Mr Iwata's speech "On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." really got me. A legend that has gone too soon.
If only more "people" that are in that position would even put a thought towards that is next to none. that's why if I do get a game its second hand now. Screw downloads that are not guaranteed to exist in 20+ years because the server the game relied on is repurposed to candycrush Powerade jello edition. FH Places now just grind their employees and give them just barely enough, toss them when someone cheaper shows up and give the others the shaft. Rinse and repeat. Disgusting how money greed kills passion and spirit..
I think that comment from 8 bit guy was a passive aggressive move to let the guy know he doesn't appreciate him copying his name for clout and he's watching...
I love that you are using the software of one computer legend (Jim Butterfield) to explain the code of another computer legend Satoru Iwata. Great content Robin!
Wow! This is precisely the kind of digital archaeology that I find fascinating. I had heard about Iwata-san and HAL Lab being associated with early Commodore before in books I’ve read, but its totally another thing to see concrete proof. Especially proof that had been mostly hidden for nearly 40 years no less. Great work as always, and although assembly might as well be a foreign language to me, you explained it in a way that even my feeble brain understood. :)
Great post. I love the term digital archaeology! I'm old enough that I was around before all this and watched it come into being, and I love that people are enjoying the discoveries - and appreciate the level of genius these people had. Great video too - glad I found this channel. And I really like seeing young folks appreciating all this "retro" stuff. It's on the shoulders of giants that today's technology was built.
I always appreciated Iwata as the funny and likeable head of Nintendo. It's only in recent years that I've learned about his programming talents and how far back his legacy really goes. Truly a fascinating guy!
Weird. Right before this, I watched a video on the Fugaku supercomputer, which is the #1 supercomputer in the world at the moment. It is run by Satoshi Matsuoka, who had worked with Satoru Iwata at Hal Laboratory on a couple of games.
Maybe. Wouldn't he have just deleted it then though? I wouldn't be surprised if he just commented it out during development so that it would go unnoticed, intending to uncomment it at the last moment before it shipped, and then got cold feet.
Ya it appears they are multiple char sprites and the collision detection was checking x,y (or perhaps just y) since they are just letters. Using one dimensional coordinates on the VIC-20 saves memory and is faster. Of course, the projectile just writes over the other char so it disappears until the ship is reprinted. i wrote a small game engine with AI in 1.7k of ram for the VIC in BASIC V2. It actually runs decently fast even though it is in BASIC.
I really love videos like this, that get right down into the machine code and just about tap the interface between software and individual transistors in these old systems. It may be over my head but it’s absolutely fascinating.
Dear Robin, thank you Sir! You have carried us safely through time, which is what I love about using my VIC 20. Thank you for pulling the plastic (Cshhhh!!) You display two forms of the Star Battle cartridge. The silver, metallic cover being the earlier. I have collected many cartridges of each sort. However there are a handful of earlier cartridges (all of them lower numbers, like Star Battle) which are made in an earlier, harder to read style, all made in Japan. I have a December 1981 Commodore magazine -with computer gifts displayed below a Christmas hearth - which displays three of these cartridges, Midnight Drive (not Road Race, same game though, I believe), Slot, and Poker. I have also found or seen pictures of Avenger, Alien, and Jupiter Lander cartridges in this style, larger font, lighter, orange print. The same magazine has a description of the cartridges then available, all that we've mentioned. Still, I wonder, COULD there be an earlier version of the cartridge, or even a tape made, for the Japanese market?
My family had a BBC Micro Model B, and when I left school, I saved up for a Commodore 64 from my first job. What still amazes me (I only did a bit of BASIC programming and a tiny bit of Assembly Language as I was more or less a gamer), is how much people could get out of these machines. Go back to 1984, and if you look at the original 'Elite' (Acornsoft) on the BBC and how Braben and Bell managed to plot 3D vectors, and free up memory by employing Procedural Generation, or Dennis Caswell's 'Impossible Mission' (Epyx) with the (for the time) very convincing running motion with the Sprite animation, and the brilliant use of the SID chip. The programmers could squeeze so much out of those little machines. The 6502 on the BBC was faster than the one on the C64, so plotting lines for 3D vector graphics was much smoother on the Beeb, whereas the C64 had a superior version of Impossible Mission, because as well as having about twice the available Memory, it had an inbuilt Sprite generator, more colours and better sound -the BBC had 3 channels plus a white noise channel, all of which could be shaped by an envelope generator, but the C64's SID chip, as well as Envelopes, had Sawtooth, Square, and Triangle Waves, so it led the way concerning music and sound effects. A lot of Pop songs at the time used the C64 as a synthesiser. I had a C64 music program that came with a music keyboard overlay. I think the limitations of the 8 Bit Home Computers, compared to what we have today, pushed programmers to be more inventive, and that's why machines like these, and the ZX Spectrum are still popular. Thanks for your video, it was really interesting. The ROM cartridge version of Galaxian that Satoru made for the VIC 20 (my mate had one, I think they are underrated considering what it could achieve at the time), using characters to shape the aliens and the ship is astounding. If people pushed PC's to the limit and were as equally inventive as Satoru and others like him, I wonder what could be achieved nowadays. This isn't a put down on today's Developers; there are some great games around, especially now we have VR, but I find a lot of them disappointing, as they feel too similar to me; just better graphics with each new Generation of console, or the latest iteration of CPU, GPU and Chipset for PC,but with similar mechanics and pretty much the same game play. Maybe there's only so much that can be done...? I realise that you probably know all of this anyway; I'm just giving a shout out to the genius' of the Eighties Anyway; Cheers and take care.
John Carmack has always been pushing the PC to it's limit. It was said that smooth side-scrollers were impossible on EGA, Carmack proved it wrong with Commander Keen (which I believe also supported running in 4-colour CGA mode as well). Then he went and wrote such things as Wolfenstein 3D engine capable of 3D'ish graphics on VGA (and it's predecessor used EGA), then DooM's engine again pushed the 386 computers to their limits - then Quake, etc., the list keeps growing. And every time he comes up with the most amazing solutions to push the limits of hardware even further. It's just that it's become an enormous job to write a whole engine, or even understand it fully even if your the head developer for a modern 3D games - and then many types of games just don't need anything that has to do any special pushing to work smoothly on every average and even low end computer today. But there are still amazing people pushing the limits further.
