Man, I remember trying to save in Excitebike and Mach Rider, and never understanding why it woudn't actually work. I only learned years later about the tape saving devices that were never released in the US. I guess they figured that it just didn't matter back then. The instruction book would tell you it was disabled, but if you didn't have that....
@@jessihawkins9116 It was a cool game, but even back in the day it felt very limited to me. There just isn't much there. The level editor makes you realize that very quickly. Still, the game has a certain appeal to it. If you own an NES, it's one of many games that you feel like you must have. It's pretty iconic.
It is kind of a hassle, but I miss the era of gaming where companies try to come up with all kinds of weird devices like this even if they don't work very well. It makes them interesting.
To truly enjoy Excitebike, you need to play the arcade VS. version. It takes the 'A' and 'B' games on the cartridge version and puts them together, adds bonus stages, and best of all it has the turbo bike that gives you unlimited turbo (no overheating) if you make five other riders crash.
Eh, from my experience with an 8-bit computer, loading from cassette tape was one thing, saving to cassette was more of a headache. Using the tape counter and making sure I don't accidentally save over any part of other data and such. Used to do so to save pictures I drew in GPaint on my Amstrad CPC 464. Still got most of my old CPC cassette tapes though. And the computer itself. And it still works flawlessly (including the built-in tape deck) almost 40 years after I first got it. It's outlived at least ten different PC's anyways. :P One of my fave things about my NES when I got it as a kid, was INSTANT LOADING! I could fit in a quick go of Super Mario Bros before school. If my then-fancy new console was to ask me to use cassettes again in any form I probably would have facepalmed.
@@Sharopolis Blaster Master is also quite a sizable one that has no save function. I remember one of the early times I played Blaster Master, and we had worked our way up to Area 7, over 3/4 through the game, but had to stop playing. I tried to figure out if there was any way to save or get a password to keep my progress, but nope. The game has to be completed start to finish in one sitting.
@@SomeGuy712x That's a lot. Blaster Master really could've benefited from saving. Also the continues are limited to like 5. There was unlimited continues in another region.
That was how I saved in Donkey Kong Country when I hadn't yet reached that world's save point. Looking at you treetop world with the save at the end...
The NES Lode Runner is one of the games I got along with the NES back on my 7th birthday in 1988 (the others being Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt and The Legend of Zelda), and I certainly had a lot of fun fooling around with the Lode Runner level editor, even though it was limited to a single screen in size, and could not be saved. And yeah, I guess the Lode Runner editor is wonky, but I certainly know how to use it real well since I basically grew up with it. (I'm actually half-tempted to try recreating and playing the level layout you showed at 10:18 in this video.) Other games with editors that I kinda "grew up" with include Excitebike of course (and for a long time, I could never figure out why the Save and Load functions in the editor's menu would not work, or why they were there in a game that didn't have battery saving like Zelda). And, there was Catrap on the Game Boy, which I got on the same day as the Game Boy itself along with Tetris, and I had a lot of fun making my own levels in that game as well. And, Catrap did have password saving for the custom levels, with enormous passwords of up to 60 characters in length. I've got loads of sheets of paper stored away somewhere with passwords for tons of levels I've made, even sometimes noting my fastest clear times on those levels. I definitely got a huge amount of replay value with Catrap!
I know there was a ton of esoteric stuff like this pre-internet days, from games that had such specific secrets/ways to progress (which I guess was on purpose to capitalize on people having to call hotlines, buy guides or spend quarters), to that weird “plug in another controller to do new stuff” kinda thing. But honestly I’m 33yo, I grew up with the NES, I’m obsessed with retro tech and know all about how prolific tape storage and entire tape-based games were in the 80’s… but I NEVER knew about this functionality- especially on games like Excitebike(?!) until now. Amazing channel man, such good content always coming from you.
"But why, how, what, on earth is going on here" it feels like somebody in the 80s said that people in the future will need something to chat about, and this is what we'll be talking about next week at work on Slack lol. Sharopolis is mining gold with these finds. No idea Excitebike of all games was in on this!
