On an unusually personal note for VC&G, I thought I’d let you guys know why I’ve been so quiet recently. The answer is completely on-topic and has a lot to do with what is pictured on the right: computers. You see, I’m about to move. Moving is no simple operation for anyone, but it becomes exponentially more complicated when your house is filled with over one thousand cubic feet (wild estimate, maybe more) of bulky computers, their accessories, and video game systems. I’ve not even actually started moving yet, but I’ve spent the last few weeks packing things up and getting things ready for the big haul. Phew. Next Wednesday the actual move begins, and I’m planning on renting a big truck to move as much as I can in as few loads as possible. I’ll probably take some pictures to show you later.

To all our readers, and to all the people who have emailed me something that I haven’t replied to / published yet, I want to say thank you for your exceptional patience. Once I’m up and running in my new office, I’ll be pumping out new VC&G features like never before. That should be in a couple weeks at the most. I’ve got tons of cool stuff in the pipeline (including an account of my recent adventure to a local hamfest that resulted in some excellent finds), so stay tuned! Subscribe to VC&G articles via RSS and you’ll know automatically when we’re back in action.

Wish me luck on moving the mountain. If I get crushed under a PDP-11 in the process, don’t cry for me; at least I will have died moving something I loved. 😛

I’ve never been a huge fan of using emulators for any computer that I actually physically possess. The original hardware is almost always where it’s at — the unique look, the feel, and even the smell of a machine all add to the “authentic” user experience (kinda makes me sound like a wine snob, doesn’t it?). But original hardware breaks over time and sometimes becomes irreplaceable since it’s no longer in production. That’s where people like Rich Dreher step in with modern upgrades for vintage computers (for more on this phenomenon, check out my “New Tech for Old Computers & Game Systems” list).

Rich is now on the second revision of an impressive Apple II hardware add-on card he designed called the “CFFA” that enables any Apple II system to use a compact flash card, IBM MicroDrive, or IDE hard drive for storage. While definitely not the first Apple II IDE interface I’ve seen (or owned), this is a very slick piece of hardware. Here’s a brief rundown of its features, taken from the official site:

• Standard Apple II form factor Card 3″ x 6″ (Usable in any slot, except slot 3 in IIe and later)
• A Compact Flash/IDE Interface for Apple II family of computers (Type II Compact Flash socket — IBM MicroDrives work too)
• Standard 40 pin IDE header connector
• 3 terminal screw type power connection for IDE hard drives
• Support for up to 128 MB (4 drives) or 256MB (8 drives) under ProDOS and GS/OS (without Dave’s GS/OS driver)
• Support for up to 128MB, (four ProDOS 32MB drives) plus two 1GB drives under GS/OS (with Dave Lyons’ GS/OS driver)
• On-board EEPROM for SmartPort firmware
• User jumper to select 1 of 2 versions of the firmware
• Allow booting ProDOS or GS/OS directly from the Interface card (for a floppy-less system)
• Firmware available for 6502 machines (II, II+, IIe) and 65C02 machines (IIe enh, IIe platinum, IIgs ROM1 & ROM3)

Particularly attractive is, of course, the built-in CF socket. I recently read on Rich’s site that there’s even a new utility called “CiderPress” that will let you transfer files to / from the Apple II-formatted CF card when it’s plugged into a Windows machine!

Despite all its neat capabilities, what is actually most important about this card is that it’s actually for sale (currently US $105 plus shipping). Extremely unique short-run hardware doesn’t stay around for very long, so if you’re interested, don’t hesitate to jump on it while you still can. I’ve already got mine on order and am looking forward to running my Platinum IIe from a compact flash card soon.

Starting today, I’ll be doing a weekly column called “Game Ads A-Go-Go” (the title was the GSW editor’s idea) over on the blog GameSetWatch that showcases good, bad, strange, funny, and interesting classic video game-related advertisements. My first column is on “Dumb Ads of the 90s” and is up now. Check it out!

Most of the ads featured in the column will be scanned from my massive early 1990s game magazine collection that I recently unearthed from deep-earth storage (my parents’ basement). The column itself is a partnership between GSW and VC&G, actually more of an extension of VC&G-style content exclusively on GSW. Why? I guess it’s because we love each other so much (read: “I’ve been bribed with a lifetime supply of chili hot dogs”). But never you mind, and don’t you worry — the fresh content from VC&G will continue to flow just as readily as before.