The difference is complexity. These 8 Bit machines were relatively (!) simple. You had a few components, some memory and some mnemonics to work with. This gives you lots of combinations, but manageable. Today’s machines are super complex and the code you use is hidden in huge libraries. Therefore, coding right at machine level is basically not possible anymore. Today’s coders are creative in another way than those pioneers. Times are changing...
Akihabara is known as "the electric district" in Japan, home to many arcades, video game enthusiast shops, maid cafes and pachinko (electronic gambling). It's a very popular tourist destination. It's pronounced "ah-key-ha-bah-rah." The faster you can say it, the better. :P
@@donpalmera I've actually been there in person, and speak a little Japanese. But yes, you could learn all this on google. I just thought it'd be more fun to leave a comment, but you had to go and be an ass about it.
Satoru Iwata is such a Legend of the Game Industry. Not Only did he develope Games since before Nintendo got into Video Games, he also was the Programmer who made Melee fun and suggest to name my Favorite Game of All Time: Xenoblade.
Amazing. I remember seeing that hidden message many years ago when my brother discovered how to hack Vic 20 roms. From memory (going back 30+ years!) the first 10 Vic 20 cartridges were all written in Japan and produced by HAL Labs, and all have similar type messages buried in that don't display on screen. I always thought they looked formatted for displaying, so to see it finally happen is satisfyingly and deeply nostalgic for me. Hearty congratulations, and doubly so for doing on a real Vic 20
Nice work on the investigation, it must've taken a lot of effort to understand and patch the code to display the credit screen as intended by Iwata. It's a shame whoever decided it shouldn't be included in the released game.
You keep surprising me with random tidbits of info that I absolutely love. ;) Good job, I thoroughly enjoyed this. Looking forwards to more easter eggs! I can only smile and wonder what mr. Iwata would have said if he saw your video. I bet he would've laughed! May he rest in peace.
Best recommendation ever from UA-cam. I only subbed after the video, but that was because I was mesmerized all the way through. Thank you. Can't wait to go through your library.
Very neat to see how you worked out the Easter Egg and restored it. I too wonder why the Easter Egg was disabled, if he quietly left it in the game likely nobody would have noticed? Also you bring back both the joy and painful memories of 6502 programming on the VIC-20 ... did you figure out how Satoru did the graphics on the game? I remember back in the day (1981) contemplating the nightmarish code of juggling the characters and realized that's it's too crazy. I was 17 at the time and a newbie programmer without any formal training or support, even though I knew in principle what had to be done, I was unable to make any progress of making my games to be like bit-mapped graphics. I was left to sort it out by myself... and couldn't... which displeased the people at HES (Jay B. and others). Sadly the games I had written for HES were a NO-GO... AND to this day I wondered what the trick was, I'll bet it's simple (after you know how)... So maybe a future video you can cover that subject (if you haven't already) of how it's done? I'd like to see that. Thanks so much for making and posting this video.
I didn't dig into his graphics routines, but it would be interesting to see his approach. I did do a bit of this in my VIC-20 game Splatform (or VIC-Splatform), by plotting a 2x2 block of characters to the screen, and then plotting the pixels within those as a mini bitmap. The Spectrum programmers got really good at doing this sort of thing.
@@8_Bit Yep, at least a 2x2 block of viable/visible bitmap, but actually you need bigger than that; because you'd have to shift them around as your animated object scrolled left/right/up/down/diagonal etc... it isn't as easy as reusing the same 4 chars. as you need to keep track of what is still visible on the screen and which char is reusable as it crosses the character boundaries. When you consider the complex tasks of doing the bit mapping on the fly for an arbitrary set of characters *times* all the char manipulations to make the 2x2 "block" *times* the number of the objects needed to be animated on the screen simultaneously... First, it seems beyond the capability of the VIC-20 and it was beyond my skill level at the time... but even today as I reflect back on the problem, I think it would be very challenging to write and of course it has to be 6502 machine language to have any hope of having the performance necessary for game play. But wait there's more!!! There is a second part to this challenge: After you figure out the cray bitmap animation routines, then you have to work out: animating the missiles, collision detection, explosions, simulating battle damage in those bitmaps (my game needed this feature)... after all that - do you even have any CPU cycles left? Apparently it is possible... but this totally warps the brain into a pretzel... how was it done!?!?
@@8_Bit It's nice to see there's some interest about this subject given a few 'likes' ... but for my own curiosity, as I think a "bit" deeper on this, the next challenge to this is the interaction and overlap between the various elements of the game when they come in proximity to each other and start sharing the same bitmaps on the screen, which I can imagine increases the code complexity... which is probably why... I think... Satoru's missiles flickered and went through the alien invaders. There wasn't enough memory in the stock VIC-20 to make a virtual bitmap screen... and BTW: it was a stated requirement that the game had to work in a stock VIC-20... no memory expanders. The obvious solution is to use a rectangular coordinate table/array for each entity in the game and perform collision boundary checks, but quickly you see a problem with irregularly shaped or rotated objects whose shape fits inside the boundary but only occupies a portion of that region (like triangular shapes) of either missing or falsely detecting collisions. To fix that, you'd have to do a two-pass collision detection: One at the rectangular region (which is fast) and then if you have a candidate collision, do another check at the bitmap-level for an actual collision. One more wrinkle... for animation purposes, you'd have to start drawing on the other entity's bitmap 2x2 block... and somehow the logic that is controlling the 2x2 blocks must now track these character blocks as well so it doesn't overwrite the bitmaps with a different characters... these aren't quite like sprites, they are more like portable fragments of a bitmap screen... 💥 OH WHAT FUN!!! (Brain melted... !)
the vic-20 and t--4/a are the computers that made me realize if i ever worked in games .. i was going to be a concept guy, not the code monkey that actually did the work ..i made my old games and then typed in the gamebooks ... and that was enough for me? anyone remember for the Vic 20 (and others) you could buy these little booklets (sometimes official sometimes not) where you typed in the code from the book to play the game?