I understand why the NES was originally branded as the Family Computer in Japan now. I’d like to see an original Famicom with the Keyboard, Cassette recorder and Disc Drive all attached. Would have been a proper little home computer for the mid 80s
Oof... Datasettes are ear piercing, though. I like that idea, and that could work, but thank God for aux cables. Like, no joke, datasettes could be used in a hostage standoff. Just hit play, cover your ears, and watch those people come running out of the building 😂
@@matthewlister3755 i think it could just be like blips and blublups rather than screeching. for a typical nes/famicom save data you just need like 20 bytes so you could probably encode that into a reasonable length ditty with split second pauses that wasn't ear breaking
@@lasskinn474 oh damn, I didn't know that, so thanks. I was thinking of the datasettes on my Commodore 64. I found out what those things sound like the hard way as a kid 😂
The Tonkachi Editor doesn’t actually seem to be a level editor for SMB1. Instead, it’s a piece of software for rewriting your games’ _hex code_ and applying your edits to the actual game’s disk! This may actually be a more interesting topic for a video than a straight level editor if you manage to get it to work. I’m not sure about the saving to cassettes though, none of the sources I’ve quickly glossed over make any mention of that. Tools that were used by contemporary hackers are a whole another rabbit hole to get into. Like the backup devices for Super Famicom and other consoles. And the unofficial games released exclusively for them on standard 3.5″ floppies, such as the famous Hongkong 97. A problem with those unfortunately is that they were released in limited quantity, on the gray market, and often only in Japan so you may encounter language barriers when researching them, if you even find the info. (Hongkong 97 already has a great in-depth series about it on UA-cam so there’s that.) The Tonkachi Editor disk seems to have a hack of SMB1 on side B (Tonkachi Mario), and a patch of it is also pre-recorded on side A in case you want to apply it to your existing disk of SMB1.
Oh boy, you hinted at a possible Tonkachi Mario video and now I'm desperately hoping it comes to fruition. Historical in terms of ROM hacking console games!
Castlequest's origin as an old computer game was so obvious that I never even bothered to confirm it, but I didn't know that it was so committed to the bit that a version of it allowed cassette saving. It is a shame that we never got the keyboard accessory in the US as my family didn't have a PC yet back in the NES days and writing BASIC programs would have been fun.
I've been developing a Dragon Warriror clone for the last couple of months, and it uses a simple password save-- just like the Japanese version of Dragon Quest! Only the US version of the game, had a battery-backed save.
@@GameTimeWhy It's not overly difficult, you just encode the player’s name, experience, gold & equipment into a set of 5-bit bytes, by using bitwise shifting. You also need to include any event flags, so the game will remember tasks that have been completed. The reason that 3-bits are empty on each password byte, is so they can be displayed to the player, as numbers & letters. Which can be written down. Most games also use at least one level of encryption, so players are less likely to successfully guess random passwords.
I always wondered what the point of the level editor in Excitebike was growing up, since none of the levels were actually saveable. But this makes a lot more sense.
I know how to make Milk & Nuts level creator work! You need to use at least one piece of everything. If you do not want to use something (like a brick), put it on a isolated corner or something. The level only starts if you use all kinds of pieces. Why? I have no idea...
I wanted Wrecking Crew back then, when I got my Nes in the UK in 1987, never did get it, or even really know how it worked. I It's easy to forget how Nintendo were experimental, since most of the interesting stuff never left Japan. The disks, tapes, internal and external ram save! Like an early external HD. You should do a video in all the great Japan only stuff NIntendo did, like the Sateliteview and other stuff.
As a sproglet, I used to read themagazines, and so became aware of the disk drive and keyboard, I wanted one! I looked into importing one from the classified but eventually didn't, stuff moved just too fast back then.
Interesting. I would have enjoyed listening to snippets of the audio form the saves to compare to how the spectrum or cpc sounded back in the day. (but I am weird!)
I would have also been interested. I don't even know how the data sounds for other home computers. I would assume it sounds the same, since the sound presumably depends only on the software, not the hardware.
I would also be interested - but mostly from the perspective of trying to decode it and see WHAT it saves, what the savegame looks like (if that isn't documented somewhere already, haven't looked).
@@Rob_III Thanks. Dialup modem makes sense, since it essentially has to solve the same problem -- encoding binary data as sound. Decoding would be hard though when every game had its own code, its own encoding method. Though that one game used a standard method, as mentioned in the video.
