Thanks for mentioning my books. I appreciate it. :) Thanks for all this work. This is fantastic. Very, very cool. I've passed it on to a colleague of Suzuki-san, to pass on to him. I'm sure he'll be very pleased to see people still interested in his original game. --- EDIT: As an aside, when I first discovered this, after interviewing Suzuki-san, as you can imagine in 2013 there was almost zero information, even in Japanese, and finding screenshots almost impossible. I had to rely on a scan from a magazine. So to see now, 10 years later, the game preserved as a piece of history for anyone to play, it's fantastic. Thank you. I don't have my interview to hand, but as I recall, the 1979 version was shown at a fair? It was part of this deal they had with Taito. They were paid to come up with these computer games. They would create games and show them to Taito. Except Taito didn't publish them - though in the case of this specific game, Taito copied the idea for its Lupin arcade game, which Suzuki was not happy about, since there had been talk of royalties, which ultimately did not materialise. (The entire reasoning behind the deal is a mystery lost to time.) Now, finally, this lost artefact can be viewed easily in its original and optimised context. Kudos to you, good sir, and your efforts.
And thank you for all your work interviewing and writing, and helping preserve this important history! I'm especially interested when it intersects with Commodore history, as a US company trying to break into the Japanese market with at least a bit of success for the first few years.
Hey Dave! Do you still terrorize the parents of school shooting survivors by bringing your rifle to the grocery store and filming it, like you used to do?
Regarding the transliteration: There are two common systems in use when transliteration Japanese to Latin characters: Hepburn and Nihon-shiki. In *very approximate* terms, Japanese syllables boil down to an optional initial consonant (none, K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W), followed by a vowel (A, I, U, E or O). This allows you to make a table of all the valid combinations of consonants and vowels. There are, however, a few exceptions in how these are actually pronounced. In Nihon-shiki, the romanization follows this logical table: し is S + I, so it's transliterated as "si". But Hepburn approximates the actual pronunciation closer, and this character is one of those exceptions: it's pronounced "shi", so Hepburn uses that. But there is an added twist here: you can modify the I characters by suffixing a smaller version of a character from the Y line. The title is an example of that: in pure kana, it's "まんびきしょねん"; ma-n-bi-ki-shi-(yo)-ne-n, where the yo is one of those smaller characters that modify the "shi". When that happens, you replace the vowel with the vowel from the Y character, so しょis pronounced "sho", and Hepburn will romanize it as such. Nihon-shiki, however, writes it as "syo", replacing the I with the Y character transliteration. English speakers tend to use Hepburn when romanizing, but Japan itself generally goes with Nihon-shiki (or Kunrei-shiki, which is very closely related, and shares this particular difference anyway). It's generally not a big issue; for the most part the romanizations do align with each other, so once you've learned one, it's easy to learn the other as well.
I'm hoping to make a video about Satoru Iwata's early game development days sometime soon-ish. Many sources say he had an HP-65 so I actually bought one (they're not cheap!) and just this past week I found out it was actually the slightly newer HP-67 he had!! Figures.
What an amazing piece of preservation! Thanks for your hard work! The PET was the first computer I ever pressed a key upon, probably when I was 6 or 7 years old. I still remember the community college summer program where I saw it. I was hooked right away.
A lot of these games weren't so much lost, but rather, just didn't have a way to get distributed and travel beyond your own machines. There were no BBS's, modems were uncommon, and the internet was pretty small only connecting universities mostly. Maybe you made a few copies on tapes (and then floppies) for your friends... I did this for my C-64 programs. I wrote a massive text adventure game for the TRS80 Model III that I guess you could say was the first and only text adventure game of someone's real life house and farm. And unlike Alexa, my text parser understood conjunctions, like AND, OR, NOT... When I finally did have a way to upload my hand written games to BBS's, I'd get random phone calls at very random times from people who opened up an about box and saw my contact info. I remember two in particular... one about a Trivia Hangman Game I had written for the Mac, and one about a copy I did of Milton Bradley's Merlin in Hypercard.
Oh yeah ... Commodore cursor keys ... I still have that shift-goes-opposite-direction-feeling stored in the muscle memory of my right hand index finger😂
Wow! This is amazing! Can you make a C64 port and add some colour and SID beeps and boops? Not done watching so I’m sorry if you already talk about a C64 port.
"Stealth game too good at hiding" could be the headline for the first section of the video... I also like how at 19:05 you're already anticipating speedrun categories.
Amazing that is written in BASIC. I remember being blown away by the Space Invaders game on the PET and hoping to look at the code only to find it was written in assembler which I hadn't (yet) learned.
what a wonderful story and piece of software, I find these ancient games and hardware analyzed through modern technology so nostalgic. Never heard of this game before, but quite cool of a concept, specially predating almost every game ever, 1979 is before Pacman, Donkey Kong. It's crazy
This is incredible, I'm so pleased that the original game has been found and preserved for western audiences! The differences between it and the emulated version are quite pronounced, I actually think the character animations and sound effects are a lot nicer. Brilliant work. Not being a native Japanese speaker didn't help in my own research for that video. It was only through basic translation searches of "shoplifting boy" that I was able to find the footage I used. Although the megazine listing was in 1980, I used the 1979 date because the developer showcased it at a fair (I think in November, if I remember correctly). Either way, it predates everything else I've found for early stealth games, or "proto-stealth games" as I like to call them. There's rumours of a stealthy submarine-type game that also appeared around the same time as a type-in listing, but I haven't managed to confirm this. Likely I'm looking in the wrong places! Thanks so much for this video and for the shout-out :)
Great to hear from you, and thanks again for making your video! Do you know anything more about the submarine game, perhaps what computer it was for? Was it also a Japanese-made game?
