It’s not the usual Sunday silliness, no it’s a different kind of Sunday silliness, but hey it’s April Fools Day! Wait, you’re saying it isn’t April Fool’s Day any more? It’s even May now? Crap.
The Commodore Amiga has quite nice digital sound output. The Commodore 64 has the SID chip, well-regarded in 8-bit computing circles. The Commodore PET, on the other hand….
I’ve seen people call the PET the first home computer. This is false. There were computers before it, but they were sold in the form of kits. One of them, the KIM-1, was sold by MOS Technology before they were bought by Commodore. The PET was released the following year as an all-in-one unit, even with an integrated monitor.
Some PETs had a basic speaker included. The speaker had to be driven directly. With the later SID, you wrote data into registers and the chip’s circuitry handled the sound generation over time, freeing up the process for other things. On the PET, the processor has to push bits into the register itself, or else use a shift register set up to do the bit pushing. That means, if you get the data in fast enough, that you actually have a fair bit of flexibility over what the speaker does, but it also means you spend a lot of CPU cycles in doing in.
58 minutes is a bit of a time imposition. And there is some hardcore hackery going on, with them writing assembly code on camera and testing it over and over in an emulator until it works, as well as both harsh hiss and very high-pitched beeping. To avoid those fine examples of audio torture, you can jump here to hear the final result, at around the 56 minute mark. By the way, the sound being played is the Windows 95 start up noise, the one composed by Brian Eno.
Mr. Goof on Youtube made a video with some cool and relatively unknown things that can be done in Super Mario Galaxy. Like the ground pound move in that game has a homing function, you can hold crouch to skate backwards on ice, and there is a secret button press that can give you a speed boost at the start of Cosmic Mario races. But none of those things are what they claim is the most obscure thing in the game.
The video is titled “Super Mario Galaxy’s Most Obscure Mechanic,” which is a bit wrong. It’s not a mechanic, or mechanism, it’s just a move with no real gameplay purpose. If you stand near water and jump, Mario will dive into the water with a special animation. That’s it. It’s cool, but pretty useless. Still, it’s nice to see it in action.
Here’s the video (7 minutes). Now, go forth and win Mario-related trivia contests, if they happen to ask a question about this extremely specific behavior.
And The Greatest Foe (a particular frog in the swamp, 2 minutes)—but Youtube’s awful policies think it’s made for kids, despite the frog getting murdered bloodily at the end, so they made it unembedable. YOUTUBE HAS DONE A STUPID THING, LET THIS ALLCAPS MESSAGE STAND IN TESTAMENT TO THIS RIDICULOUS FACT.
Nintendo has a habit of, with each new console, throwing a bunch of features at the wall to see what’ll stick. Most things, let’s be frank, don’t.
Top of my head? The DS’s second screen? It worked for a while, but now seems pretty well an abandoned idea. The 3D features of the 3DS. StreetPass. AR games. Their brief experiments with free-to-play on the 3DS. The whole darn Virtual Boy. Need I go on?
One of these features was the idea of system-supported services that software could use to interact with the player outside of borders of their channel. Miis were the finest example of this, of course, and amazingly Nintendo hasn’t abandoned them yet, although ideas like Miis that could travel between systems on their own have been conveniently forgotten.
But on the Wii, there were a few less publicized things that games could do. Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel were known to send you messages on the system bulletin board to congratulate you on winning, or to give you hints of Stars to find.
About a year ago GVG did a recounting of Wii games that used, of all things, data from the Weather Forecast Channel. They pinned down nine pieces of software that did this. It’s a feature that Peter Molyneux notably abandoned when he directed Black & White (after announcing it), but Nintendo actually did it. Here is the video, which is a fairly padded 9½ minutes:
The title says nine games used it, but the channel only lists seven, and not all of them are even games! The software named:
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (could be enabled in Options)
Nights: Journey Into Dreams (in the Nightopian garden)
Quick! Name a level in Sonic Adventure 2 that isn’t City Escape (the first level)!
You probably couldn’t think of one. Maybe Pumpkin Hill, from remembering its rap-based theme song? But one very distinctive level in that game is the last one on the Hero Side: Final Rush.
Wait, what do I mean by Hero Side? None of this paragraph really matters, but…. There’s two scenarios in it, the Hero story with Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, and the Dark story (the game shies away from the term Evil) with series debut characters Shadow and Rouge, and Dr. Robotnik, a.k.a. Eggman, playable. The story scenes from Sonic Adventure 1 were ditched in favor of a level select map, and the varied gameplay of the first game narrowed down to running stages (Sonic/Shadow), searching stages (Knuckles/Rouge) and shooting stages (Tails/Eggman). Gone were Amy and Big the Cat’s playstyles, and Omega’s were given over to Tails and Eggman.
Of course, everyone most loved the running stages. The game’s named after Sonic, after all, even though they had some issues. The issues, they were what many people who played the game remembered. Although the game is arguably an improvement on SA1, gave us more insight into Eggman’s history and motivations than we’ve ever had before or since, and even its lore plays a big part in the Sonic 3 movie, it’s still a 3D Sonic, and so it’s still seen as inferior to the Genesis originals. The 3D Sonic game released after Sonic Adventure 2 was Sonic Heroes, which was mostly about running; the searching and shooting gameplay seen in SA2 hasn’t to my knowledge returned since.