Kinda disappointed it was Famicom rather than actual NES, but I guess I'm not surprised since I probably would've heard of it before if it was for NES.
Huh, I didn't know about the FC keyboard and its cassette interface I wasn't really confused about the saving to tape part, since that could be done by connecting the NES audio jack / TV headphone jack to a cassette recorder and recording, I was more curious about how to load the data back into the NES When I heard "Famicom", I just realized that the cycle could have been audio port -> cassette tape -> P2 mic, but that was not how they did it either Would audio out -> cassette tape -> P2 mic even have worked?
I remember borrowing a game from my mate which was on cassette for the spectrum and taking the cassette apart and taking out the tape, puting it in another cassette, then giving the original game back to my mate with blank tape and said, sorry my cassette player snapped the tape and keeping the original game lol
Two things: First, I wonder if it would work (with this specific game or any other tape-based save system) to attach a more modern digital recorder in place of the tape recorder to record the data digitally, but in whatever odd sound format the tape worked in. (I've always assumed that systems like this just recorded data in audio binary. Sort of like how when you picked up the phone when an old style modem was running, you'd hear all that digital screeching.) The second thing: Anybody else think the enemy on the screen @5:46 looks like Snarf from Thundercats?
You can load and save via any modern audio device as long as you record in a lossless format like wav. Mp3`s can loose information when they compress. Tried it on my speccy48k hooked up to a laptops audio jacks and it worked fine. There are archives of games online that are pre-prepared audio rips so you can load via modern equipment (or record back onto cassette and do it that way if you wanted to make life harder for yourself).
That's just a regular old Philips cassette recorder. These days you could plug those wires from the Famicom keyboard into a headset jack splitter and into your phone, and use a voice recorder app instead of tapes.
I was able to get Arkanoid II's level editor to load a level I made and saved on a cassette tape with an AV Famicom, so it can work on original hardware. Maybe using a computer for recording and playback may be more reliable.
I do too! I'm always looking for cool fonts for my thumbnails, but they are either stupid expensive to buy or just not available at all. A lot of the old Nintendo stuff just seems to be sort of custom one off things done for a particular design.
If you click save and it saves right away with no breathing room for you to unpause and record wouldn’t that mean that a lot of the time you would get currupted data?
While I am glad we got what we got, Japan saved the cooler features for the Famicom and left the NES with basic features. Basicly what NES had, Famicom did too, only of better quality and then some.
15:30 - "Of course the Disk System was never a huge success itself." Wait, previous sources I've seen over the years depict the FDS as redefining the way retail Famicom games were sold, to the point where cartridge releases significantly trickled down for a while.
What am I missing here. Why does the title say ONE game when you clearly showed multiple games that did save to the cassette. Did you mean one that didn’t save?
Can you use this for ACE? I was thinking, you might be able to use the loading function on one of these games which use a cassette to save game data or level editing and then get the NES to launch your own custom code / Game etc
Faxanadu had the worst passwords fuck up one letter and it wont work on another note could put one in wrong and be at a whole different area in the game
really interesting video like always! one completely unrelated thing I found interesting tho. back during the early 00s I used to see a lot of famiclones, and almost all of the games mentioned here (with the exception of wrecking crew and castle excellent) were extremely common to see, being in almost every machine and multicart. do you have any idea why this might be? are these games really simple or something?
They were all early cart titles before the introduction of fancy enhancement chips, which means that they were A) small, so many could fit on a multicart, and B) they didn't rely on any special chip functionality, so didn't require any additional chips in the multicart/clone.
The Famicom Disk System was for more than game saves. It was designed to fix the limited ROM space Nes cartridges had. By the time the Nes released here in the states Nintendo had already pushed the console to its theoretically limits and Super Mario Brothers was considered the pinnacle of what it could do. At any rate, that was before bank switching was utilized and when coupled with the price of memory dropping Nintendo decided to cancel the release of the disk system here in the states. They still supported and sold the Famicom Disk System for a couple of years in Japan even though bank switching made the addition completely obsolete. I do know it made games considerably cheaper for Japanese consumers while it was still supported. At one point a Japanese customer could buy blank Famicom disks and had games added to them from a kiosk for a fraction of the cost of brand new carts. This all ended with Nintendo of Japan limiting the run of new Famicom Disk games while porting older games from the add-on to the cartridge format.
