The first Famicom/NES emulators began to appear around 1996. By most accounts, PasoFamicom, developed by Nobuaki Andou, was the first. Unfortunately, it wasn't user-friendly for most Westerners - the documentation and GUI were in Japanese, it required a licensing fee, and its split ROM format was difficult for non-technical types to wrap their head around. As a result, PasoFami was rampantly pirated, so much so that Andou cut off non-Japanese support and even started injecting malicious, HD-formatting code to ...
Porting the Kill Screen
The 2007 film King of Kong popularized much of the minutia of high-level arcade play. One scene showed underdog Steve Wiebe drawing Madden-esque diagrams to illustrate some of the underlying procedural patterns dictating Donkey Kong's barrel flow. A quick left-right flick on the joystick, for instance, could send a barrel down a ladder, smoothing some of the random chaos afflicting Mario's unending ascent. The film also highlighted Donkey Kong's infamous kill screen. In videogame lore, a kill screen is ...
Emulate the Emulators
How will we play NES/Famicom games 10, 50, 100, or 1000 years from now? We can imagine a not-so-distant future where all of the playable Nintendo Entertainment Systems are trashed, lost, non-functional, or beyond repair. Sound silly? Think of the early history of recording media. You may have friends who still buy vinyl, own a record player, and hopefully know how to operate said devices. Fortunately, vinyl has had a vibrant underground music culture to support its existence. But what ...
Whence Came the Famicom’s Brain?
The MOS Technology 6502 was a landmark microprocessor. It was powerful, easy to program, and cheap, debuting for an astounding $25 in 1975. In its wake, competitors scrambled. Microprocessor prices dropped dramatically, but the damage was already done. MOS’s bargain basement chip was overwhelmingly attractive to PC and videogame manufacturers: Atari, Commodore, and Apple, among others, launched successful videogame and PC platforms built around the 6502. But why did Nintendo choose the 6502? David Sheff's Game Over (1993) is widely regarded ...
Slow Television
This morning's Famicom research focused on the video half of videogames. In other words, I was looking at the oft-neglected world of cathode ray tubes, aka the big fat TVs we used before flatscreens came along. There's a reason many vintage game enthusiasts keep stocky CRTs around--old games look better on them. And this isn't mere nostalgic impulse. Early videogames were designed around two inefficiencies: our eyes and our televisions. Like cinema and animation, television relies upon the persistence of ...
An Unknown Value
During a recent computer backup, I came across some old family videos that I'd archived. A few years back, my dad lent me a box of VHS tapes that he'd recorded during the 80s and 90s. I made a day-long library trip to transfer them to hard disk, sorting through hours of basketball footage and poorly-lit Christmas gatherings. Around 1988, both my dad and uncle received camcorders as gifts from my grandparents. This was a big deal at the time. ...
‘TV Game System Having Reduced Memory Needs,’ or A Lengthy Tour of NES Patents
If you've ever seen a Famicom alongside an NES, you might be shocked that they're the same system. The NES's older Japanese sibling is a diminutive red and white plastic box with hardwired controllers and a top-loading cartridge slot. It's nothing like the muted black, white, and gray 'toaster' that millions of Americans brought into their homes. The NES is more VCR than child's toy -- a clever Trojan horse that helped Nintendo dominate the American console market. Nintendo's flagship store ...
Aperture Science and the Caribbean Orange
I recently visited Chicago for the DHCS conference held at Loyola University College. During the second day of the conference, I was able to sneak away for a few hours and visit the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Their featured exhibition was a dual retrospective/contemporary take on minimalism, but I was more fascinated by a small room devoted to a single piece by Gordon Matta-Clark. The room was filled with photographic documentation, sketches, and preparatory ephemera for 'Circus' ...
Foods Named after the Process that Creates Them
When you're in a band on tour, you sit in a van for hours on end, thinking of ways to entertain yourself. When I toured the U.S. with Silent Type back in 2006, we routinely had 5-10 hour drives without the benefit of fancy cellphones or 3G Internet. During one of my passenger seat navigator stints, bassist/driver Billy and I started a word game. We tried to name as many foods as possible that were named after the process that ...
Tool-Assisted: Console Emulation and Platform Plasticity
Since the early 1990s, a special subculture of play, called speedruns, has pushed the limits of videogame skill, performance, and technical mastery. The aim of the speedrun is to play a game as quickly as possible, by any means possible, short of cheating, passwords, or other ‘non-diegetic’ exploits. Games that might take an average player tens of hours are reduced to an hour or less, often at the highest possible difficulty. Notoriously difficult Nintendo Entertainment System games like Contra or ...
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