You may remember our popular feature on Mario Adventure a few weeks ago. Well, an intrepid fan named Greg Head has completed the first ever Mario Adventure FAQ and it’s now available for view on Vintage Computing and Gaming. The FAQ is mostly complete so far (except for some world walkthroughs) and Greg and I will be updating and improving it over time. You can send typo / editing / formatting errors to me, and content errors, improvements, or suggestions to Greg.

If you didn’t catch the link above, here’s where you can view the Mario Adventure FAQ.

You may have noticed on other gaming blogs that yesterday (Feb 21st, 2006) was the 20th anniversary of the first release of The Legend of Zelda on the Famicom. I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap this week by coincidence (an excellent game, by the way), and all this confluence of Zelda activity has gotten me thinking. Wouldn’t it be awesome to play a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in the Zelda universe? Perhaps Nintendo could make a spiffy, slick 3D one with nice graphics for their upcoming Revolution console. If not, I’d be happy if some fans simply made a homebrew 2D, top-down MMORPG using A Link to the Past as a graphical framework. Either way, there would be some serious questions to address in such a game.

The most obvious question about a Zelda MMORPG is: who would you play as? Would the world have 1,000 Links running around? Or could you choose your race during character creation, kinda like World of Warcraft? You might choose to be Hylian, Kokiri, Goron, Zora, Deku, Rito, Minish, Fairy or even other races that have appeared in Zelda games. Each race would start out in their own zone with their own quests, etc., although they could obviously travel all over Hyrule. Another major question is: where would Link and Zelda be in all this? Would people just get frustrated (ala Star Wars Galaxies) if they couldn’t play as the main characters? Another issue is gameplay: I think since the Zelda games are action-adventure games, that the gameplay of a Zelda MMORPG should be action-role-playing. That is, you swing your sword and do actions in real time, but you could build up experience and raise your stats over time. Also you could learn new skills and techniques (unique to each race) that could let you access new areas, or just simply let you have new abilities. And like other MMORPGs, there would be an in-world economy (but based on rupees, of course). You’ll gain rupees based on killing monsters, and spend them by visiting shops and buying from other players. There are many possibilities in the universe of Zelda. I just wanted to write this article as a quick brainstorm to get started, but please feel free to continue and improve my train of thought on a new Zelda MMORPG. Good idea? Bad idea? Please discuss!

Just yesterday I had the opportunity to conduct an email interview DahrkDaiz, creator of the impressive hack Mario Adventure. Mario Adventure is a completely new Mario game made from modifications to the Super Mario Bros. 3 game engine for the NES. The game was the subject of a recent piece on VC&G and has proven to be quite popular now that it has been given wider attention on our site.

Vintage Computing and Gaming: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. First off, where are you from?
DahrkDaiz: Knoxville, Tennessee

VC&G: What do you do for a living?
DD: I’m currently a student at ITT-Tech and working full time at a fast food restaurant.

VC&G: Do you aspire to be a professional game designer?
DD: I hope so one day but in reality I know game design is a tough field to crack, so I’ll continue to pursue the dream in my spare time while focusing on a realistic programming career, working for businesses to make a living.

VC&G: What’s your favorite video game? Favorite Mario game?
DD: A tie between Sonic 3 & Knuckles and SMB3. [Favorite Mario Game:] SMB3, no surprise there.

VC&G: What inspired you to make Mario Adventure?
DD: The total lack of a proper Mario sequel. I was disappointed with the Mario Advance series and I saw other people’s attempt at creating a new SMB3 experience and decided to take the matter into my own hands.

VC&G: Mario Adventure has been very popular on VC&G. It been downloaded over 11,000 times from our site in the last few days. Is there anything you’d like the players of Mario Adventure to know or keep in mind while playing?
DD: This hack was made with the hardcore SMB3 player in mind. I could practically beat the original with my eyes closed and figured it was time to up the difficulty. However, I tried to include ways to pass hard obstacles easily. Use your power-ups to their fullest abilities and you should do fine getting through the game.

VC&G: What’s your favorite new feature of Mario Adventure? Also, what’s your favorite world in the game?
DD: Definitely the key collecting idea. I always liked having to back track through levels or world to get something out of the way to continue in a game. Point A to point B grows old quickly. [Favorite World:] Colossal Classics. The giant nostalgic look just has something about it that pleases me. Though I thought I could have a slightly better job with it.

VC&G: What development tools did you use to create Mario Adventure?
DD: FCEUd (emulator with an excellent debugger), YY-Chr (graphics editing), Mario 3 Improvement (archaic SMB3 level editor), Hex Workshop (hex editor).

VC&G: How long did it take you to complete Mario Adventuree?
DD: Approximately 16 months.

