Recently in Retro Category

Time to blow some dust off of this blog. I at least hope to update the blog more often nowadays - I’ve fully upgraded the blog to use Melody features now, it’d be shame to let all that go to waste.

In 21st August, there was an interesting thread in reddit on dead Game Boys.

Nintendo builds surprisingly resilient hardware, and it’s fairly odd that the Game Boy is so far the only Nintendo product that failed on me. I got my Game Boy shortly after its launch in early 1990s, and played many games on it.

I felt I sort of grew out of Game Boy. My GB library consisted of platformers, and I started to dislike platformers. (Nowadays, I just dislike some platformers. I rather enjoy Castleroids.)

But I got my interest in Game Boy back - my sister started playing Pokémon and got her own Game Boy Color. RPGs on Game Boy? Awesome. In 2000s, I was actually inspired to get a Game Boy Advance, which still remains my favourite Nintendo handheld of all time because of the awesome game library. RPGs on the go!

Of course, with the GBA, I didn’t really need my Game Boy for anything. In 2005, I tried to use my old Game Boy again.

No luck.

In summer, it's always fun to play the old games. In my parents' home, I don't have a television in my old room, but I still do have two Commodore 64s, 1541 disk drive, and the Commodore 1802 monitor.

And since Wii has Commodore 64 games, what would be more logical than try seeing what they look like on a real Commodore monitor, right?



The annoying thing is, the copy of California Games for Wii is the first legit copy of the game I've had. I was going to post a comparison screenshot of California Games running on a real C64, but I could only find the Side 2 of the heinously illegal copy. (I didn't Copy That Floppy. I got the stack of disks from the previous owner of the machine, back in the day. Even when I was a kid, I had no idea why the hell these highly competent buccaneers couldn't put the game on two sides of the same floppy.)

Still, my highly unscientific opinion is that California Games on Wii is not quite the same as California Games on a real C64. Even on a real Commodore monitor, the picture qualify far surpasses the real C64. And, of course, the load times are far shorter. And there's no floppies that can be lost. Maybe the folks doing the Wii ports of C64 games could do something similar to the "PAL emulation" modes from VICE...

I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time, but never quite got around to it. Nintendo-lehti, the official Finnish Nintendo magazine in 1990s, had a contest where people could submit new ideas for marketing slogans for Nintendo. The results were published in issue 3/1992, but I’m not sure if Nintendo’s importer (Funente Oy, I think?) ever used the slogans.

A discussion on Slashdot again reminded me of one of the most odd game copy protection things I've ever seen.

Ages ago, I got a game collection for Commodore 64 called 2 Hot 2 Handle, which had - I think - Shadow Warriors, Total Recall, Golden Axe and Ivan Ironman's Super Off Road. (Whoa, memory serves me well, if MobyGames is to be believed.)

Now, I think Shadow Warriors and IISOR worked fine, but Golden Axe and Total Recall had curious feature: the copy protection clankered the drive a lot, which could mean only one thing: A busted disk.

With a little help from my father, the thing was sent back, by mail, across the country, to the store it was bought from. Some time later, the thing came back with a note that said something like "The games are okay! If they don't work, turn the disk drive to its side." With a helpful diagram, too! (I think I'll scan it and put it here if I find it. =)

I think they just returned the exact same disks, because the game definitely did not work - but once I flipped the drive to horizontal position, yep, the thing worked just fine!

(As a side note, "Shadow Warriors" is not the same thing as Shadow Warriors, aka Ninja Gaiden. I bet a lot of people got disappointed. =)

Update, March 18, 2006: Yup, obviously, I could find the thing. Scan is above. Also of note that I was still confused about the whole Shadow Warriors thing: Both of the games were marketed as Shadow Warriors!...

Here's something weird. I happened to find an old issue of Finnish computer magazine Hakkeri ("Hacker"), which was published in mid-nineties by Casamedia. I used to be a regular at the CasaBox.

This particular issue was 1/94. It had weird game-related news like "Doom has been released" and "A new version of the Commodore 64 emulator has been released". (Umm, yeah. The new version of "the Commodore 64 emulator". In retrospect it's pretty hard to guess which emulator that was, but I take an educated guess it was CCS64. There pretty much weren't other C64 emulators then! [Or was it this? My memory is a bit hazy.])

The most important thing, and probably the most educational piece of news in retrospect, was, however, an article titled "Commodore takes it like a man."

"...if the numbers have any other basis in reality aside of the market leader's hallucinations, the company seems to be doing just fine... ...the current sales... are approximately 30,000 per week, the total being close to 400,000 units already... ...is selling up to four times more than Sega's similar offering. The company has... heh, a 'problem': [David Pleasance says] 'Our problem is that we aren't manufacturing enough of the machines [to meet the demand]...'"

