doesn’t expose its video through the cartridge port. There is no pin leading out providing a video signal that can be converted for display. There’s no way this could work!
Well, there is a way, kind of. The device contains a Raspberry Pi that runs its own Gameboy emulator, that it tries to keep synced with the version running on physical hardware. It does this by watching bus activity exposed to it through the cartridge port!
But while there’s a lot that it can do with this information, there’s also a lot it can’t see. It can’t, for example, see directly what buttons are being pressed. However, by watching how the cartridge reads the cart ROM, it can deduce what inputs were pressed.
The process is not perfect. While it can spy some memory accesses, a few things escape its inspection. While it can recreate the layout of the starting blocks in Tetris Game B, it can’t catch their randomized appearances. Also, while a Raspberry Pi is much faster than a Gameboy, it’s not fast enough to carry out its display in the same frame as the main unit, so it lags behind a couple of frames. Still though, it’s a very clever idea, and it’s amazing that it works as well as it does!
Sebastian made a Youtube video explaining and showing off his work, here. (It’s the same one embedded above.)
There Oughta Be A Game Boy Capture Cartridge
tom7, aka suckerpinch on YouTube, is a freaking genius. I don’t believe in geniuses, but he is a strong counter-argument, I will admit.
His modus operandi is to take some absurd premise and carry it to its logical conclusion, usually using some form of technology along the way. He then makes a video about it. Sometimes the video is in connection with a paper he’s written for SIGBOVIK, which is an entire oil tanker full of worms that I really don’t want to get into here, suffice to say it’s hosted on the site of the Association for Computational Heresy.
The PDF of their 300-page record of proceedings calls itself, “The fifteenth annual intercalary robot dance party in celebration of workshop on symposium about 26th birthdays; in particular, that of harry q. bovik,” about which all I can say, honestly, is, woof. I encourage you to go to that side and read, or at least try to read, some of their papers. You will come to feel like a complete imbecile, but you’ll probably be entertained.
AnYwAy. This post isn’t about SIGBOVIK but about tom7. The post above is about his questionable quest to construct mass storage devices out of unlikely things, like masses of Nintendo Tetris emulators, or a mass of used COVID tests. In the past he’s done fascinatingly-insane videos on bad chess algorithms, generalizing the concepts of uppercase and lowercase, created a number of weird bikes, or (to stick with the blog’s theme) teaching a computer to play Super Mario Bros. in a fairly silly way, which at least will teach you what lexicographical ordering means.
Found via a Metafilter post from user zengargoyle.
Let’s start by getting you up to speed. It’s one of the most well-known video games in the whole world at this point, but people who’ve lived under rocks might not know about Tetris, the block falling puzzle game created in Russia and popularized first by Spectrum Holobyte, then by Nintendo. Favorite game of both diehard Japanese arcade players and Steve Wozniak.
While the increasing speed and rising pile are what directly end games, a lot of the difficulty of Tetris comes from the pieces that are generated by the software. Famously, it’s known that completely random Tetris is doomed to failure, that it’s been mathematically proven that there exist sequences of blocks that are unsolvable, but aside from that nearly all sequences are survivable.
One thing that can help a player survive is the sequence of the blocks that are generated by the game, which is really getting into the weeds. A consistently varied collection of pieces helps out a lot. Early versions of Tetris just picked any block, and sequences of the same piece could easily happen. Recent years have seen an effort by the official stewards of the game, The Tetris Company, to standardize it, and one of their edicts is to use a “bag” system, where the game tries to ensure that all pieces will appear over a short period of time, to try to keep the game fair while still acceptably random-seeming.
At the other end of the field, Hatetris is a fan-made form of Tetris that seeks to increase difficulty by picking the least-survivable block, the one least able to fit in with the rest of the bit. (It’s not the only such version, another is Bastet.) Casual players usually find it impossible more than one or two lines.
Yet recently there has been surprising progress in surviving this worst-universe version Tetris. Getting the World Record in HATETRIS explains the work done to maximize scores in this version; the current record is 86 lines. Helping their work is that the Hatetris isn’t random at all, but actually completely deterministic. The piece that must stack the bin the highest is always chosen, so it can be predicted and, to some extent, accounted for.
And with an ocean of computing power out there now, sloshing about over everything, it was probably only a matter of time that someone would look into optimizing adverse Tetris. What, I ask you with growing concern, is next?
The Gripe Monster lives in a cave on the premises, and hates everything. In its mind, nothing has ever been great, but it always used to be better. It has demanded the opportunity to vent its three spleens here every once in a while. We have agreed, in order to shut it up, and so long as it confines its rantings to occasional Sunday evenings. Take it away, Gripey!
Don’t call me Gripey!
Rarr! I am the Gripe Monster! Fear me! I will talk your ear off if given the opportunity! Do you know how much a doctor charges to reattach an ear? And you can’t sue me for injury, judges think I don’t exist!