The POKEs mentioned in the magazine article to save are absolutely necessary when saving to tape. It's a long-known problem that if you are doing CB2 sound and you leave the VIA registers in the state used for playing sounds, it prevents the tape routines from working. I haven't checked line-by-line, but if this program doesn't restore the original shape of the VIA registers, you have to use those POKEs. There is no issue with the CB2 sound interfering with IEEE-488 disk drive operations AFAIK.
The "Syo" is indeed supposed to be "Sho", it's a different way of transliteration system. "Sho" is easier though for English speakers to pronounce correctly just by seeing it (as in "show"). You occasionally see also "tu" in the game, but that is supposed to be pronounced "tsu". I could talk an hour about this, haha ;p Might be able to translate some of it :)
Really cool to learn about the game. Thank your for the clear explanations and your amazing work in optimizing the code. It's always a good day when old media gets rediscovered!
Great video, thank you for going the extra mile and discussing the flowchart, it was really fun 🙂 By the way, what did you use to get the magazine pages translated and displayed on your iPad (or other tablet)?
@@8_Bit Thanks! For a long time all I could do to achieve the same has been to use Google Lens on my phone, not the most convenient way to read a full-page article...
It's funny you should mention the Space Invaders soundtrack. My friend borrowed his older brother's boombox. A Pet 4016 I bought has an Archer speaker phone inside connected to the port for sound.
An early game with a stealth element is Saboteur! for the ZX Spectrum, published in 1985. Stealth isn't a theme of the game per se, but it is possible to sneak up on guards and kill them without a fight. It works in much the same way as in Prince of Persia - running will cause a guard to turn around in the direction of your footsteps, but walking does not. Interestingly, Saboteur! does not even have a 'walk' feature, but you can simulate it by quickly tapping then releasing the direction controls so the character takes one step at a time.
Superb video, containing so much backstory and detailed information. Question: I assume the link to the game in your description is to your optimized version; is there a copy of the original version available for download somewhere too? Many thanks.
Yes, there's actually 6 versions on the disk, where the first 3 are the original (with two alternate control schemes to make it more emulator-friendly), and then 3 more versions with the same controls but with faster/optimized gameplay. I explain this at 14:27 chapter name "Why 6 versions - the menu"
Stealth mode & god mode were the only things that made Quake II addictive. Just racing through all 12 hours of obstacles without having to fight enemies or get past the enemies without being mortal was an exciting challenge on its own.
@8:25 When you showed the Mini PET, I was thinking "uh oh, is he going to type in the listing on that?!?" :D @22:00, Wait, the first program has to be longer than all subsequent programs?? Got more details on that? Also, what happens if the time runs out and you didn't finish shoplifting?
I really did consider typing the listing in on camera... See "Programming the PET/CBM" by Raeto West, page 90: "Loading from BASIC: This is perfectly successful provided that: (i) The newly loaded program is not longer than the older one...". I think the main reason is that variables are stored immediately after the program, so if you LOAD from in a program with a longer program, it overwrites those variables. I was under the impression that Commodore BASIC handled this okay with the caveat that effectively variables would be CLR'd. However, I had crashes and/or corruption happening on the PET. So maybe this is something that was better-handled in later versions of C= BASIC. If the time runs out, then somehow you're suddenly running away from the store (or is it the police station??) and get caught, just like if you were caught in-store but without the warden-down-the-aisle animation.
I think the 8K 2001 was briefly "the standard" for PET games especially in Japan where the later models didn't seem to catch on, after an initially good launch.
@@8_Bit , then I chose wisely. OR it was the one I could get my hands on in need of A LOT of repairs. One of those. Took me weeks to get it running, but it's great now.
I was following your explanation of the code along, but somehow I missed where it checks whether you have the shotgun equipped. Also, how were the microtransactions required to rent more backpack slots so that you can empty the entire store in one go implemented?
It's possible that the King's Quest games were among the first stealth games. You had to avoid getting caught by the witch, the wizard (Manannan), the troll, the wolf and a number of other bad guys. Although King's Quest was not really of the stealth game genre, you had to do a fair amount of sneaking around.
I don't read or understand Japanese, but if you use Google Translate in camera mode it pretty accurately (it seems) shows what those characters say on the cover of RAM magazine. [edit: Sorry, I wrote this comment before the video was finished. Seems Robin has the same idea!]
This is so cool. As a VIC-20 kid, the PET was something that I kind of missed (still need to finish assembling all of the mini-pet parts.). But now I want to see if I can do a VIC-20 port. 🤔Just trying to figure out the best approach to make it fit within the vic-20 limited display resolution. Thinking of a "Zoomed out" view while in the game and a "Zoomed in" view during the animated sections (including when you're caught). I also want to see how far I can get on unexpanded. Thanks to your videos, I was encouraged to make my first assembly VIC-20 project. As a kid, I never understood assembly. But after multiple years working in high-level languages it was fun to go back to basics and bang the hardware. :)
The way many do Commodore program loaders is to position the LOAD"[file]",8 and RUN commands on the screen load the keyboard buffer with a few 13s (return) and exit the program so the cursor lands on the LOAD line... that gets around the thing with end of BASIC not resetting when loading in program.
"Shounen" and "syōnen" are just two different ways to romanize "しょうねん", which is pronounced like you pronounced "shounen". The second romanization is in Nihon Shiki, which is Japan's official system, in which they seem to prefer consistency over what makes sense to Westerners. In this case, し = "shi", ょ = small "yo". Small kana are used to modify the regular ones, so when you put these two together, you get "sho", but for them, spelling it as "syo" makes more sense, because all of the other combinations with "yo" are like that. Also, "ou" is just a long "o", for historical reasons, and Nihon Shiki writes it as "ō", which actually does make more sense to us. But obviously that computer has no such character, so the programmer used just a plain "o".