I will never trust to record digital data on tape as you have to make sure that your recording equipmenp works correctly,you have to make sure that the volume level is correct,make sure that you have enough enough space left on the tape and that your tape is in good condition,but even then things could still go wrong like using cracky audio cables or mechanicle failures in the cassette drive etc,,, Also the analogue world is random so would i really trust to store digital data on anaalogue tapes??? By the way if i ever want to store multiple files on 1 tape,then i have to exactly remember at wich position i have stored those data on tape,and since nintendo’s official cassette player has no counter,you cannot mark you save files either, The best way i would consider is to use a mp3 player with audio recorder,this way you could record and name your save file accordingly on the mp3 player to load them later on. So i would say,forget those unreliable rutting tapes and just use an mp3 player instead, And lastly, the reason i think why some companies opted for a save feature on cassette is to save costs for the expensive battery ram.
"Also the analogue world is random"... Well, then I have some bad news for you. Nothing in the real, physical, world of computing is truly digital. Even transistors and harddrive platters are, on some level, analogue. @@jimb12312 But the digital formats of those days were very much designed to take into account dodgy connections and old tapes and whathaveyou's. Datarates were low, there were plenty of checksums/CRC's, tolerances were high and data was a lot more resilient than you'd think. So MP3, even at quite low bitrates, would actually probably work just fine.
Most users in the day would setup and test their tape drive then leave it setup like that. You are talking when cassette was the king in home audio, getting a good quality cassette player, cassettes and cables was not hard and you really didn't need anything like type IV metal tapes on a high end hi-fi unless you drastically increased the baud rate.
@@Rob_III MP3 uses perceptual compression that is optimized for human hearing. Fundamentally incompatible with binary data formats. According to random forum posts it is extremely unreliable for data backup.
@@jimb12312 "Unreliable for data backup". Again: by todays standards and data densities and high datarates we've come to expect. But we're talking 30 - 40 bytes / sec. here. Not even Kilobytes, bytes mind you. Yes, MP3 is lossy and quite heavy compression but - and I haven't tested this or looked it up - I'm convinced it should work. But I agree a lossless compression format would, ofcourse, be better. As would be not using a tape in the first place ;-) It has been done - I'd link it but UA-cam keeps deleting my comment...
Shame they didn't use it on more games, putting a tape interface into a cart wouldn't have taken much. The ZX Spectrum's tape circuits were almost nothing, just something to square off the sine waves coming in from the audio, then the CPU used software to count how long the pulses on the tape were. Short and long pulses were 1s and 0s. Writing was much the same, count out time periods, and send a pulse as and when. Ironically Commodore and Atari did something much more complex that was 8x slower. Americans, eh? Clive had a knack for that, alwas seeing things as they actually ARE, at their most basic level, rather than abstracting away too much into expensive systems and sub-systems. The Interface 1 supported up to 8 microdrives, serial port, and a LAN, and that was all done in software too with the same sort of hardware the tape circuit used, ie very little. His stuff cost much less than the competition and I'm sure was more profitable. So... you could do the same on the NES, just a couple of logic gates, maybe a transistor or two, couple of passives, and 2 jack sockets. Easy! And probably cheaper than battery-backed RAM.
I've got the expansion board for the nes so I can use famicom accessories. I tried saving excitebike and I do get an output but I'm having trouble loading the saves.
It's all free stuff from the UA-cam audio library. Bad Snacks, Sarah The Illstrumentalist, Yung Logos and NoMbe, Joe Bagale and Cheel are the artists I used in this video.
The US version of this game actually made up for the lack of a save feature by drastically increasing the number of starting lives to reduce the risk of a game-over substantially and allow players to make it further.
Okay, so I did eventually decide to recreate and play the Lode Runner level shown at 10:18, and included it at the end of this video here: ua-cam.com/video/bMyTFt95BDA/v-deo.html
You may want to consider speeding up your dialogue a bit in post production for better flow. 1.25x is maybe a bit too fast, so maybe a touch slower than that.
I was confused why they had an audio INPUT in the first place until you explained that this was in fact the intended use, copying what home computers of the day often did. It's just a _convention_ that the stuff you save to cassette is typically edited levels and such, while progress gets battery saves.