Discovering and explaining the easter egg was interesting enough, but coding a patch to put it back in the game is a fitting tribute to Iwata. Had to subscribe so I can watch your upcoming videos on other easter eggs.
I saw this again on the easter egg hunter channel. I liked the video in 2020! The fact this was found still makes me cry that it wasn't widely known in his shortened life time.
Such an amazing find! I've looked at the strings before and thought it was odd that it had nulls at the end, I figured it was some kind of easter egg ingame but I was too lazy to check. I'm so glad that someone else figured this out!
Hello from Madrid! This was definitely much more fun than studying C to hand in my next project as I should be doing. xD Thanks for the explanation. Even though I don't know this language (yet... Assembly is ahead in the curriculum...) or Commodore I'd say I can still understand like 70% of the whys and wheretofores. It's too bad that he disabled the easter egg, although if it was because of his boss, I guess Iwata got the last laugh, eh? ;) It's cool you discovered it and could finally credit him as deserved. It's adorable that you don't know what Akihabara is! For programmers in my generation that's like saying "Nerd Mecca"... everybody knows it and wants to make their pilgrimage. xD
Awesome work, what a fantastic discovery you have made. Thank you for sharing this. Thank you for explaining it thoroughly. Thank you for the work and I'm excited to see what other eggs you have discovered.
I've had complaints in my other videos when I left the plastic on things. There's no pleasing everyone, eh? Typically I leave it on but it was starting to peel up in the one corner already, so...
I was really upset when they removed his hidden game from Switches. I'm not even a Nintendo fan but it took up hardly any space and was a beautiful tribute to a great man.
@@hteekay I'd like to think so but it's rumoured the order came from high up and working with Nintendo is a lot of people's dream job so... it's unlikely that someone will slip something into an update, sadly.
that easter egg is cool....i respect and love the games iwata has been involed in.....1981 was a great year!...miss those early 80s ..great time......long gone..
A few months ago myself and CRV of the website GDRI (gdri.smspower.org/) were wondering about identifying Japan-developed VIC-20 and Ultimax games. I did identify a few games developed by the same person, but didn't get much further than that. First, some trivia (I did not plan this comment out very well and copying/pasting on UA-cam just results in lots of glitches in my experience): Radar Rat Race was also developed at HAL, but not by Iwata; we know this because there was actually an earlier version of the game, serial number VIC-1903, released *as* Rally-X without Namco's consent. That game has a hidden credit to Hiroaki Suga. The person at Commodore USA who did the conversion into Radar Rat Race (Bill Hindorff) swapped out that name with his, and the C64 version deletes the hidden credit entirely (but I did confirm it's is essentially the same codebase). Good job figuring this out! This secret eluded me this whole time, because I am pretty sure I searched for the key routine, and I don't remember why I didn't look deeper into this, but I think I had just assumed the key combo was for something else that was common among VIC-20 games (like the color changing and screen centering keys), since it was my first real experience with VIC-20 stuff :D And I definitely did not look for string-printing code or notice the string table indexing stuff. (Plus, I was also looking through a whole bunch of other games at the same time, and my disassembler and VICE were in different VMs.) Oh well, can't win them all =P You should absolutely update the The Cutting Room Floor page on this game to include this code. tcrf.net/Star_Battle (TCRF is where the trivia on Radar Rat Race comes from.) I will say as for the null terminator thing, it's always possible that they just used an asciiz directive in the assembler, though yes this case was absolutely intentional =P Here's the entry point for our conversation: twitter.com/gdri/status/1239001982075129857 (warning: it branches a lot; not every post is visible on this page)
Akihabara is Tokyo's "Electric Town," often called "Akiba" for short. Very cool place! I couldn't help myself when I was there a few years ago. Filled up all my luggage with cool retro game and computer stuff. :)
Very nice find !! Very cool to know that Iwata wrote code on the PET :) I read on The Cutting Room Floor site that the game was licensed to Commodore Japan and was taken off the market. Probably not many copies exist ?
Very good explanation. Even I could understand it. I've spent a big part of my career modifying and fixing other people's code, so I can appreciate the detective work.
Iwata is one of the greats, no doubt. We may not see the likes of his type again, but I do have hope for the forthcoming generation, that understand the history and respect such greats (due in no small part to videos like this), therefore I think the future is bright. Cheers for your vids matey!
I had a question. when creating a patch, why could the other TSR be used? and why did it make a difference to use the other one? this video was too short :-)
Too bad he isn't around no more, otherwise you could just ask him directly, Akihabara still has remnants of its great past. Awesome vid on a true genius. The world lost a true pioneer and a genius(and a human) to cancer when Satoru Iwata past away and I know he'll be dearly missed. Rest In Power Iwata San
Sounds like it wasn't an deliberate Easter egg as such but something coded for release told they couldn't put it in by commodore. Really nice work on finding how to display it, though!
Interesting...I did something similar when I wrote 'Punchy' for the VIC20(16k) ..a tape loaded game which displayed a simple 'For Alaine' my girlfriend at the time...only activated by poking 0,0 before the load was initiated.
Cool, I don't have that game, but it'd be fun to check out. I usually only make videos about things I actually own and can show, I'll see if I can find a copy. I'm finding so many VIC-20 easter eggs I should do a round-up video with a whole bunch of them.
@@8_Bit So long as you dont expect superb game play lol...I was really pleased with it graphically as it used bit mapping and what I liked to call 'psuedo sprites' and single bit collision detection. Those were the days ...and I have trouble remembering a lot.
Impressive sleuthing through the code. I've been on a few hunts myself and it's always exciting to see whether you can bring it to a successful end. I believe it's pronounced "akihabra".
We can still hope that maybe there was a small early early release batch that had this code active. But that's still an incredible find. Thank you for finding this!
Excellent video. Great detective work. I did not know there was Jiffy DOS for the VIC. I'm surprised people will still making stuff for it in 1989. It makes me wonder if there are early versions of this cartridge where the egg still works.