"Szczepaniak" is a "simple" Polish surname, while your pronunciation was far from perfect it was a really good effort, 7/10 BTW, I reminded myself of a Black Box V8 cartridge that had a Polish version of a voice synthesizer (based on an English one, I would have to turn my C64 again to tell more about it) that was very hard to understand but did a pretty good job back at the time. And was also really funny, I like software trying but failing
It was SAM with text-to-phoneme module replaced with the Polish one. So it pronounced Polish using English phonemes, giving it an extra layer of strong accent.
10:33 万引き 少年 (manbiki shōnen) means "Shoplifting-Juvenile" or "Shoplifting-Boy" (="young shoplifter") う！ない！(u! nai!) means something along the lines of "Ugh! There is nothing!" or "Oh, no!!" 監視員 (かんしいん) (kanshiin) means "guard" つかまえろ (tsukamaero) means "catch me" 文部科学省奨学金 (monbukagakushō shōgakukin), formerly also "Monbusho Scholarship" is an academic scholarship offered by the Japanese Ministry of Education that supports foreign students 空いててよかった！(Sui tete yokatta!) means "Good thing it's open!" いけ! (ike!) means "Let's go!" こい！(koi!) means "come!" まて! (mate(ee)) means "wa(aa)it!" ばかめ！(baka me!) means "(you) idiot!" うまい！(umai!) means "good" or "excellent" or even "tasty" いい気分 (Ī kibun) means "good feeling" or "feeling good" (from the Slogan 7-ELEVEN いい気分)
SUPER-STORE means a marketplace that is super, just like a "super market" POLICE means law enforcement, just like "the police" (not the band!) @!# means "Oh, my good lord, what has happened to me? Why do I have to suffer this fate? It all sucks here on this earth!"
I happen to speak Japanese (not fluently though), and I can explain the "syo" vs. "sho" thing - it's two different styles of romanization. The "Hepburn" romanization is based on English pronunciation, so it's fairly obvious to an English speaker how to say something, and so 少年 would be written "shōnen" or "shounen". A simplification of this is the most common system used outside of Japan. But "Nihonshiki" or "Japan-style" romanization is more normalized according to Japanese use, so you don't have as many exceptions - but as a result it's not as phonetically accurate, and you get "syônen" or "syoonen" instead. You'll often see Nihonshiki romanization used in Japan proper, as it's the official standard there.
FWIW, the Y in "syonen" is a consonant, not a vowel, so it sounds like "s" + "yonen", which when run together is not all that different from "shonen". The two spellings are just different ways of transliterating the same sound, whose Japanese version is somewhere between English "sh" and "s+y".
Thanks, I actually tried for a while to find an explanation of "syonen" and there was very little available online. Now I know the "y" is really just like an "h" when dealing with transliterated Japanese.
The main takeaway is that in Japanese transliteration, Y is always a consonant, as in "you" or "yet", and never a vowel as it is in "byte" or "yttrium". So the name Ryu isn't rye-oo, but instead sounds like the word "you" with an R stuck on the front. Hard for English speakers, natural for Japanese ones. I find it helps to imagine a little apostrophe in front of the Y, so it's r'yu. Or s'yonen. When the consonantal Y sound comes after another consonant, the two sounds tend to merge over time into a single combined sound. This happened in many English dialects with the word "Tuesday", which went from "t'yoozday" to "chewsday" (though for me it's just "toozday", which I guess marks mine as a lower-class dialect). In Japanese that happened with the s'y sequence, and the result is very close to our "sh" sound. So some transliterators write it that way. But that doesn't help when Y comes after something other than S, and thinking of it as an H will only lead you further astray. So just remember that Japanese Y is always "yuh", never "aye" or "ee" or "ih". :)
@@8_Bit No, the "y" isn't like an "h": it's there for a different reason. The five syllables starting with "s" are さしすせそ, "sa shi su se so." You'll notice that only the second one, "shi," uses an "sh" sound rather than a "hard s." "Shi" alone can be modified with a yō-on, a small "ya, yu or yo" ("ゃゅょ") after it to produce a somewhat different syllable, giving you "しゃ、しゅ、しょ" ("sha, shu, sho"). The "h" is there because し is pronounced "shi." When yō-on are used with other characters, you don't get the "h" sound, such as み ("mi") to みゃ、みゅ、みょ ("mya, myu, myo").
@@Curt_Sampson Okay, can you explain specifically the difference between "syonen" and "shonen" and "shounen" and how to pronounce each. I've seen all three in the context of this game.
They're all pronounced the same: show-nen. The spelling "sy" is systematically derived from the Japanese writing system, while the one with "sh" is more phonetic, but they're representing the same sound. As for the "ou", that's an old convention for representing a "long" o, which in modern typography is more often written ō. (In Japanese, unlike the way the term "long" is often used in English, long vowels are literally just the same vowel sound held for a longer amount of time. In fact, if you were singing in Japanese, the word "shōnen" would usually be three beats rather than two.)
Thanks, it was mostly the "syonen" spelling that was confusing me, as it looked like it would be pronounced differently as well but apparently not; even the "syo" should be pronounced "show", it's just an alternate way of spelling it in another transliteration system.
if it rally interests you, way back when there was two different romanization systems created, hepburn and some other... anyway I probably grew up less than 250 miles from you in central Michigan. My great Grandpa was born in the then territorries of today Canada. I really love and relate to every one of your videos, the ones with your old time buddies as well as the ones with your kids.
21:50 You should be able to do the keyboard-buffer-POKE thing like a lot of VIC-20 and C64 programs do to load the next part of a program as if the user had entered LOAD and RUN manually.
I did think of that briefly but when I got this working it was a "good enough" moment. It's funny how many things we do on the VIC-20 and C-64 actually don't work, or don't work easily, on the PET despite the huge similarities. Even loading my credits program on the PET involved messing around with a hex editor due to the PET not doing relocatable loads. My C64 credits program loaded at $0801 on the PET instead of at the $0401 it needed to be at.