0:12 "oops, you bumped your NES cart the wrong way. Your 'blissfully easy' save data has been completely erased." As far as my personal experience goes I still prefer the annoying passwords over the shoddy save batteries of the era. The battery carts were like playing a lottery: some worked great and others would lose their data over a slight breeze. A properly written down password was failsafe as long as the paper wasn't ruined.
That actual game in the video is called Pen Pen and is a Famicom Basic game, but it's a clone of Binary Land, which is a really fun game. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Land
Figuring out Tonkachi Editor for Super Mario Bros is a heck of a challenge, especially since you'd have to translate all the docs it came with (and it's not exactly intuitive to start with). It's no surprise there's very few ROM hacks actually using Tonkachi Editor...
Admittedly, that keyboard accessory is literally just a keyboard with mic and headphone jacks on it. I'd be interested whether it's some separate thing or if it just runs off the same circuitry that makes sound to send to the TV and processes sound from the mic on controller 2. It's completely possible to generate the sorts of sounds needed for this using the PSG chip, and it would absolutely be possible to create games that can load and save tape data without the keyboard, but you'd have to be very quiet while it's working and bear with the screeching noises it makes.
Man, I remember trying to save in Excitebike and Mach Rider, and never understanding why it woudn't actually work. I only learned years later about the tape saving devices that were never released in the US. I guess they figured that it just didn't matter back then. The instruction book would tell you it was disabled, but if you didn't have that....
Lol excitebike back when we use to trade in games the stores stopped taking that 1 because they had stacks they couldn't sell
oh we had it, just never read it :P
Same here!
excitebike kicked rear 😃
@@jessihawkins9116 It was a cool game, but even back in the day it felt very limited to me. There just isn't much there. The level editor makes you realize that very quickly. Still, the game has a certain appeal to it. If you own an NES, it's one of many games that you feel like you must have. It's pretty iconic.
It is kind of a hassle, but I miss the era of gaming where companies try to come up with all kinds of weird devices like this even if they don't work very well. It makes them interesting.
To truly enjoy Excitebike, you need to play the arcade VS. version. It takes the 'A' and 'B' games on the cartridge version and puts them together, adds bonus stages, and best of all it has the turbo bike that gives you unlimited turbo (no overheating) if you make five other riders crash.
Eh, from my experience with an 8-bit computer, loading from cassette tape was one thing, saving to cassette was more of a headache. Using the tape counter and making sure I don't accidentally save over any part of other data and such. Used to do so to save pictures I drew in GPaint on my Amstrad CPC 464.
Still got most of my old CPC cassette tapes though. And the computer itself. And it still works flawlessly (including the built-in tape deck) almost 40 years after I first got it. It's outlived at least ten different PC's anyways. :P
One of my fave things about my NES when I got it as a kid, was INSTANT LOADING! I could fit in a quick go of Super Mario Bros before school. If my then-fancy new console was to ask me to use cassettes again in any form I probably would have facepalmed.
Ahahah. True story. Going from Amstrad/Spectrum to console was a huge progress considering the time of loading games!! 😅
In the USA nobody talks about tapes only floppies and they sound much better.
You left out my favorite way to save progress on the NES when I was a kid: Leaving the console TURNED ON with the game paused FOR DAYS AT A TIME
Ha ha, one day I'll do a video about SMB 3, that's got to be the big one for that sort of 'saving'!
@@Sharopolis Indeed, that's the one I had in mind!
@@Sharopolis
Blaster Master is also quite a sizable one that has no save function. I remember one of the early times I played Blaster Master, and we had worked our way up to Area 7, over 3/4 through the game, but had to stop playing. I tried to figure out if there was any way to save or get a password to keep my progress, but nope. The game has to be completed start to finish in one sitting.
@@SomeGuy712x That's a lot. Blaster Master really could've benefited from saving. Also the continues are limited to like 5. There was unlimited continues in another region.
That was how I saved in Donkey Kong Country when I hadn't yet reached that world's save point. Looking at you treetop world with the save at the end...