All of us put REM lines at least with those type of "easter eggs" back then.. at least on the C64. The Vic was a bit more pressed for RAM. Once I started hacking and churning out Mac Shareware on a Mac SE, the easter eggs could become a lot more elaborate. But most of what you want to see is in the About drop down Dialog... The VIC still looks like a sexy beast. I bought mine with my own money. When my grandparents out of the blue bought me a C=64 one Xmas, I was floored. Never in my wildest dreams. The C=64 was a dream, It wasn't perfect, but I hacked the heck out of that. If only they had waited a year or two more though and got me a C128. Still. They're all dead now. Soon I will be too. I have a trailer and a barn full of 100's of 8bits I rescued all headed to the dump... I can't bear to look at and never even touched. Someone had bought them all from the local nuclear plant to take out all the screws from them (daft idea), and when he died, his wife and sons were going to send them to the dump and I snatched them all and added them to my already massive computer elephant graveyard. All my 8bits came from that haul. Everything else way more modern I brougt home from schools and businesses by the truck full. I couldn't fire up any of them any more. The last time I flipped the switch on the pet was the late 1990s. Never got around to setting up an antique computer museum.
Aki-ha-bourough - also known as Akiba and Akibara for short, and by locals (see many female created anime :) - It was going to be buldozed flat at one point around mid to late 1980's, but everyone kicked up a stink, so it was revamped into am electronics distric. it has always been a leading edge place, a hangout for alternate, modern, socially broad minded people, even when it was a fashon and design district - ther are some anime that explore this history, and a couple of documentaries, and a lot of anime series have been centered on it as the main way to promote their story line thanks for doing this, I never had a nintendo, so its nice to "meet new people", even if they already expired - long live VIC-20 :)
Some of us who never really got in to games talk about him now because - as the legend goes - he lives by a small pond on the top of a hill in the form of a glowing, iridescent horse which you can ride. When you're absorbed in Zelda: Breath Of The Wild that is.
Very cool. I don't know the Vic, but C64 has a Kernal routine that will look at A and X and print to the screen what it finds till it hits a null. Same idea as the code had there. Never saw a MLM in Vic 20. M command makes 4 bytes a line. Ouch.
BTW, I have noticed that the intro screens in the earliest (metallic label but larger type and orange print) cartridge games sometimes feature different colors and words in menus and gameplay (Jupiter Lander). There might be a version with the working Easter egg OR another early game with one!
Yes, HAL Laboratory worked on several of the C64 launch games and while it's not known if Mr. Iwata was the primary programmer on those games, he certainly had a hand in their creation.
The Joust-on-NES thing is a pretty interesting topic in itself. Because the game ended up releasing so long after it was put together (due to the copyright shenanigans hinted at in this video), most Japanese gamers who know anything about it believe that Joust is a ripoff of Balloon Fight, whereas the reality of course is that Balloon Fight was created specifically because of the difficulties involved in getting Joust released in a timely manner.
Mr Iwata's speech "On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." really got me. A legend that has gone too soon.
If only more "people" that are in that position would even put a thought towards that is next to none. that's why if I do get a game its second hand now. Screw downloads that are not guaranteed to exist in 20+ years because the server the game relied on is repurposed to candycrush Powerade jello edition. FH
Places now just grind their employees and give them just barely enough, toss them when someone cheaper shows up and give the others the shaft. Rinse and repeat. Disgusting how money greed kills passion and spirit..
Neat find.
hi
I agree!
I think that comment from 8 bit guy was a passive aggressive move to let the guy know he doesn't appreciate him copying his name for clout and he's watching...
@@ThoughtCrimeCriminal oof, even though 8-bit is a widely used term
@@ThoughtCrimeCriminal 8-bit is a common computing term.
I love that you are using the software of one computer legend (Jim Butterfield) to explain the code of another computer legend Satoru Iwata. Great content Robin!
Jim Butterfield was a 6502 legend and a regular contributor to the TPUG magazine. We learned so much from this man.
Wow! This is precisely the kind of digital archaeology that I find fascinating. I had heard about Iwata-san and HAL Lab being associated with early Commodore before in books I’ve read, but its totally another thing to see concrete proof. Especially proof that had been mostly hidden for nearly 40 years no less. Great work as always, and although assembly might as well be a foreign language to me, you explained it in a way that even my feeble brain understood. :)
Great post. I love the term digital archaeology! I'm old enough that I was around before all this and watched it come into being, and I love that people are enjoying the discoveries - and appreciate the level of genius these people had.
Great video too - glad I found this channel.
And I really like seeing young folks appreciating all this "retro" stuff. It's on the shoulders of giants that today's technology was built.
I always appreciated Iwata as the funny and likeable head of Nintendo. It's only in recent years that I've learned about his programming talents and how far back his legacy really goes. Truly a fascinating guy!
This is awesome! He would be happy to know someone finally figured out his Easter egg.
I'd love to hear any back story on why he wasn't allowed to implement it. Maybe he got cold feet. Maybe his boss disabled it
Maybe he broke it intentionally so someone would have to figure out how to make it work again.
Weird. Right before this, I watched a video on the Fugaku supercomputer, which is the #1 supercomputer in the world at the moment.
It is run by Satoshi Matsuoka, who had worked with Satoru Iwata at Hal Laboratory on a couple of games.
You're like the Indiana Jones of the C64. Love it. Must be exciting finding these hidden gems after so long time.
Hey Robin. I reckon someone accidentally pressed the key combination and Satoru got into trouble. The quickest way was to comment out that code.
Maybe. Wouldn't he have just deleted it then though? I wouldn't be surprised if he just commented it out during development so that it would go unnoticed, intending to uncomment it at the last moment before it shipped, and then got cold feet.
yes it is because he got in trouble after someone pressed the key combo.
@@Brendanasdfdsf Do you have proof of this or is this just an urban legend.
@@thatscienceguy9458 I seen it on another UA-cam video so it must be true :P
This video deserves much more views, especially among Nintendo fans.
I am 4 years old again. This was incredible to watch - hearing the key clicks is like the static on an old record. Great video!