A lot of sloppy unnecessary code. Just looking at the movement routine for example. Looking at lines 4005 and 4010 it appears there is a slightly higher chance of switching to the left, since it could switch right then immediately left. The movement could have been better coded using Q=1 for movement in the right direction and Q=-1 for a moment in the left direction A change of direction could be simply coded as if RND(1) < 0.0286 THEN Q=Q-1 And subsequently A=A+Q could have been used. Small improvements like this could speed up the game.
seems like the pet and vc 20 were popular in japan but commodore stopped being successful in japan quickly while the c64 was popular in many countries it was not very popular in japan. i think its because it doesn't support Japanese characters .they tolerated it in the early days when having any computer was a luxury and Japanese characters are harder to render anyway. and japan made their own systems that were very good unlike most countries that either didn't have the wealth or manpower or did but were not as advanced as America or japan or the uk. like in france they had a few systems but they fell behind quickly and started using the same stuff the rest of the world was using quickly. all the east block countries did it because it was the only option and gave up when it was no longer necessary but japan still had their own systems until the 90s i heard they had to stop Japanese companies from making their own systems instead of just making pc compatibles. because it was becoming a problem with the rise of the internet and having to port everything to those systems.
Yes, I think the MSX came along at just the right time for Japan. I think the Japanese C64 did support Japanese characters but it had compatibility problems with other C64 software. I'm not even sure the VIC-20 (or VIC-1001, which was the Japanese model) did very well in Japan.
@@8_Bit Yes, there was a Japanese C64 that replaced many of the graphics symbols with katakana on both the keyboard and in the character ROM. It's pretty rare now (more rare than U.S. C64s here in Japan!) so I'm guessing it didn't sell well. I'm not clear on the compatibility issues, but I'm guessing that it goes both ways, and the later VIC-20 was equally incompatible with the original VIC-1001 (designed and first sold here in Japan).
There was no need to "tolerate" western computers in Japan from about 1980 onwards; by that point there were several Japanese manufacturers of excellent and relatively cheap computers, often offering more memory and better graphics than western computers. (Part of the reason for better graphics was to be able to render kanji on the screen; 640x200 8-colour RGB was by 1982 the standard for home computers not focused only on gaming, and by 1984 640x400 was becoming standard.) But yes, it was only in the early '90s that Japan finally started switching in a big way from locally developed systems (mainly PC-9801) to PC-compatible systems. It was the introduction of VGA, followed by DOS/V (adding kanji display to DOS--see the Wikipedia entry on that for more) that made the switch possible.
万引き少年- Shounen is pronounced Show Nen which means "boy" or "young boy." For some reason, some Japanese people use the 'y' in romanizing Sho - like an upside-down H. It's still pronounced 'sho' and in this case, it's a long O, held for an extra syllable. Shounen. Momotaro - Mo Mo Tah Roe Composite - com POZ zit Koi - "Come!" Matee - mah teh! "Wait!" or "Hold it!" Bakame - bah kah meh "Dumbass" Yoku yatta - "You did well"
Okay, thanks. I think I was pronouncing "Shonen" or "Shounen" correctly when that's what the text said, but the "Syonen" was confusing me. So now I know the "y" is just like an "h" . Thanks for the info.
@@8_BitAnd Momotaro is the titular character of a Japanese fairy tale. You should be able to look this one up easily in a search engine so no need for me to summarize the story.
Thanks for mentioning my books. I appreciate it. :)
Thanks for all this work. This is fantastic. Very, very cool.
I've passed it on to a colleague of Suzuki-san, to pass on to him. I'm sure he'll be very pleased to see people still interested in his original game.
---
EDIT: As an aside, when I first discovered this, after interviewing Suzuki-san, as you can imagine in 2013 there was almost zero information, even in Japanese, and finding screenshots almost impossible. I had to rely on a scan from a magazine.
So to see now, 10 years later, the game preserved as a piece of history for anyone to play, it's fantastic. Thank you.
I don't have my interview to hand, but as I recall, the 1979 version was shown at a fair? It was part of this deal they had with Taito. They were paid to come up with these computer games. They would create games and show them to Taito. Except Taito didn't publish them - though in the case of this specific game, Taito copied the idea for its Lupin arcade game, which Suzuki was not happy about, since there had been talk of royalties, which ultimately did not materialise. (The entire reasoning behind the deal is a mystery lost to time.)
Now, finally, this lost artefact can be viewed easily in its original and optimised context. Kudos to you, good sir, and your efforts.
And thank you for all your work interviewing and writing, and helping preserve this important history! I'm especially interested when it intersects with Commodore history, as a US company trying to break into the Japanese market with at least a bit of success for the first few years.
Thank you both for caring to preserve some software from early micro computing history.
That's an impressive PET game for 1979. Even more impressive that it is written in BASIC and still runs fast enough to be playable.
Nice to see you here! :)
Hey Dave! Do you still terrorize the parents of school shooting survivors by bringing your rifle to the grocery store and filming it, like you used to do?
The animations have so much character! It's impressive that the original dev got so much out of plain PETSCII.
I agree, I find the animation very funny and amusing!
Regarding the transliteration: There are two common systems in use when transliteration Japanese to Latin characters: Hepburn and Nihon-shiki.
In *very approximate* terms, Japanese syllables boil down to an optional initial consonant (none, K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W), followed by a vowel (A, I, U, E or O). This allows you to make a table of all the valid combinations of consonants and vowels. There are, however, a few exceptions in how these are actually pronounced.
In Nihon-shiki, the romanization follows this logical table: し is S + I, so it's transliterated as "si". But Hepburn approximates the actual pronunciation closer, and this character is one of those exceptions: it's pronounced "shi", so Hepburn uses that.
But there is an added twist here: you can modify the I characters by suffixing a smaller version of a character from the Y line. The title is an example of that: in pure kana, it's "まんびきしょねん"; ma-n-bi-ki-shi-(yo)-ne-n, where the yo is one of those smaller characters that modify the "shi". When that happens, you replace the vowel with the vowel from the Y character, so しょis pronounced "sho", and Hepburn will romanize it as such. Nihon-shiki, however, writes it as "syo", replacing the I with the Y character transliteration.
