Gism Butter

Hit my favorite flea market this past Sunday at Laney college in Oakland. While I didn’t score anything amazing, I did get a legal box full of carts for $30. The guy wanted $50, but I walked away, and by the time I was 2 booths down, he was shouting “$30!”

All of the above 2600 carts were what I’d label “uncommon,” though that’s a complete lie. Maybe about 1/3 were uncommon. The rest are distinctly common. But I’d not had a copy of M*A*S*H or GI Joe before, so I chalked these up to bringing my Atari 2600 cart collection up to snuff.

Of course, the Atari 5200 is worthless. Even the rare games don’t top $100 in the original packaging. I already have most of these anyway. But the three Sega carts, I felt, were worth it. Star Trek and Buck Rogers are both somewhat uncommon.

More Intellivision games for my collection. Plus a Ms. Pac-Man for 7800 that I can play. I have another copy in the sealed box. None of these are really worth anything.

The Genesis games were a great addition to the box. Especially Mutant League hockey. A great game, and somewhat uncommon. I had Ecco, but the others are additions to my collection, and thus I was happy to bring them home.

Finally, two cheat devices and an Atari 800 game. The N64 Game Shark was unexpected. And the Game Genie for Genesis was a nice addition too. You could easily make an argument that I over paid for this box, but I think I got a relative deal.

This company, Tilestack, is bringing Hypercard to the Web. In theory, it should work like: Upload stack, view stack. Simple, right?

This got me thinking. For years, we’ve been chasing emulation as a means to bringing old software back to life. Unfortunately, building a new emulator for every system, and for every OS to run it is kinda silly. The real way to run old software is with Web hosting and emulation. This should be done for all old software.

We’ve gotten to the point where you can run amazing things under the browser, and with Lively Kernel coming around in a few years, we’ll have an environment in which to build more desktop-like interfaces. That means we’ll have a place to put all this old stuff.

Imagine a day when you go to the Macintosh Garden, and decide to play the old World Builder Game, Psychotic. Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to run the emulator and download the game: you could just run it in the broswer? I await this innovation, lazy Web.

We published my chat with Sony Online. The print version’s out now, but the online version went up last month, I now find. Had no idea!

I’m always peaking at speed runs on YouTube. Archive.org has a section dedicated to them as well, but it lends itself to lengthy 100%-style runs. Who has the attention to watch a 5 hour run? Great for ambiance, though.

Anyhoo, I thought I post up a few well done runs. First, no death Contra run in 13:52, flat, is pretty freaking impressive. I expect he uses turbo on his controller. If not, wow, but if so… well, I can’t play very well without turbo either. So, no harm no foul on that. NES Advantage was definitely key there.

This run of Mega Man in under 30 minutes is also quite impressive.

Of course, Metroid is always popular in the speed running crowd, and this shorty run shows off lots of tricks of the trade.

I’m just back from EA’s Spring Break event, at the Supper Club in SF. The first thing I thought when I got home was to write up a quick synopsis of what the world’s largest game company did wrong at this massive press event. Bringing ya’ll up to speed: E3, the consumer oriented game conference, is dead going on 2 years now. Instead of having a replacement conference, all the game companies this week, are having events to show off their new titles.

Essentially, all of the game publishers have gotten into a massive rut: build until May, show preview at E3. Crunch until September, set in stone, release. It’s a treadmill that every developer hates. I’d imagine they all got excited when E3 died, thinking “I’ll never have to crunch for another playable build in April and May!”

Nope. Not gonna happen. All the devs are still crunching away, and instead of an exclusive event in LA, their wares are shown in a supper club in San Francisco.

So, tonight’s EA event was the first of a week-long tirade through Sega, Namco, and Konami, amongst  others. So, what did EA do wrong at its event tonight?

1: Bad Food: I’ve been to the Supper Club before. It has some great food and drinks. But tonight, EA sprang for some Sushi in a shot glass, some Chinese take-out boxes with lots of chicken and a few noodles, and… worst of all… I can’t even say it… EA decided, for some reason, to offer cutlets and bread as mini sandwiches. Great, works for everyone else, right? Well, not so much. FI have no idea why, but EA’s cutlet plates consisted of Salmon and fucking balogna. No, I am not kidding Bologna. No other meats.

2: No Room for Cameras: Watch G4 this week. You’ll no doubt see interviews with EA’s development leads on Mass Effect PC, Battlefield, and Left 4 Dead. But those interviews were conducted in poorly lit corners amongst hundreds of shouting games journalists. Not an optimal situation for filming. I know a lot of angry cameramen who were forced to drag their equipment into this cramped, loud, poorly lit room. The only room where booze was offered. Bad call.

3: Tammy Schacter Forgot Who I Am: Totally personal. But still Isn’t PR supposed to remember everyone’s names?

4: Too Soon For Overdue Wii Titles: I’m sure Rock band Wii is ready. But Skate It, for Wii is far too early on in development to show off. All that this game gathered from the audience were groans and guffaws. I’m sure this is a great title, and there’s a ton of potential there, especially with the Wii Fit Board coming into the fold, but it’s all so far from finished that it was pointless to show it off. It’s a shame EA completely missed the Wii bandwagon, but it’s even worse to see that their current Wii projects are months from release. Possibly even years. Ladies and Gentlemen, EA has already lost the next gen wars by ignoring Wii.