VC&G: Was reverse engineering the Super Mario Bros. 3 Game engine and implementing new rules, power-ups, etc. difficult? Tell us more about how you made changes to the Super Mario Bros. 3 game itself.
DD: At first it was very difficult. I slowly began to see a certain logic used behind the game. However, when reprogramming the code, I had to find unused space in the ROM, so that was pretty much hit and miss. Admittedly I did a poor job at coding it, hence all the bugs and glitches, but I did what I could with what knowledge I knew. A lot of time stepping through code and even writing code out on paper while at work during my break was required.

VC&G: Did you do all the level design in Mario Adventure yourself?
DD: Absolutely everything was done by me in this.

VC&G: Do you think Mario Adventure would work properly if somehow put on an actual hardware cartridge and played on a real NES/Famicom? Have you ever attempted this?
DD: Unfortunately, it will not. I reprogrammed the game to take advantage of a bug most emulators have, however, I did not realize at the time that it was a bug. The hack would work on a real NES, but not properly all time. The main bug being the status bar moving up over the screen at certain times.

VC&G: Have you ever heard from Nintendo about your Mario hacking exploits?
DD: Surprisingly, no.

VC&G: Have you done any previous game hacking projects? If so, tell us about them.
DD: Before Mario Adventure? No, but there were a few things I did while working on Mario Adventure and afterwards. Most of it is unknown unfinished test projects. I created a cool parallax (SNES style) background scroll in Mega Man 3 for Snake Man’s stage. I hacked Castlevania 3 to start and stay as Alucard. I completely hacked Ms. Pac-Man to have 32 unique levels, a mode to play levels at random and a pellet counter. This hack is known as Pac-Man 3 and will be available on my site once it relaunches.

VC&G: What can you tell us about your next hacking project? When will it be ready?
DD: I can tell you now the next big project is another SMB3 hack. Most people may sigh at this, but I took a different approach with this hack and differs from Mario Adventure. The scale is that, if not more than Mario Adventure. It makes Luigi and Mario be separate characters with each having special powers of their own for different gameplay, including Luigi’s floaty jump and slippery control and a new item box for Mario found in Mario Adventure. Each character has their own separate 8 worlds to play through, so this is literally two hacks in one. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

VC&G: Is there anything else that you’d like our readers to know?
DD: Mario Adventure is a real gem, but I’ve listened to a lot of good and bad feedback on it and this new project I’m working on addresses those issues. But I like to thank everyone who’s played this hack and given so much praise for it. It’s really inspired me to take game development as a serious career.

I know this site is called Vintage Computing and Gaming, but what this site is really about is celebrating the history of computers and video games. I’m interested in the history of computers and video games over all time: past, present, and future. What is current now will soon be in the past, and part of history. Those of us who ponder the history of video games can’t help thinking ahead and wondering what will come next. Well, one can’t get a glimpse of the future of an industry without knowing its past. That’s why amateur enthusiast-historians like myself are here.

It has been said many times that the video game market has grown up with the gamers who purchase and play the games themselves. For example, take “Gamer X,” born in 1975, who played his first video game console, an Atari 2600, at age 3. Then maybe he moved on to a Commodore 64 around age 8, switching later to a NES at age 12, then a SNES at age 16. By the time he hit 1995 and the launch of the PlayStation in the US, that gamer was 20-years-old. That 20-year-old was probably no longer content to play the same video games he did at 3 and 8, although he probably still loved them for nostalgic reasons. No, that person was at a completely different stage in his life with different dreams and a new worldview. As Gamer X grew up, video game complexity and maturity grew up with him, matching him almost perfectly along the way. He had Atari 2600 games with the simplicity for a toddler to pick up and play, NES games with more depth and imagination for adolescents and early teens, then the SNES with its more violent fighting games and deeper and more emotionally rewarding RPGs for mid- to late-teenagers. Then along came Sony. With the launch of the first PlayStation, Sony was the first company to aggressively go after the late-teen and early-adult gamer market. This was a huge surprise to the whole world of “older folks” (i.e. Baby Boomers and above) at the time, because until then, everybody thought video games were strictly for kids. Why did they think they were for kids? Because kids were young, flexible, and open-minded enough to embrace video games when they came into their own.