English speakers tend to use Hepburn when romanizing, but Japan itself generally goes with Nihon-shiki (or Kunrei-shiki, which is very closely related, and shares this particular difference anyway). It's generally not a big issue; for the most part the romanizations do align with each other, so once you've learned one, it's easy to learn the other as well.
Oh yeah, Nihon-Shiki conventions are also, for instance, Yoshi's name is romanized as "Yossy" at times in Japanese market media.
That’s cool! The late Satoru Iwata, who worked for Nintendo, actually programmed his very first game on a Commodore PET.
Yes, at least, his first surviving game was on the PET. His first games were written on his HP-67 calculator apparently, but they're very much lost.
@@8_Bit I didn’t know that.
I'm hoping to make a video about Satoru Iwata's early game development days sometime soon-ish. Many sources say he had an HP-65 so I actually bought one (they're not cheap!) and just this past week I found out it was actually the slightly newer HP-67 he had!! Figures.
The way this was presented and the fact you could type it in, would have certainly helped people to learn programming.
What an amazing piece of preservation! Thanks for your hard work! The PET was the first computer I ever pressed a key upon, probably when I was 6 or 7 years old. I still remember the community college summer program where I saw it. I was hooked right away.
The shop attendant mr K has quite the flamboyant walk
Walking like that "Going to store" guy
A lot of these games weren't so much lost, but rather, just didn't have a way to get distributed and travel beyond your own machines. There were no BBS's, modems were uncommon, and the internet was pretty small only connecting universities mostly. Maybe you made a few copies on tapes (and then floppies) for your friends... I did this for my C-64 programs.
I wrote a massive text adventure game for the TRS80 Model III that I guess you could say was the first and only text adventure game of someone's real life house and farm. And unlike Alexa, my text parser understood conjunctions, like AND, OR, NOT...
When I finally did have a way to upload my hand written games to BBS's, I'd get random phone calls at very random times from people who opened up an about box and saw my contact info. I remember two in particular... one about a Trivia Hangman Game I had written for the Mac, and one about a copy I did of Milton Bradley's Merlin in Hypercard.
Oh yeah ... Commodore cursor keys ... I still have that shift-goes-opposite-direction-feeling stored in the muscle memory of my right hand index finger😂
Pretty interesting blast from the past. Definitely shows how an intelligent individual can work wonders even when they're severely limited.
Song at the end was great. One of the best yet
This is awesome! It's great that someone archived those old magazines.
Wow! This is amazing! Can you make a C64 port and add some colour and SID beeps and boops? Not done watching so I’m sorry if you already talk about a C64 port.
I have just finished doing a ZX Spectrum port
I'm on it, though I'm having difficulty replicating the PET noises.
What a find!! It's completely amazing and love the changes you made. Thanks for sharing and the shout-out
Thanks again for your help, and for making the PET Companion, it was very handy while making this video.
"Stealth game too good at hiding" could be the headline for the first section of the video...
I also like how at 19:05 you're already anticipating speedrun categories.
I'm playing it on my 4032 :-) Thanks for the link to the disk file you did.
Amazing that is written in BASIC. I remember being blown away by the Space Invaders game on the PET and hoping to look at the code only to find it was written in assembler which I hadn't (yet) learned.
I am fascinated by the effort someone put into the PETsci graphics and animations!!
what a wonderful story and piece of software, I find these ancient games and hardware analyzed through modern technology so nostalgic. Never heard of this game before, but quite cool of a concept, specially predating almost every game ever, 1979 is before Pacman, Donkey Kong. It's crazy
This is so funny! The old games really had charm!
Thank you for helping to preserve this bit of gaming history by sharing it with the rest of us!
This is incredible, I'm so pleased that the original game has been found and preserved for western audiences! The differences between it and the emulated version are quite pronounced, I actually think the character animations and sound effects are a lot nicer. Brilliant work.
Not being a native Japanese speaker didn't help in my own research for that video. It was only through basic translation searches of "shoplifting boy" that I was able to find the footage I used. Although the megazine listing was in 1980, I used the 1979 date because the developer showcased it at a fair (I think in November, if I remember correctly). Either way, it predates everything else I've found for early stealth games, or "proto-stealth games" as I like to call them.
There's rumours of a stealthy submarine-type game that also appeared around the same time as a type-in listing, but I haven't managed to confirm this. Likely I'm looking in the wrong places!
Thanks so much for this video and for the shout-out :)
Great to hear from you, and thanks again for making your video! Do you know anything more about the submarine game, perhaps what computer it was for? Was it also a Japanese-made game?
The POKEs mentioned in the magazine article to save are absolutely necessary when saving to tape. It's a long-known problem that if you are doing CB2 sound and you leave the VIA registers in the state used for playing sounds, it prevents the tape routines from working. I haven't checked line-by-line, but if this program doesn't restore the original shape of the VIA registers, you have to use those POKEs.
There is no issue with the CB2 sound interfering with IEEE-488 disk drive operations AFAIK.
Ah, if someone were to run the program before saving! I have learned the hard way to never do that :)
closing music was genius. Shades of Crash Test Dummies.
Brings back memories. These first games were innovative. Thank you.
Man, I really like the animations! Very well designed for typed in Basic!
The "Syo" is indeed supposed to be "Sho", it's a different way of transliteration system.
"Sho" is easier though for English speakers to pronounce correctly just by seeing it (as in "show").
You occasionally see also "tu" in the game, but that is supposed to be pronounced "tsu".
I could talk an hour about this, haha ;p
Might be able to translate some of it :)
Wow Robin, this is great stuff (as always).
Really cool to learn about the game. Thank your for the clear explanations and your amazing work in optimizing the code. It's always a good day when old media gets rediscovered!
