‘platformstudies’ Tag Archive


June 8, 2015

I AM EXTRA: Manic Compression

How Donkey Kong's programmers used compression to save ROM space. The following section is one of I AM ERROR’s oldest—it appeared in the initial drafts of ...

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June 6, 2015

I AM EXTRA: The Super C Helicopter Boss

How Konami's developers used the MMC3 scanline counter to create large moving enemies. The following section was originally intended to directly follow the Mega Man 2 ...

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January 9, 2014

Major League Baseball vs. Retro Criticism

Via Twitter, friend of the site Cameron Kunzelman recently introduced me to Eric Bailey, proprietor of Nintendo Legend, a site dedicated to ...

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December 13, 2012

10 PRINT NES

Porting randomness The 10 PRINT book is now available for purchase and download. Its full title is a single line of BASIC code, written for ...

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September 12, 2012

The Famicom Cart Swap Trick

Replicating a Japanese glitch While researching my chapter on the US NES launch and subsequent game localizations, I came across Mato Tree's site. Mato does ...

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March 15, 2012

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 ...

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February 12, 2012

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 ...

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January 2, 2012

‘TV Game System Having Reduced Memory Needs’

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 ...

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December 6, 2011

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 ...

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March 20, 2011

Carts Tapes Discs Drives

This paper was originally presented at the Society for Textual Scholarship Conference, Penn State, PA, March 18, 2011. Today I want to speak about videogames as ...

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