Thank you for this video an honoring Saturo Iwata. As an experienced C64 assembler programmer i enjoyed watching you revealing this easter egg.
I love how the "sprites" in the Galaga game just turn off when the bullet goes through. You didn't miss! They dodged it!
Ya it appears they are multiple char sprites and the collision detection was checking x,y (or perhaps just y) since they are just letters. Using one dimensional coordinates on the VIC-20 saves memory and is faster. Of course, the projectile just writes over the other char so it disappears until the ship is reprinted. i wrote a small game engine with AI in 1.7k of ram for the VIC in BASIC V2. It actually runs decently fast even though it is in BASIC.
@@peterlamont647 ohh that makes sense ive done the same thing before :)
I really love videos like this, that get right down into the machine code and just about tap the interface between software and individual transistors in these old systems. It may be over my head but it’s absolutely fascinating.
"Satoru Iwata worked on some of the very first Vic-20 games." My biggest TIL of this month.
Dear Robin, thank you Sir! You have carried us safely through time, which is what I love about using my VIC 20. Thank you for pulling the plastic (Cshhhh!!) You display two forms of the Star Battle cartridge. The silver, metallic cover being the earlier. I have collected many cartridges of each sort. However there are a handful of earlier cartridges (all of them lower numbers, like Star Battle) which are made in an earlier, harder to read style, all made in Japan. I have a December 1981 Commodore magazine -with computer gifts displayed below a Christmas hearth - which displays three of these cartridges, Midnight Drive (not Road Race, same game though, I believe), Slot, and Poker. I have also found or seen pictures of Avenger, Alien, and Jupiter Lander cartridges in this style, larger font, lighter, orange print. The same magazine has a description of the cartridges then available, all that we've mentioned. Still, I wonder, COULD there be an earlier version of the cartridge, or even a tape made, for the Japanese market?
My family had a BBC Micro Model B, and when I left school, I saved up for a Commodore 64 from my first job. What still amazes me (I only did a bit of BASIC programming and a tiny bit of Assembly Language as I was more or less a gamer), is how much people could get out of these machines. Go back to 1984, and if you look at the original 'Elite' (Acornsoft) on the BBC and how Braben and Bell managed to plot 3D vectors, and free up memory by employing Procedural Generation, or Dennis Caswell's 'Impossible Mission' (Epyx) with the (for the time) very convincing running motion with the Sprite animation, and the brilliant use of the SID chip. The programmers could squeeze so much out of those little machines.
The 6502 on the BBC was faster than the one on the C64, so plotting lines for 3D vector graphics was much smoother on the Beeb, whereas the C64 had a superior version of Impossible Mission, because as well as having about twice the available Memory, it had an inbuilt Sprite generator, more colours and better sound -the BBC had 3 channels plus a white noise channel, all of which could be shaped by an envelope generator, but the C64's SID chip, as well as Envelopes, had Sawtooth, Square, and Triangle Waves, so it led the way concerning music and sound effects. A lot of Pop songs at the time used the C64 as a synthesiser. I had a C64 music program that came with a music keyboard overlay.
I think the limitations of the 8 Bit Home Computers, compared to what we have today, pushed programmers to be more inventive, and that's why machines like these, and the ZX Spectrum are still popular.
Thanks for your video, it was really interesting. The ROM cartridge version of Galaxian that Satoru made for the VIC 20 (my mate had one, I think they are underrated considering what it could achieve at the time), using characters to shape the aliens and the ship is astounding. If people pushed PC's to the limit and were as equally inventive as Satoru and others like him, I wonder what could be achieved nowadays. This isn't a put down on today's Developers; there are some great games around, especially now we have VR, but I find a lot of them disappointing, as they feel too similar to me; just better graphics with each new Generation of console, or the latest iteration of CPU, GPU and Chipset for PC,but with similar mechanics and pretty much the same game play. Maybe there's only so much that can be done...?
I realise that you probably know all of this anyway; I'm just giving a shout out to the genius' of the Eighties
Anyway; Cheers and take care.
John Carmack has always been pushing the PC to it's limit. It was said that smooth side-scrollers were impossible on EGA, Carmack proved it wrong with Commander Keen (which I believe also supported running in 4-colour CGA mode as well). Then he went and wrote such things as Wolfenstein 3D engine capable of 3D'ish graphics on VGA (and it's predecessor used EGA), then DooM's engine again pushed the 386 computers to their limits - then Quake, etc., the list keeps growing. And every time he comes up with the most amazing solutions to push the limits of hardware even further.
It's just that it's become an enormous job to write a whole engine, or even understand it fully even if your the head developer for a modern 3D games - and then many types of games just don't need anything that has to do any special pushing to work smoothly on every average and even low end computer today. But there are still amazing people pushing the limits further.
The difference is complexity. These 8 Bit machines were relatively (!) simple. You had a few components, some memory and some mnemonics to work with. This gives you lots of combinations, but manageable. Today’s machines are super complex and the code you use is hidden in huge libraries. Therefore, coding right at machine level is basically not possible anymore. Today’s coders are creative in another way than those pioneers. Times are changing...
@@bierundkippen720 that said, there are still cpu-cycle cheap teachings like raymarching that are still relevant to this day :D
Akihabara is known as "the electric district" in Japan, home to many arcades, video game enthusiast shops, maid cafes and pachinko (electronic gambling). It's a very popular tourist destination. It's pronounced "ah-key-ha-bah-rah." The faster you can say it, the better. :P
The best way to pronounce it is to say it three times fast.
We've finally found the one person left that can use google guys... get your questions in quick before all the quiz night trivia is lost forever.
@@donpalmera I've actually been there in person, and speak a little Japanese. But yes, you could learn all this on google. I just thought it'd be more fun to leave a comment, but you had to go and be an ass about it.
@@smugshrug
笑
Not really arcades, only Segas and a Taito.
Satoru Iwata is such a Legend of the Game Industry. Not Only did he develope Games since before Nintendo got into Video Games, he also was the Programmer who made Melee fun and suggest to name my Favorite Game of All Time: Xenoblade.