Definitely worth documenting this game, improving it and contributing so much to preservation.
Very cool and great improvements!
Love this video and your channel! Really appreciate all that you share.
what a fantastic episode again!
Great video, thank you for going the extra mile and discussing the flowchart, it was really fun 🙂
By the way, what did you use to get the magazine pages translated and displayed on your iPad (or other tablet)?
Thanks, I just used Google Translate which now supports images (and sort-of pdfs, but it worked better when I converted each page into an image).
@@8_Bit Thanks! For a long time all I could do to achieve the same has been to use Google Lens on my phone, not the most convenient way to read a full-page article...
It's funny you should mention the Space Invaders soundtrack. My friend borrowed his older brother's boombox.
A Pet 4016 I bought has an Archer speaker phone inside connected to the port for sound.
An early game with a stealth element is Saboteur! for the ZX Spectrum, published in 1985.
Stealth isn't a theme of the game per se, but it is possible to sneak up on guards and kill them without a fight.
It works in much the same way as in Prince of Persia - running will cause a guard to turn around in the direction of your footsteps, but walking does not.
Interestingly, Saboteur! does not even have a 'walk' feature, but you can simulate it by quickly tapping then releasing the direction controls so the character takes one step at a time.
Mud1, created in 1978 may have a prior claim. You could attack other players while invisible.
Amazing!
Candidate for 'first game where you play as the villain' too? :-)
Superb video, containing so much backstory and detailed information. Question: I assume the link to the game in your description is to your optimized version; is there a copy of the original version available for download somewhere too? Many thanks.
The unmodified original program is option #1 in the menu. I wanted to give it priority on the disk, top honours.
Its file name is MANBIKI SYONEN.
@@8_BitOh, the file contains both versions. Thanks, I think you mentioned that in the video. Appreciate your efforts.
Yes, there's actually 6 versions on the disk, where the first 3 are the original (with two alternate control schemes to make it more emulator-friendly), and then 3 more versions with the same controls but with faster/optimized gameplay. I explain this at 14:27 chapter name "Why 6 versions - the menu"
What a great game! =D Thank you
Stealth mode & god mode were the only things that made Quake II addictive. Just racing through all 12 hours of obstacles without having to fight enemies or get past the enemies without being mortal was an exciting challenge on its own.
@8:25 When you showed the Mini PET, I was thinking "uh oh, is he going to type in the listing on that?!?" :D
@22:00, Wait, the first program has to be longer than all subsequent programs?? Got more details on that?
Also, what happens if the time runs out and you didn't finish shoplifting?
I really did consider typing the listing in on camera...
See "Programming the PET/CBM" by Raeto West, page 90: "Loading from BASIC: This is perfectly successful provided that: (i) The newly loaded program is not longer than the older one...". I think the main reason is that variables are stored immediately after the program, so if you LOAD from in a program with a longer program, it overwrites those variables. I was under the impression that Commodore BASIC handled this okay with the caveat that effectively variables would be CLR'd. However, I had crashes and/or corruption happening on the PET. So maybe this is something that was better-handled in later versions of C= BASIC.
If the time runs out, then somehow you're suddenly running away from the store (or is it the police station??) and get caught, just like if you were caught in-store but without the warden-down-the-aisle animation.
I happen to have a PET 2001-8N. Not very often you find a game designed for/on that particular model. Cool find.
I think the 8K 2001 was briefly "the standard" for PET games especially in Japan where the later models didn't seem to catch on, after an initially good launch.
@@8_Bit , then I chose wisely. OR it was the one I could get my hands on in need of A LOT of repairs. One of those. Took me weeks to get it running, but it's great now.
Thanks for the great video! What software was used to make the translations while maintaining the magazine's layout?
Google Translate, which allows images to be uploaded and translated now.
I was following your explanation of the code along, but somehow I missed where it checks whether you have the shotgun equipped. Also, how were the microtransactions required to rent more backpack slots so that you can empty the entire store in one go implemented?
It's possible that the King's Quest games were among the first stealth games. You had to avoid getting caught by the witch, the wizard (Manannan), the troll, the wolf and a number of other bad guys. Although King's Quest was not really of the stealth game genre, you had to do a fair amount of sneaking around.
great video and cool game
That outro song is just plain awesome! Can you please release this somehow? :) I take it this is all a family production?
Pretty neat!
I don't read or understand Japanese, but if you use Google Translate in camera mode it pretty accurately (it seems) shows what those characters say on the cover of RAM magazine. [edit: Sorry, I wrote this comment before the video was finished. Seems Robin has the same idea!]
I'd like to translate the Japanese instances seen in this game.
"Nai!" = "Nothing here!"
Monbusyo/Monbusho = Minister of Education, Science, and Culture
"T(s)ukamaero!" = "Catch him!"
Kanshiin = Watchman
"Ha(-)haaaaaa(i)!" = "O-okaaaaaay!"
"Aitete yokatta!" = "I'm glad it's (the store's) open!"
"Ike!" = "Go!" (imperative)
"Mateee!" = "Stop!"
"Bakame!" = "Idiot!"
"Umai!" (上手い) = "(He's) skillful!"
"Yoku yatta!" = "You did well!"
This is so cool. As a VIC-20 kid, the PET was something that I kind of missed (still need to finish assembling all of the mini-pet parts.).
But now I want to see if I can do a VIC-20 port. 🤔Just trying to figure out the best approach to make it fit within the vic-20 limited display resolution. Thinking of a "Zoomed out" view while in the game and a "Zoomed in" view during the animated sections (including when you're caught). I also want to see how far I can get on unexpanded.
Thanks to your videos, I was encouraged to make my first assembly VIC-20 project. As a kid, I never understood assembly. But after multiple years working in high-level languages it was fun to go back to basics and bang the hardware. :)
Just following up that that my vic-20 port is now on Github in the vic-manbiki-shonen repo.
what a game XD !!! Cheers!