But as ZoomZike reminds us, there are interesting ideas in Sonic Adventure 2! He examines the last of the running levels (if you don’t count the very hard to unlock Green Hill level), in fact the last Hero Side level in the game.
Final Rush takes place in space (there’s still gravity though), and is themed around Sonic Adventure’s 2 new gimmick, rail grinding. You’ve shredded on rails throughout the game up to this point, but most of Final Rush takes place sliding around on rails improbably placed in Earth orbit. The level is rife with opportunities to send your pitiful blue garden mammal through a fiery reentry. My own memories of the level, like most of the game, involve camera struggles and fighting glitches, but I remember Final Rush being entertaining at least.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s been ten years since a little line drawning animation called URappinBad! shows up on Newgrounds. Now its creator Kevin Fagaragan has gone back and not only made it into a full color animation, but shows it side by side with the original.
Be on the lookout for cameos by Parappa’s friends PJ Berri and Katy Kat, Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken, and UmJammer Lammy. Both videos of course feature music taken directly from the Playstation classic Parappa the Rapper, which still has one of the best soundtracks in gaming. They got the music stuck in my head all over again. “When I say boom boom boom you say bam bam bam, no pause in between! C’mon let’s jam!
Displaced Gamers and their various technical dives, including the Behind the Code series, are favorites around here, and we’ve linked to them many times before. They take a lot of time with their content, but they always do a good job, much better than the average Youtube channel of whatever type, and it’s always something interesting to learn about. They have a new video up now (22 minutes) that examines the differences between the original and revised versions of Super Mario Bros 3, released a few months apart back in 1990.
Most of the differences were superficial: they changed the cover art slightly and added a ® symbol replacing a ™ on the Official Nintendo Seal. On the rom itself, they changed the names of the lands in the ending, from a flavorful set of localized names to just Adjective Land eight times in a row.
But there were other changes, and one of them was a substantial difference in the code, one that required moving much of it around by seven bytes to make room for it.
What was it? In brief, there’s one level in the game, 7-3, that uses a vertical-only scroll instead of a horizontal or multi-directional scroll, and it writes the images of the cards in the status window to the wrong place. So in the original release, on that one level, the card images are mysteriously blank during the vertical section.
That was fixed in the revision, which meant a check for what kind of scroll the level was using, and which changed the pointer to where to write them. Code needs space, and that space came out of a section of unused bytes at the end of the rom, with all the code between the change and that section shifted to account for it. If you had a Game Genie code that relied on data in those memory locations, too bad! You’ll need a modified version of that code.
Here’s the full low-down, which goes into much greater detail:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I think I’ve posted some of these before, but I don’t think I’ve done all of them, and I’m cleaning some links out of my list. So let’s take another look.
These are from a six-or-so year old meme that began with putting creepy (but not too creepy) music to battle music from perennial retro JRG favorite Earthbound. Earthbound had lots of weird and crazy enemies, so they fit fairly well. But they’re not all Earthbound collections, just so’s you knows.
I’ve got quite a few of these links. I could spread them across weeks, but I’ve got other posts to make, so I’ll just unload them all at once. Watch as many as you can stand.
The video refers to a shorter video (19 minutes) by Zarithya, who solved some particular technical issues that made the 16-player game possible. If you’re in the mood for the full journey watch the above video; if you want less of your day consumed, try this one:
The gist: Faceball 2000 was a console (and portable) recreation of an Atari ST game called Midi Maze. Midi Maze was probably the first true FPS. Faceball 2000 got releases for multiple platforms, but the first, and most impressive technically, is probably the Gameboy version.
Developer Xanth Software F/X had a 16-player version of Gameboy Faceball working internally with special cables. Nintendo wanted them to support their new four-player adapter, but the mode that allowed for 16 players with the rigged cables was left in (it still works with an ordinary Gameboy link cable, jut limited to two players), although the devs noted in a 2005 interview that they had only managed to test it with up to 10 players.
Zarithya managed to figure out a way to play it with higher player counts with minimal extra hardware, and also discovered, and fixed, a bug that made 16-player games impossible with the code as released. It’s a pretty accessible explanation, you can probably understand it without much of a technical background.
That’s the main point; for the full story, the videos above are available. Enjoy, if you have the time!
It’s true. It’s meant for things like WiFi login pages and displaying online manuals, but it doesn’t have a field for entering URLs yourself.
Seems unfair to me, but I suppose they thought everyone has a smartphone these days. (Until recently, I didn’t!) And I understand the web browser was a persistent security hole for the Wii-U. So while they include a web browser in the Switch for those reasons, it’s locked-off from the users. It’s still a security risk, mind you.
Now, a weird thing about the Switch is it’s multitasking system. The OS reserves a large portion of its memory for an “applet.” This is one of a number of system programs intended to provide a number of services to the user and running game software. Each of the round button options on the Home menu starts up an applet. The eShop is an applet. The system keyboard is an applet. And the web browser is an applet.
One thing about the applets is only one can run at a time! Games can actually run in the background while the Home menu and an applet are open, but if a game calls upon the system keyboard to enter text, then you go to the Home menu and open something else, the keyboard will stop. When you return to the game, it’ll have to be restarted.