Amazing. I remember seeing that hidden message many years ago when my brother discovered how to hack Vic 20 roms. From memory (going back 30+ years!) the first 10 Vic 20 cartridges were all written in Japan and produced by HAL Labs, and all have similar type messages buried in that don't display on screen. I always thought they looked formatted for displaying, so to see it finally happen is satisfyingly and deeply nostalgic for me. Hearty congratulations, and doubly so for doing on a real Vic 20
Wow, really enjoyed this mixture of 8-bit tech, history, and the patching of the game to what he (probably) originally wanted!
Nice work on the investigation, it must've taken a lot of effort to understand and patch the code to display the credit screen as intended by Iwata. It's a shame whoever decided it shouldn't be included in the released game.
You keep surprising me with random tidbits of info that I absolutely love. ;)
Good job, I thoroughly enjoyed this.
Looking forwards to more easter eggs!
I can only smile and wonder what mr. Iwata would have said if he saw your video. I bet he would've laughed! May he rest in peace.
Best recommendation ever from UA-cam. I only subbed after the video, but that was because I was mesmerized all the way through. Thank you. Can't wait to go through your library.
Thanks, I appreciate the sub :)
Very neat to see how you worked out the Easter Egg and restored it. I too wonder why the Easter Egg was disabled, if he quietly left it in the game likely nobody would have noticed? Also you bring back both the joy and painful memories of 6502 programming on the VIC-20 ... did you figure out how Satoru did the graphics on the game? I remember back in the day (1981) contemplating the nightmarish code of juggling the characters and realized that's it's too crazy. I was 17 at the time and a newbie programmer without any formal training or support, even though I knew in principle what had to be done, I was unable to make any progress of making my games to be like bit-mapped graphics. I was left to sort it out by myself... and couldn't... which displeased the people at HES (Jay B. and others). Sadly the games I had written for HES were a NO-GO... AND to this day I wondered what the trick was, I'll bet it's simple (after you know how)... So maybe a future video you can cover that subject (if you haven't already) of how it's done? I'd like to see that. Thanks so much for making and posting this video.
I didn't dig into his graphics routines, but it would be interesting to see his approach. I did do a bit of this in my VIC-20 game Splatform (or VIC-Splatform), by plotting a 2x2 block of characters to the screen, and then plotting the pixels within those as a mini bitmap. The Spectrum programmers got really good at doing this sort of thing.
@@8_Bit Yep, at least a 2x2 block of viable/visible bitmap, but actually you need bigger than that; because you'd have to shift them around as your animated object scrolled left/right/up/down/diagonal etc... it isn't as easy as reusing the same 4 chars. as you need to keep track of what is still visible on the screen and which char is reusable as it crosses the character boundaries. When you consider the complex tasks of doing the bit mapping on the fly for an arbitrary set of characters *times* all the char manipulations to make the 2x2 "block" *times* the number of the objects needed to be animated on the screen simultaneously... First, it seems beyond the capability of the VIC-20 and it was beyond my skill level at the time... but even today as I reflect back on the problem, I think it would be very challenging to write and of course it has to be 6502 machine language to have any hope of having the performance necessary for game play. But wait there's more!!! There is a second part to this challenge: After you figure out the cray bitmap animation routines, then you have to work out: animating the missiles, collision detection, explosions, simulating battle damage in those bitmaps (my game needed this feature)... after all that - do you even have any CPU cycles left? Apparently it is possible... but this totally warps the brain into a pretzel... how was it done!?!?
@@8_Bit It's nice to see there's some interest about this subject given a few 'likes' ... but for my own curiosity, as I think a "bit" deeper on this, the next challenge to this is the interaction and overlap between the various elements of the game when they come in proximity to each other and start sharing the same bitmaps on the screen, which I can imagine increases the code complexity... which is probably why... I think... Satoru's missiles flickered and went through the alien invaders. There wasn't enough memory in the stock VIC-20 to make a virtual bitmap screen... and BTW: it was a stated requirement that the game had to work in a stock VIC-20... no memory expanders. The obvious solution is to use a rectangular coordinate table/array for each entity in the game and perform collision boundary checks, but quickly you see a problem with irregularly shaped or rotated objects whose shape fits inside the boundary but only occupies a portion of that region (like triangular shapes) of either missing or falsely detecting collisions. To fix that, you'd have to do a two-pass collision detection: One at the rectangular region (which is fast) and then if you have a candidate collision, do another check at the bitmap-level for an actual collision. One more wrinkle... for animation purposes, you'd have to start drawing on the other entity's bitmap 2x2 block... and somehow the logic that is controlling the 2x2 blocks must now track these character blocks as well so it doesn't overwrite the bitmaps with a different characters... these aren't quite like sprites, they are more like portable fragments of a bitmap screen... 💥 OH WHAT FUN!!! (Brain melted... !)
the vic-20 and t--4/a are the computers that made me realize if i ever worked in games .. i was going to be a concept guy, not the code monkey that actually did the work ..i made my old games and then typed in the gamebooks ... and that was enough for me? anyone remember for the Vic 20 (and others) you could buy these little booklets (sometimes official sometimes not) where you typed in the code from the book to play the game?
Great video, you really have some of the best retro content on UA-cam. Also - pulling that plastic off of that metal badge... that was sweet.
That was a fascinating discovery!
Robin, you're brilliant mate! Thanks for doing this old commodore stuff. Really enjoy it.
Restoring this Easter Egg is a wonderful tribute to Iwata-san, and this video was super educational. Good on you! 👍
I screamed inside when you peeled the plastic off that cartridge.
Discovering and explaining the easter egg was interesting enough, but coding a patch to put it back in the game is a fitting tribute to Iwata.
Had to subscribe so I can watch your upcoming videos on other easter eggs.
I saw this again on the easter egg hunter channel. I liked the video in 2020! The fact this was found still makes me cry that it wasn't widely known in his shortened life time.
iwata san is a legend
Excellent work Robin, as usual!
Such an amazing find! I've looked at the strings before and thought it was odd that it had nulls at the end, I figured it was some kind of easter egg ingame but I was too lazy to check. I'm so glad that someone else figured this out!