Sounds interesting, huh?

Now, you may think that's just a typical marketspeak, and you may have heard similar speak from most of the major console manufacturers of the day when they spew ramblings of their own consoles.

The bit I omitted in the dot-dot-dots was the fact that they're talking of Commodore CD32.

Which, you may be aware, didn't quite live up to the hype what comes to the sales. (Nor, exactly, did Sega CD, but that's just a small detail.)

People, please, remember this. Don't believe the hype. Here we see a company spinning "yeah, we're doing fine", and if you look at them a decade later, the frigging company doesn't even exist.

This is exactly why I hate the marketing bullshit that's being spewed around the new consoles. I hope this small example was enlightening enough in this respect.

I got this crazy idea to test how the old Finnish freeware DOS games would work in DOSBox.

Note that these games are not exactly the most shining examples of free/shareware games that were produced in Finland in the MS-DOS era. Pet, they clearly are an indication of the fact that Finns have traditionally been pretty keen on making games on their own! Hobbyist gamemaking scene is something quite out of ordinary here. If you want some high-quality freeware action, try Tapan Kaikki instead =)

Ryssän Kauhu

My machine is a Pentium III 600MHz, which doesn't seem to have enough horsepower to run any 486 or Pentium era games in DOSBox at an acceptable speed.

So, I was kind of surprised to find out that Ryssän Kauhu works perfectly in DOSBox, at full speed! Amazing! High quality Finnish game design! Er... or something like that. You need to disable the GUS emulation though, and only enable SoundBlaster. And not use any scalers either, or at least on my machine.

The game is quite simple: Soviet soldiers march from the horizon and your job is to kill them with a Minigun (well, this is set in World War II, and I'm pretty sure Finns used Maxims or stuff like that, not Miniguns - but I don't think the game is entirely historically correct anyway...)

The game is simply remarkable for one reason: The sound acting is hilarious. Specifically, hilariously bad. I could easily get to Level 3 in the game before I got the sound working, and after the sound worked, I couldn't get past level 2...

Oikeutta Eläimille

Too bad Oikeutta Eläimille doesn't work as well. The game is sluggish, sometimes crashes DosBox, and sometimes makes DosBox completely freeze (fortunately it doesn't freeze X11). Otherwise, it's perfect.

The idea of the game is to kill animal rights activists who are trying to release the foxes from your fur farm. Completely crazy stuff.

The following are random questions from the letters page ("Box Mario") of Nintendo-lehti (which, I believe, was the Finnish version of Nintendo Power in 1990-1995 or so). I try to answer them as best as I can, because frankly, the answers given in the magazine left quite a bit to be desired.

"Can you use magic in Mega Man 2 or DuckTales?" (3/1991) Mega Man II, set in year 200X, is regrettably set in time when magic is generally believed to be only superstitious, and science and reasoning has gained foothold tremenduously. As such, magic might be highly out of place. DuckTales represents the latter animated productions of Disney, in the time when the Disney magic had already started to fade (which is not to say DuckTales was bad, I did enjoy the series myself) - I have to say that until The Lion King (1994), the Disney Magic was clearly going strong, and after that, it sort of died down, with only a couple of notable exceptions (such as Mulan (1998)).

"Is Duck Hunt only a game for passing time?" (9/1992) No. Most obvious answer would be that, since Duck Hunt is rather repetitive and simple-minded, it is a way of attaining Nirvana. In western society, however, the game can be seen as a powerful suppressor of hunting instincts that tend to surface way too often. The popularity of the laughing dog can be seen either as a signal that people like comedy and believe in brighter future, or, for some individuals who would rather shoot the dog, a focus of hatred in the world. Either way, the game is obviously good for you.

"Where can I replace a game called Action 52?" (6/1994) Now, the reply from the magazine spoke the usual garbage about Action 52 being non-approved cartridge full of "copies". Obviously, the magazine did not get it. Action 52, unlike other unapproved games, has to be replaced by any means necessary. The cartridge sure isn't full of copied games, it's full of The Real Stuff. (You know, genuine countryside smell and all.) It shouldn't matter if the cart is unapproved. Official Nintendo representatives should immediately, upon encountering this cartridge, remove it, reimburse the owner in form of n or more "genuine" cartridges, and place the Action 52 cartridge in... um... some kind of highly hazardous material containment.

More stupid replies coming later on! Wow, I'm really bad at this game humor thing! Seanbaby would be rolling in his grave, if he would be dead! Well, fortunately, these replies aren't exactly supposed to be funny, just... a bit thoughtful. =)