The way many do Commodore program loaders is to position the LOAD"[file]",8 and RUN commands on the screen load the keyboard buffer with a few 13s (return) and exit the program so the cursor lands on the LOAD line... that gets around the thing with end of BASIC not resetting when loading in program.
I'm familiar with that technique on VIC-20 and C-64 but had trouble implementing it on PET and just went with whatever method I could get working.
"Shounen" and "syōnen" are just two different ways to romanize "しょうねん", which is pronounced like you pronounced "shounen". The second romanization is in Nihon Shiki, which is Japan's official system, in which they seem to prefer consistency over what makes sense to Westerners. In this case, し = "shi", ょ = small "yo". Small kana are used to modify the regular ones, so when you put these two together, you get "sho", but for them, spelling it as "syo" makes more sense, because all of the other combinations with "yo" are like that. Also, "ou" is just a long "o", for historical reasons, and Nihon Shiki writes it as "ō", which actually does make more sense to us. But obviously that computer has no such character, so the programmer used just a plain "o".
"Szczepaniak" is a "simple" Polish surname, while your pronunciation was far from perfect it was a really good effort, 7/10
BTW, I reminded myself of a Black Box V8 cartridge that had a Polish version of a voice synthesizer (based on an English one, I would have to turn my C64 again to tell more about it) that was very hard to understand but did a pretty good job back at the time. And was also really funny, I like software trying but failing
It was SAM with text-to-phoneme module replaced with the Polish one. So it pronounced Polish using English phonemes, giving it an extra layer of strong accent.
Not only is it the first stealth game... It's also the original GTA!
Is that you in the ending song? I never noticed until now
Yeah, at least, the lower pitched of the two voices is me :)
Fun Fact:
Even in ascii one can tell, the Nord is enforcing the law, and the Redguard is looting.
10:33 万引き 少年 (manbiki shōnen) means "Shoplifting-Juvenile" or "Shoplifting-Boy" (="young shoplifter")
う！ない！(u! nai!) means something along the lines of "Ugh! There is nothing!" or "Oh, no!!"
監視員 (かんしいん) (kanshiin) means "guard"
つかまえろ (tsukamaero) means "catch me"
文部科学省奨学金 (monbukagakushō shōgakukin), formerly also "Monbusho Scholarship" is an academic scholarship offered by the Japanese Ministry of Education that supports foreign students
空いててよかった！(Sui tete yokatta!) means "Good thing it's open!"
いけ! (ike!) means "Let's go!"
こい！(koi!) means "come!"
まて! (mate(ee)) means "wa(aa)it!"
ばかめ！(baka me!) means "(you) idiot!"
うまい！(umai!) means "good" or "excellent" or even "tasty"
いい気分 (Ī kibun) means "good feeling" or "feeling good" (from the Slogan 7-ELEVEN いい気分)
SUPER-STORE means a marketplace that is super, just like a "super market"
POLICE means law enforcement, just like "the police" (not the band!)
@!# means "Oh, my good lord, what has happened to me? Why do I have to suffer this fate? It all sucks here on this earth!"
@@insertaverygenericnamehere FYI, random symbols used in place of swear words are called "grawlix".
I happen to speak Japanese (not fluently though), and I can explain the "syo" vs. "sho" thing - it's two different styles of romanization. The "Hepburn" romanization is based on English pronunciation, so it's fairly obvious to an English speaker how to say something, and so 少年 would be written "shōnen" or "shounen". A simplification of this is the most common system used outside of Japan. But "Nihonshiki" or "Japan-style" romanization is more normalized according to Japanese use, so you don't have as many exceptions - but as a result it's not as phonetically accurate, and you get "syônen" or "syoonen" instead. You'll often see Nihonshiki romanization used in Japan proper, as it's the official standard there.
could this be ported to the Vic20?
Nice game for a type in.
FWIW, the Y in "syonen" is a consonant, not a vowel, so it sounds like "s" + "yonen", which when run together is not all that different from "shonen". The two spellings are just different ways of transliterating the same sound, whose Japanese version is somewhere between English "sh" and "s+y".
Thanks, I actually tried for a while to find an explanation of "syonen" and there was very little available online. Now I know the "y" is really just like an "h" when dealing with transliterated Japanese.
The main takeaway is that in Japanese transliteration, Y is always a consonant, as in "you" or "yet", and never a vowel as it is in "byte" or "yttrium". So the name Ryu isn't rye-oo, but instead sounds like the word "you" with an R stuck on the front. Hard for English speakers, natural for Japanese ones. I find it helps to imagine a little apostrophe in front of the Y, so it's r'yu. Or s'yonen.
When the consonantal Y sound comes after another consonant, the two sounds tend to merge over time into a single combined sound. This happened in many English dialects with the word "Tuesday", which went from "t'yoozday" to "chewsday" (though for me it's just "toozday", which I guess marks mine as a lower-class dialect). In Japanese that happened with the s'y sequence, and the result is very close to our "sh" sound. So some transliterators write it that way. But that doesn't help when Y comes after something other than S, and thinking of it as an H will only lead you further astray. So just remember that Japanese Y is always "yuh", never "aye" or "ee" or "ih". :)
@@8_Bit No, the "y" isn't like an "h": it's there for a different reason.
The five syllables starting with "s" are さしすせそ, "sa shi su se so." You'll notice that only the second one, "shi," uses an "sh" sound rather than a "hard s." "Shi" alone can be modified with a yō-on, a small "ya, yu or yo" ("ゃゅょ") after it to produce a somewhat different syllable, giving you "しゃ、しゅ、しょ" ("sha, shu, sho"). The "h" is there because し is pronounced "shi." When yō-on are used with other characters, you don't get the "h" sound, such as み ("mi") to みゃ、みゅ、みょ ("mya, myu, myo").
@@Curt_Sampson Okay, can you explain specifically the difference between "syonen" and "shonen" and "shounen" and how to pronounce each. I've seen all three in the context of this game.