The NES Lode Runner is one of the games I got along with the NES back on my 7th birthday in 1988 (the others being Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt and The Legend of Zelda), and I certainly had a lot of fun fooling around with the Lode Runner level editor, even though it was limited to a single screen in size, and could not be saved. And yeah, I guess the Lode Runner editor is wonky, but I certainly know how to use it real well since I basically grew up with it. (I'm actually half-tempted to try recreating and playing the level layout you showed at 10:18 in this video.)
Other games with editors that I kinda "grew up" with include Excitebike of course (and for a long time, I could never figure out why the Save and Load functions in the editor's menu would not work, or why they were there in a game that didn't have battery saving like Zelda). And, there was Catrap on the Game Boy, which I got on the same day as the Game Boy itself along with Tetris, and I had a lot of fun making my own levels in that game as well.
And, Catrap did have password saving for the custom levels, with enormous passwords of up to 60 characters in length. I've got loads of sheets of paper stored away somewhere with passwords for tons of levels I've made, even sometimes noting my fastest clear times on those levels. I definitely got a huge amount of replay value with Catrap!
Hey friend, small world! You should show off some of those old custom Catrap levels sometime, that would make a great video!
@@ImSquiggs
I probably should indeed make Catrap videos at some point. (Man, why didn't I think of including Catrap in my "Turning 40 Into 41" video?)
35 years on, and I'm still learning new stuff about this system. 😃
I know there was a ton of esoteric stuff like this pre-internet days, from games that had such specific secrets/ways to progress (which I guess was on purpose to capitalize on people having to call hotlines, buy guides or spend quarters), to that weird “plug in another controller to do new stuff” kinda thing. But honestly I’m 33yo, I grew up with the NES, I’m obsessed with retro tech and know all about how prolific tape storage and entire tape-based games were in the 80’s… but I NEVER knew about this functionality- especially on games like Excitebike(?!) until now.
Amazing channel man, such good content always coming from you.
Quite fascinating! I always wondered why there was a save feature on Excitebike.
"easy backup saves" except if you forget to hold reset and it wipes your data
"But why, how, what, on earth is going on here" it feels like somebody in the 80s said that people in the future will need something to chat about, and this is what we'll be talking about next week at work on Slack lol. Sharopolis is mining gold with these finds. No idea Excitebike of all games was in on this!
I understand why the NES was originally branded as the Family Computer in Japan now. I’d like to see an original Famicom with the Keyboard, Cassette recorder and Disc Drive all attached. Would have been a proper little home computer for the mid 80s
... because it knows the key to my heart?
Shutupoctavius!
famicom has a microphone. I kinda was expecting it would save through audio and load through holding the controller with the mic to the boombox.
Oof... Datasettes are ear piercing, though. I like that idea, and that could work, but thank God for aux cables. Like, no joke, datasettes could be used in a hostage standoff. Just hit play, cover your ears, and watch those people come running out of the building 😂
@@matthewlister3755 i think it could just be like blips and blublups rather than screeching. for a typical nes/famicom save data you just need like 20 bytes so you could probably encode that into a reasonable length ditty with split second pauses that wasn't ear breaking
@@lasskinn474 oh damn, I didn't know that, so thanks. I was thinking of the datasettes on my Commodore 64. I found out what those things sound like the hard way as a kid 😂
No, I was asking about NES games that do weird stuff with TAPS (as in, those that are usually accompanied by a sink), not tapes!
The Tonkachi Editor doesn’t actually seem to be a level editor for SMB1. Instead, it’s a piece of software for rewriting your games’ _hex code_ and applying your edits to the actual game’s disk! This may actually be a more interesting topic for a video than a straight level editor if you manage to get it to work. I’m not sure about the saving to cassettes though, none of the sources I’ve quickly glossed over make any mention of that.
Tools that were used by contemporary hackers are a whole another rabbit hole to get into. Like the backup devices for Super Famicom and other consoles. And the unofficial games released exclusively for them on standard 3.5″ floppies, such as the famous Hongkong 97. A problem with those unfortunately is that they were released in limited quantity, on the gray market, and often only in Japan so you may encounter language barriers when researching them, if you even find the info. (Hongkong 97 already has a great in-depth series about it on UA-cam so there’s that.)
The Tonkachi Editor disk seems to have a hack of SMB1 on side B (Tonkachi Mario), and a patch of it is also pre-recorded on side A in case you want to apply it to your existing disk of SMB1.