But I do exist! I’m not just a piece of pixel art! And I am displeased. This time the object of my formidable ire is a dumb listicle!
In particular my woeful focus is fixed upon an article on a website, titled 10 Games You Probably Didn’t Know Started As Arcade Games! It makes my bile boil, and my blood clog! It upsets all of my monsterly fluids!
Three of the series listed are Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and “Space Wars!” This article, it makes me breathe FIRE! None of these series started in arcades! It doesn’t even get the original name of Space War right! My sensibilities are agitated! They cannot even claim defense due to Mario starting in Donkey Kong, for they list that as a separate series!
I do blame the author, for my anger is indiscriminate, but my wrath is tempered with the understanding that writing is difficult and research is time-consuming, although the histories of these series are by no means secret! Much more, I blame the site that let it pass without question. Grar, I say! Grar and grar again! I swipe at it with my mighty claws, and I bite it with my awful tusks!
If you do not wish to suffer my wrath in the future, please edit your articles with greater care! And get off my lawn!
Management wishes to express that we bear no ill-will towards either the author or the site, although the points Gripey brings up are technically accurate. Mistakes happen!
Stop undercutting my rant!
Via MNeko on Twitter, Apotris (itch.io, $0) is nothing more than a really sharp and responsive clone of a certain tetromino-stacking puzzle game. It just feels good to play! It’s Game Boy Advance homebrew, and I can personally vouch that it’s particularly nice if you have the means to play it on a jailbroken 2 or 3DS.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Greetings, humans! Here is the gaming news I could glean from decrypting your internet broadcasts from my flying saucer floating above your atmosphere!
Jordan Devore, Destructoid: Rogue Legacy 2 Drops Vertigo From Its Traits List. You see, each character you play in that game is part of a lineage of characters, and they have semi-random traits. One of those traits flipped the screen upside-down during play. Or it did. Now it’s not in the game anymore!
Oisin Kunhke, Gamebyte tells us about a word-in-progress Breath of the Wild Randomizer mod!
Brad Linder of Liliputing notes of a new version of a three-key keyboard made by Stack Overflow.
Wololo (?) of Wololo (??) tells us that homebrew fans are reviving Playstation Home!
Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica lets us know that Nvidia is facing scrutiny from the FCC for inaccurately representing how cryptocurrency mining boosted the sales of their graphics hardware.
Sam Medley of NotebookCheck tells of AltStore, a sneaky way around Apple’s App Store for distributing software they’d rather you not use. I hesitate to speculate on how long this loophole will last, but I’m no fan of hardware lockouts and use limitations, so it’s nice while it lasts!
More news from the orchard. MacRumors talks with Feral about porting games to Apple’s new M1 hardware and the difficulties it has faced with their graphics.
Always awesome Kyle Orland at Ars Technica has an article with a headline too fun to paraphrase: Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest.
Ian Evenden at Tom’s Hardware talks about HoloISO, a port of SteamOS 3 that fans have gotten to run on devices other than the Steam Deck. Valve hasn’t released it officially for other hardware yet!
Jay Fingas at Engadget tells us about an auction for a gold-played Wii originally intended for the Queen of England. Seems she was denied the shiny unit due to rules against gifts.
Trent Cannon of Nintendo Life reviews Prinny Presents: NIS Classics Volume 2 for Switch.
Alex Donaldson at VG247 warns us that Sonic Origins probably won’t have Sonic 3‘s original soundtrack, due to rights issues related to Michael Jackson’s involvement with the project. Sega has been hampered with music rights across several games, including the soundtrack for some ports of Crazy Taxi.
More from Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech tells us about Rifftrax: The Game!
Zoey Handley at Destructoid on Famicom Wars, the game of which the upcoming Advance Wars Reboot Camp is a distant sequel!
Rebecca Stone at Twinfinite tells us about the 10 highest-priced used Gamecube games going! Sadly none of those I still own are up there, drebnar, not even Kirby Air Ride!
Mike Wilson writing at Bloody Disgusting celebrates the 30th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D!
Back around to Engadget, J. Trew tells us about the lengths to which players are pushing NES Tetris.
And Zoe Sottile at CNN (swanky!) notes that Ms. Pac-Man and The Legend of Zelda are being inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
The always-wonderful retro gaming and hardware info site Nicole Express has a great post about the chips that Tengen (a subsidiary of Atari) used in their cartridges! Tengen is a special case among NES developers, in that while a Nintendo licensee they got to use their own mapper, from Namco, but went and manufactured their own ASICs when they split off from Nintendo’s licensing program. The deets are all in the article!
Nicole Express’ archives are well worth a look, which among other items hosts their article on Zaxxon and Future Spy. They have interesting games to play on their itch.io page too! Have I used enough exclamation points yet?!