They're all pronounced the same: show-nen. The spelling "sy" is systematically derived from the Japanese writing system, while the one with "sh" is more phonetic, but they're representing the same sound. As for the "ou", that's an old convention for representing a "long" o, which in modern typography is more often written ō. (In Japanese, unlike the way the term "long" is often used in English, long vowels are literally just the same vowel sound held for a longer amount of time. In fact, if you were singing in Japanese, the word "shōnen" would usually be three beats rather than two.)
Pac-Man is "kinda" a stealth game. You're trying to clear the maze of dots without being seen and chased.
What if the maze is a store and Pac-Man's actually shoplifting?!
Yeah, you pretty much said it correctly the first time. "Mambiki Show-Nen"
Thanks, it was mostly the "syonen" spelling that was confusing me, as it looked like it would be pronounced differently as well but apparently not; even the "syo" should be pronounced "show", it's just an alternate way of spelling it in another transliteration system.
if it rally interests you, way back when there was two different romanization systems created, hepburn and some other... anyway I probably grew up less than 250 miles from you in central Michigan. My great Grandpa was born in the then territorries of today Canada.
I really love and relate to every one of your videos, the ones with your old time buddies as well as the ones with your kids.
There's a Smiths joke somewhere in there.
Stop. I think I've heard that one before.
2:55 sometimes you sound very much like Christopher Walken. lol. 🙂
nice little game
Hey hey not a single Sniper Elite game! I have many hours in those and I recommended them as a stealth game.
21:50 You should be able to do the keyboard-buffer-POKE thing like a lot of VIC-20 and C64 programs do to load the next part of a program as if the user had entered LOAD and RUN manually.
I did think of that briefly but when I got this working it was a "good enough" moment. It's funny how many things we do on the VIC-20 and C-64 actually don't work, or don't work easily, on the PET despite the huge similarities. Even loading my credits program on the PET involved messing around with a hex editor due to the PET not doing relocatable loads. My C64 credits program loaded at $0801 on the PET instead of at the $0401 it needed to be at.
Let’s not forget “Sneak King,” an XBOX game from Burger King where the purpose was to sneak up on people and give them Whoppers, shakes and fries.
Definitely the first heist game... Maybe
UMAI = delicious!
A lot of sloppy unnecessary code. Just looking at the movement routine for example.
Looking at lines 4005 and 4010 it appears there is a slightly higher chance of switching to the left, since it could switch right then immediately left.
The movement could have been better coded using Q=1 for movement in the right direction and Q=-1 for a moment in the left direction
A change of direction could be simply coded as if RND(1) < 0.0286 THEN Q=Q-1
And subsequently A=A+Q could have been used.
Small improvements like this could speed up the game.
Choplifter>Shoplifter
seems like the pet and vc 20 were popular in japan but commodore stopped being successful in japan quickly while the c64 was popular in many countries it was not very popular in japan. i think its because it doesn't support Japanese characters .they tolerated it in the early days when having any computer was a luxury and Japanese characters are harder to render anyway. and japan made their own systems that were very good unlike most countries that either didn't have the wealth or manpower or did but were not as advanced as America or japan or the uk. like in france they had a few systems but they fell behind quickly and started using the same stuff the rest of the world was using quickly. all the east block countries did it because it was the only option and gave up when it was no longer necessary but japan still had their own systems until the 90s i heard they had to stop Japanese companies from making their own systems instead of just making pc compatibles. because it was becoming a problem with the rise of the internet and having to port everything to those systems.
Yes, I think the MSX came along at just the right time for Japan. I think the Japanese C64 did support Japanese characters but it had compatibility problems with other C64 software. I'm not even sure the VIC-20 (or VIC-1001, which was the Japanese model) did very well in Japan.
@@8_Bit Yes, there was a Japanese C64 that replaced many of the graphics symbols with katakana on both the keyboard and in the character ROM. It's pretty rare now (more rare than U.S. C64s here in Japan!) so I'm guessing it didn't sell well. I'm not clear on the compatibility issues, but I'm guessing that it goes both ways, and the later VIC-20 was equally incompatible with the original VIC-1001 (designed and first sold here in Japan).
There was no need to "tolerate" western computers in Japan from about 1980 onwards; by that point there were several Japanese manufacturers of excellent and relatively cheap computers, often offering more memory and better graphics than western computers. (Part of the reason for better graphics was to be able to render kanji on the screen; 640x200 8-colour RGB was by 1982 the standard for home computers not focused only on gaming, and by 1984 640x400 was becoming standard.)
But yes, it was only in the early '90s that Japan finally started switching in a big way from locally developed systems (mainly PC-9801) to PC-compatible systems. It was the introduction of VGA, followed by DOS/V (adding kanji display to DOS--see the Wikipedia entry on that for more) that made the switch possible.
That mistranslation is hilarious it's almost as bad as that one all your bases are belong to us
thats okay Im not up on my Japanese either. 🙂
This game wouldn't translate well for Americans these days.
All the items would be chained down.
万引き少年- Shounen is pronounced Show Nen which means "boy" or "young boy."
For some reason, some Japanese people use the 'y' in romanizing Sho - like an upside-down H. It's still pronounced 'sho' and in this case, it's a long O, held for an extra syllable. Shounen.
Momotaro - Mo Mo Tah Roe
Composite - com POZ zit
Koi - "Come!"
Matee - mah teh! "Wait!" or "Hold it!"
Bakame - bah kah meh "Dumbass"
Yoku yatta - "You did well"
Okay, thanks. I think I was pronouncing "Shonen" or "Shounen" correctly when that's what the text said, but the "Syonen" was confusing me. So now I know the "y" is just like an "h" . Thanks for the info.
@@8_BitAnd Momotaro is the titular character of a Japanese fairy tale. You should be able to look this one up easily in a search engine so no need for me to summarize the story.