5: Crappy Gift Bag: The going rule for gift bags is “current titles in playable form,” and work back from there. You don’t have to give out playable beta code, but giving away free games is always appreciated. Shit, burn internal copies so they can’t be sold at the local GameStop. Anything playable. A bag with a couple T-Shirts, some tie-in tchochke’s and an assets disc is just not good enough. THQ understands. EA should just buy THQ. Maybe that will teach them.

For all you arcade nerds and pinball wizards, California Extreme 2008 is scheduled for July 19-20 at the San Jose Convention Center. For those who’ve never been, you pay around $40 for admission to a massive room where all the local arcade collectors have dumped their machines

There’s also an auction that usually takes place, and the Lucky Juju should be there as well. Definitely a good way to spend $50 and a day.

Well, that about wraps it up for the ROMs. All has been revealed. I’d like to thank everyone who helped out (Kevtris, Kingpin, and Zylon) in identifying the games, and making them available to the world. I’ll be returning to my normal, silly blog thingie now, and allow the games to speak for themselves.

Another shout out to Ed Temple, the excellent ninja programmer who wrote Cabbage Patch Kids for the Atari. I mistakenly credited Ed English with this feat, but was informed that it was Temple who really did it.

Finally, a few links to cool things that came about as a result of this find. First, the Wall Street Journal piece. Then there’s the Fark Photoshop contest. Various things at Atari Age have followed the game and its journey to digital distribution. And Tempest took it upon himself to review each version of CPK and describe the differences betwixt them.

Again, thanks to everyone for their support and praise. Anyone who’s asked questions in the comments, I can only say that they’re all answered now, amongst the various pages on this blog and in some of the above links. Above is a picture of me with the ROM and the game in the background. Below is a picture of Joe, who dumped the game. This is a picture of the first time the game had been seen or played in almost 25 years.

This is Dragon-80. It’s a very playable Colecovision action game. There’s sword swinging and jumping and falling floor tiles. But the loading screen is broken and says nothing. There’s no way I can tell to find out what game this really was supposed to be.

Unfortunately, The Sword and the Sorcerer looks to be a demo, not a game. It loops, and I can’t get it to let me play.

UPDATE: Dragon-80 is, in fact, Dragon’s Layer for Colecovision. Zylon at QT3 found a movie of the Adam version.

It only took a few hours to find someone, but #RGVC’s Kevtris came through on the Coleco ROM problem. I have posted another Zip file here, which includes playable forms of the Coleco ROMs I found, all stitched up. The Dragon 80 game has a broken select screen, but the game works, I’m told. I have a crappy emulator here, so I can’t verify… emulator isn’t accepting inputs from the keyboard…..

Behold, the first ever screen shot of The Sword and the Sorcerer:

So, I’ve stuck all of Kevtris’ ROM reconstructions in this archive. They’ve also been stuck into the existing ROM archive, so everyone can play all the revisions in here. We’ve got Sword and the Sorcerer, Spy Hunter in 2 revisions, Wargames, the Adam Resident Debugger, 2010 the Action Graphic Game, Cabbage Patch Kids for Coleco and the still unidentified Dragon 80. Oh, and Cabbage Patch Kids for Atari, but that’s not in this Coleco zip file.

Well, they’ve been dumped. And just about everything here is what I thought it was. The boner is still raging.

The entire kit and kaboodle of these roms can be downloaded from my server here. This file includes all the Coleco games, and the 10, yes 10 revisions of the Cabbage Patch Kids game for Atari. Other games in this file are Video Hustler, Sword and Sorcery (Yes, really), monkey Academy (Seemingly molested with a debugger), Spy Hunter and 2010 The Action Graphic Game.

Also, there’s a bunch of Adam tools in there. There’s a dev suite, a debugger, two bank switches and a duplicator for the tape drive.

So, breaking it down a bit, here’s what we know. Firstly, Ed Temple is a fucking god. Take one look at Cabbage Patch for Atari and you’ll see that he worked very hard to squeeze some amazing graphics out of the platform. Second, Sword and Sorcery needs to be diddled in order to work. The Atari ROMS work fine because they’re all on single ROMs. the Coleco games are multi-chip games, save for Hustler. Therefore, they won’t work right in a Coleco emulator because it can only open a single file, not the four needed to fun the game. I tried pasting these files together, but that doesn’t work either.

Sword and Sorcery, which is just barely on two chips, halts on its load screen. I can’t get the game to run. I’m sure someone out there will solve this mystery for me. The same problem occurs with Dragon 80, which was can’t even get to run up to menu screen.

Jigsaw and Tapper are both single ROMs from larger batches, so they won’t run either. The 2010 game is complete, as is Spy Hunter. Also in there is Monkey Academy, but it’s got all manner of debug code in the middle chip. I figure this means it was having dev issues.

We also have, in this batch, those Adam development tools, so someone please let me know if those are cool, unknowns or are already out there and not that exciting.

The final summary: Everything worked. Many chips had memory checksums written on them, and every time, they matched the dumped check sum. The one chip that was not taped and have an open window on it was completely empty, likely a blank.

Special thanks goes out to Joe Grand who dumped these for me. I gave him one of the 12 Cabbage Patch kids roms, so you can all be insanely jealous.

If you’re going to play around with these ROMs, I ask that you post info you find on the Web, and then link to it in the comments on this post. Again, all the ROMs are in this zip file.