At this point, we’re due for a stop off at the present. Even today, in 2005, with the average video game player being 30-years-old (also see this), and — surprise — with Gamer X at 30, video games as an entertainment medium are still being misunderstood by the generations that have come before it. But this behavior is not new; other forms of popular entertainment have experienced similar growing trends…and growing pains. The rock and roll record-smashing of the 1950s and 60s was similar to what’s going on today with social conservatives and alarmist politicians pointing their pens at violent and sexual video games. Remember Elvis? Neither do I — I’m only 24. But I’ve read some books and I know that when he first shook his hips on TV, the whole world of over-40-year-olds thought teenagers everywhere would instantly collapse into massive inter-racial orgies, never to recover. It’s been the same story with every generational gap and entertainment medium since the dawn of time. You can look back in the history of TV, music (rap and jazz are good examples in addition to rock & roll), movies, theater, books, paintings, and poetry, and you’ll see the same trend as you do with video games today. It’s the same old story: the older generation in power just doesn’t understand, and frightened governments everywhere, knowing magically what’s best for people under 30, want to make state-parenting de rigueur.

Well, guess what? Gamer X isn’t going to stop growing, aging, and maturing. By the time people who grew up with video games take positions of authority, the current controversies over games as an entertainment medium will, for the most part, cease (to be replaced by some other concern, no doubt). Rock and roll music, once shunned, misunderstood, and censored by the WWII generation, has grown up with the Baby Boomers until we regularly see 60-year-old rockers like Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones drawing crowds of thousands.

Now, back to the present for a moment. At 30, Gamer X is currently enjoying PlayStation 2 games, with ever-growing depth and maturity. But soon (if he doesn’t already), he’ll have his own wife, kids, and family, and his priorities will change again. What happens when Gamer X reaches 40? At 40 years of age, I bet he’ll probably still want to play video games. But will Gamer X be content to run around and shoot hookers, kill virtual people, and steal their cars like he does today in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? Or will he want something different? He’ll probably work hard all day and come home exhausted — to a wife to attend to, kids to play with, and bills to pay. Will he have time to play that 100-hour RPG any more? Or does he want something more casual and less involved? Maybe he wants to tend a farm. Maybe he wants to sculpt clouds and float casually through the air. Or maybe he craves more driving simulators for his pending mid-life crisis. And what if he doesn’t have time to master the super-sophisticated, glowing, 20-button control pad that is being peddled to teenagers of the day? Maybe he wants to simply wave his hands in the air (like with the upcoming Nintendo Revolution controller, perhaps), and control things more intuitively. Well, I don’t think Gamer X will have to worry, because I firmly believe that the video game industry will grow with him to meet his changing needs and desires along the way.

But why stop at 40? Eventually there will be video game systems and content suitable-for and tailored-to a market of 50-, 60-, 70-year-old gamers and beyond (Gardening simulators, anyone? :P). In 2055, when Gamer X is 80, there will be millions of people his age that have grown up with interactive digital entertainment as a way of life. They will want new games to play, and digital entertainment companies, eager for their Social Security dollars (if SS hasn’t collapsed by then), will provide them. This will give the phrase “gaming grandma” a whole new meaning.

Finally, our short story of Gamer X’s gaming life ends one day in 2082, when he is 107 years old. There, in a richly decorated room (with Star Wars posters and antique Spawn action figures), he lies on a bed, jerking, moving, and definitely occupied with something. Concerned, his 10-year-old great-grandson enters and poses a simple question:

“What are you playing grandpa?”

“Heaven 2.0, son. Now leave me alone, I’m busy!”

Heh. And I thought all this NEX stuff was over. It has come to my attention that IGN posted a review of the Generation NEX yesterday on their site. And what’s more, they gave it a 9.5 out of 10. Whoa. They must have been on nostalgia overdrive to hand out a score like that to a piece of absolutely mediocre hardware. Considering that the reviewer probably hadn’t played a NES game since 1992, I can almost forgive him for his enthusiasm (“WHOA!! You can still play NES games?! Dude!!”). What’s more, IGN was apparently provided a set of Messiah’s wireless controllers for free (which cost $59.99 and don’t come with the unit) and that probably significantly improved their overall impression of the NEX. They should have reviewed the wireless controllers separately. I know that whether one likes/dislikes the NEX is really a glass half-full or half-empty issue, but the NEX’s glass is definitely not full enough to warrant a 9.5. I don’t know if I should be suspicious of IGN’s review integrity, or if they just don’t know any better.

I stand firmly by my review. But of course, I also respect the opinions of others who actually like the NEX. At least most of those people have the sense to take a realistic look at it (like my buddy Jake at 8-Bit Joystick).

Update (12/23/2005): I’m not the only one who thinks IGN’s review is weird. Take a look at this thread on the AtariAge forums.