Hello from Madrid! This was definitely much more fun than studying C to hand in my next project as I should be doing. xD Thanks for the explanation. Even though I don't know this language (yet... Assembly is ahead in the curriculum...) or Commodore I'd say I can still understand like 70% of the whys and wheretofores. It's too bad that he disabled the easter egg, although if it was because of his boss, I guess Iwata got the last laugh, eh? ;) It's cool you discovered it and could finally credit him as deserved. It's adorable that you don't know what Akihabara is! For programmers in my generation that's like saying "Nerd Mecca"... everybody knows it and wants to make their pilgrimage. xD
Awesome work, what a fantastic discovery you have made. Thank you for sharing this. Thank you for explaining it thoroughly. Thank you for the work and I'm excited to see what other eggs you have discovered.
Wow! Great work Robin. Digging up this kind of stuff is fascinating!
This is really cool, I always love looking back at older tech like this.
Also happy 40th birthday to the easter egg tomorrow
Thank you for your ingenuity and diligence in bringing this easter egg to life in-game.
This man is doing the lord's work. Great video as always!
Anyone else screamed as Robin pulled the plastic protector? 🤪🤪
Worth it! Made my night ;)
Because of the collector's value?
YES! It was akin to somebody lighting a sugar donut on fire while Homer Simpson could only look on in horror.
I've had complaints in my other videos when I left the plastic on things. There's no pleasing everyone, eh? Typically I leave it on but it was starting to peel up in the one corner already, so...
oh I screamed but only with joy, due to how dang clean that metal label looked afterwards!
I was really upset when they removed his hidden game from Switches.
I'm not even a Nintendo fan but it took up hardly any space and was a beautiful tribute to a great man.
Maybe there's an easter egg hidden deep in Switch console that will be found a decade later?
@@hteekay I'd like to think so but it's rumoured the order came from high up and working with Nintendo is a lot of people's dream job so... it's unlikely that someone will slip something into an update, sadly.
@@greenhowie If I remember correctly, it's actually a type of tribute in Japanese culture, where it exist for a year and is then removed.
that easter egg is cool....i respect and love the games iwata has been involed in.....1981 was a great year!...miss those early 80s ..great time......long gone..
Robin, this was great! Really fascinating! Definitely motivates me to do more programming in assembly language. Thank you very much!
Excellent content and explanation! I’m certain Iwata-san would have LOVED seeing his nearly 40-year-old secret uncovered!!
A few months ago myself and CRV of the website GDRI (gdri.smspower.org/) were wondering about identifying Japan-developed VIC-20 and Ultimax games. I did identify a few games developed by the same person, but didn't get much further than that.
First, some trivia (I did not plan this comment out very well and copying/pasting on UA-cam just results in lots of glitches in my experience): Radar Rat Race was also developed at HAL, but not by Iwata; we know this because there was actually an earlier version of the game, serial number VIC-1903, released *as* Rally-X without Namco's consent. That game has a hidden credit to Hiroaki Suga. The person at Commodore USA who did the conversion into Radar Rat Race (Bill Hindorff) swapped out that name with his, and the C64 version deletes the hidden credit entirely (but I did confirm it's is essentially the same codebase).
Good job figuring this out! This secret eluded me this whole time, because I am pretty sure I searched for the key routine, and I don't remember why I didn't look deeper into this, but I think I had just assumed the key combo was for something else that was common among VIC-20 games (like the color changing and screen centering keys), since it was my first real experience with VIC-20 stuff :D And I definitely did not look for string-printing code or notice the string table indexing stuff. (Plus, I was also looking through a whole bunch of other games at the same time, and my disassembler and VICE were in different VMs.) Oh well, can't win them all =P
You should absolutely update the The Cutting Room Floor page on this game to include this code. tcrf.net/Star_Battle (TCRF is where the trivia on Radar Rat Race comes from.)
I will say as for the null terminator thing, it's always possible that they just used an asciiz directive in the assembler, though yes this case was absolutely intentional =P
Here's the entry point for our conversation: twitter.com/gdri/status/1239001982075129857 (warning: it branches a lot; not every post is visible on this page)
Long time ago i came across radar rat race.
Thank you Robin for another great hack and video.
Akihabara is Tokyo's "Electric Town," often called "Akiba" for short. Very cool place! I couldn't help myself when I was there a few years ago. Filled up all my luggage with cool retro game and computer stuff. :)
came here because of the 8 bit guy. enjoying your content. becoming a subscriber
Very nice find !! Very cool to know that Iwata wrote code on the PET :) I read on The Cutting Room Floor site that the game was licensed to Commodore Japan and was taken off the market. Probably not many copies exist ?
I love these metal plate labels on the cartridges :)
Very good explanation. Even I could understand it. I've spent a big part of my career modifying and fixing other people's code, so I can appreciate the detective work.
Iwata is one of the greats, no doubt.
We may not see the likes of his type again, but I do have hope for the forthcoming generation, that understand the history and respect such greats (due in no small part to videos like this), therefore I think the future is bright.
Cheers for your vids matey!
Incredible! Too bad that change was made to the original code. What a cool find though!
I had a question. when creating a patch, why could the other TSR be used? and why did it make a difference to use the other one?
this video was too short :-)
Amazing!! Thanks for sharing your discovery!
Fantastic investigation work as always Robin. Great video 👏
Too bad he isn't around no more, otherwise you could just ask him directly, Akihabara still has remnants of its great past. Awesome vid on a true genius. The world lost a true pioneer and a genius(and a human) to cancer when
Satoru Iwata past away and I know he'll be dearly missed. Rest In Power Iwata San
that was cool Robin...many thanks...
0:39 It should be noted that Balloon Fight, another game by Iwata, is essentially a clone of Joust.
Unfortunately I don't have that one in my NES collection!
this was great and an excellent explanation and demo. ah key hah bah lah. the photo metal nameplates on those vic cartridges are cool
Even from the grave, the man is still astounding us. Awesome find !!!! Thank you for bringing this piece of history to light.
That is maybe the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Thank you, sir.
Cool episode. Your videos are great and very entertaining to watch.
Sounds like it wasn't an deliberate Easter egg as such but something coded for release told they couldn't put it in by commodore. Really nice work on finding how to display it, though!
Interesting...I did something similar when I wrote 'Punchy' for the VIC20(16k) ..a tape loaded game which displayed a simple 'For Alaine' my girlfriend at the time...only activated by poking 0,0 before the load was initiated.
Basically the publisher Mr Micro didn't want me to dedicate it to her ...so I hid it...lol
Cool, I don't have that game, but it'd be fun to check out. I usually only make videos about things I actually own and can show, I'll see if I can find a copy. I'm finding so many VIC-20 easter eggs I should do a round-up video with a whole bunch of them.
@@8_Bit So long as you dont expect superb game play lol...I was really pleased with it graphically as it used bit mapping and what I liked to call 'psuedo sprites' and single bit collision detection. Those were the days ...and I have trouble remembering a lot.
Great video! Thank you for sharing this discovery.
Amazing find, I very much enjoyed the video!
The Galaxian sound on the Starbattle game is superb
It sounds amazing with a subwoofer, some of the best VIC-20 audio I've ever heard.
Thank you for finding this, this is amazing.
Great stuff! I love your detailed explanation!
Great work, very interesting. Incidentally April 19th 1981 is a Sunday, so I guess he might have been putting in some overtime that day.
I have a feeling Iwata put in overtime nearly every day! :)
This is great stuff. Fun detective work. Well done,
Great piece of computer archeology. Thank you very much!
I didn’t understand most of this, but it is such a fascinating find. I believe Iwata also programmed the first Kirby game on Game Boy.
Great find. Love it!
Impressive sleuthing through the code. I've been on a few hunts myself and it's always exciting to see whether you can bring it to a successful end.
I believe it's pronounced "akihabra".
It's clearly pronounced 秋葉原
You sir really know how to work with code. Amazing work.
We can still hope that maybe there was a small early early release batch that had this code active.
But that's still an incredible find. Thank you for finding this!
Great find! Thanks for posting this.
This is brilliant, love it.
Brilliant as always, Robin.
Very cool, and love the explanation as always!
You really know what you're doing. Great video.
Great video! I wish I had more time this looks fun. I owned a vic20 (with datasette. Grafix module and ram.) back in the days but sold it for c64.
Nicely done!
Excellent video. Great detective work. I did not know there was Jiffy DOS for the VIC. I'm surprised people will still making stuff for it in 1989. It makes me wonder if there are early versions of this cartridge where the egg still works.
This was an awesome and informative exploration.
Nice work.
Fascinating , great work👍
All of us put REM lines at least with those type of "easter eggs" back then.. at least on the C64. The Vic was a bit more pressed for RAM.
Once I started hacking and churning out Mac Shareware on a Mac SE, the easter eggs could become a lot more elaborate. But most of what you want to see is in the About drop down Dialog...
The VIC still looks like a sexy beast. I bought mine with my own money. When my grandparents out of the blue bought me a C=64 one Xmas, I was floored. Never in my wildest dreams. The C=64 was a dream, It wasn't perfect, but I hacked the heck out of that. If only they had waited a year or two more though and got me a C128. Still. They're all dead now. Soon I will be too. I have a trailer and a barn full of 100's of 8bits I rescued all headed to the dump... I can't bear to look at and never even touched. Someone had bought them all from the local nuclear plant to take out all the screws from them (daft idea), and when he died, his wife and sons were going to send them to the dump and I snatched them all and added them to my already massive computer elephant graveyard. All my 8bits came from that haul. Everything else way more modern I brougt home from schools and businesses by the truck full.
I couldn't fire up any of them any more. The last time I flipped the switch on the pet was the late 1990s. Never got around to setting up an antique computer museum.
Aki-ha-bourough - also known as Akiba and Akibara for short, and by locals (see many female created anime :) - It was going to be buldozed flat at one point around mid to late 1980's, but everyone kicked up a stink, so it was revamped into am electronics distric. it has always been a leading edge place, a hangout for alternate, modern, socially broad minded people, even when it was a fashon and design district - ther are some anime that explore this history, and a couple of documentaries, and a lot of anime series have been centered on it as the main way to promote their story line
thanks for doing this, I never had a nintendo, so its nice to "meet new people", even if they already expired - long live VIC-20 :)
Some of us who never really got in to games talk about him now because - as the legend goes - he lives by a small pond on the top of a hill in the form of a glowing, iridescent horse which you can ride. When you're absorbed in Zelda: Breath Of The Wild that is.
That was fantastic! Great content!
So this man was president of Nintendo during my favorite era of Nintendo games. Fascinating! I never knew!
Very cool. I don't know the Vic, but C64 has a Kernal routine that will look at A and X and print to the screen what it finds till it hits a null. Same idea as the code had there. Never saw a MLM in Vic 20. M command makes 4 bytes a line. Ouch.
BTW, I have noticed that the intro screens in the earliest (metallic label but larger type and orange print) cartridge games sometimes feature different colors and words in menus and gameplay (Jupiter Lander). There might be a version with the working Easter egg OR another early game with one!
Found this by accident, loved it even though I'll be honest and I didn't understand some of it. subbed.
Excellent find. Wasn't Satoru Iwata / HAL Laboratory also the producer of the first Commodore 64 launch games, Jupiter Lander and LeMans?
Yes, HAL Laboratory worked on several of the C64 launch games and while it's not known if Mr. Iwata was the primary programmer on those games, he certainly had a hand in their creation.
The Joust-on-NES thing is a pretty interesting topic in itself. Because the game ended up releasing so long after it was put together (due to the copyright shenanigans hinted at in this video), most Japanese gamers who know anything about it believe that Joust is a ripoff of Balloon Fight, whereas the reality of course is that Balloon Fight was created specifically because of the difficulties involved in getting Joust released in a timely manner.
The Gaming Historian made a fantastic video about Satoru Iwata. I highly recommend it.
Yes, it's great. I have a link to it in this video's description.