That (hk 97) guy is totally nuts and even has an active YT channel. Ultra Healthy Video Game Nerd did a great interview on the guy! 😀
Oh boy, you hinted at a possible Tonkachi Mario video and now I'm desperately hoping it comes to fruition. Historical in terms of ROM hacking console games!
I hope it comes to fruition too. Getting hold of a copy isn't easy and I think I really need to do it with the original hardware.
Castlequest's origin as an old computer game was so obvious that I never even bothered to confirm it, but I didn't know that it was so committed to the bit that a version of it allowed cassette saving. It is a shame that we never got the keyboard accessory in the US as my family didn't have a PC yet back in the NES days and writing BASIC programs would have been fun.
I've been developing a Dragon Warriror clone for the last couple of months, and it uses a simple password save-- just like the Japanese version of Dragon Quest!
Only the US version of the game, had a battery-backed save.
How difficult is it: having a password save system? The password is tied to a specific frame or event in the game?
@@GameTimeWhy It's not overly difficult, you just encode the player’s name, experience, gold & equipment into a set of 5-bit bytes, by using bitwise shifting.
You also need to include any event flags, so the game will remember tasks that have been completed.
The reason that 3-bits are empty on each password byte, is so they can be displayed to the player, as numbers & letters. Which can be written down.
Most games also use at least one level of encryption, so players are less likely to successfully guess random passwords.
The overall level size and difficulty of Dracula's Curse makes a lot more sense now that I know you could save your game on the Famicom version
i believe akumajo densetsu used passwords just like the nes version, it wasnt released on fds, just the first 2 games were
The famicom was so much better than the nes same for most Japanese versions of consoles they really where far ahead in terms of gaming back then.
Back in 1984 my roommate (Ben) and I bought a TI-99 that used cassette tape to backup programs that we wrote.
I always wondered what the point of the level editor in Excitebike was growing up, since none of the levels were actually saveable. But this makes a lot more sense.
They used to sell leaderless "computer" cassettes as well. Saved you the 2 seconds of forwarding past the leader.
I know how to make Milk & Nuts level creator work!
You need to use at least one piece of everything. If you do not want to use something (like a brick), put it on a isolated corner or something.
The level only starts if you use all kinds of pieces. Why? I have no idea...
Thanks for that. I never would have guessed that, cheers!
I wanted Wrecking Crew back then, when I got my Nes in the UK in 1987, never did get it, or even really know how it worked. I
It's easy to forget how Nintendo were experimental, since most of the interesting stuff never left Japan. The disks, tapes, internal and external ram save! Like an early external HD.
You should do a video in all the great Japan only stuff NIntendo did, like the Sateliteview and other stuff.
15:35 The Disk System was arguably a success with over 200 games on the platform.
As a sproglet, I used to read themagazines, and so became aware of the disk drive and keyboard, I wanted one! I looked into importing one from the classified but eventually didn't, stuff moved just too fast back then.
I have a Castle Excellent cart and I had NO idea you could do this.
Interesting. I would have enjoyed listening to snippets of the audio form the saves to compare to how the spectrum or cpc sounded back in the day. (but I am weird!)
I would have also been interested. I don't even know how the data sounds for other home computers. I would assume it sounds the same, since the sound presumably depends only on the software, not the hardware.
yea we all would i think. Quite unique
@@cube2fox It sounds very similar to a dialup modem sound (if you're too young to witness that then you're unsavable).
I would also be interested - but mostly from the perspective of trying to decode it and see WHAT it saves, what the savegame looks like (if that isn't documented somewhere already, haven't looked).
@@Rob_III Thanks. Dialup modem makes sense, since it essentially has to solve the same problem -- encoding binary data as sound.
Decoding would be hard though when every game had its own code, its own encoding method. Though that one game used a standard method, as mentioned in the video.
Thanks for getting this info out!
NES wasn't the only one. Atari 2600 did this, too. Very weird feature...
Great video. Super thorough and very fascinating to see this kind of obscure functionality.
3:26 I had eaxctly same tape record for my ZX sepctrum when I was 3 years old !!
I wish I had a tape cassette so I could put my pencil in and slowly rewind my broken bytes xx
Really fascinating stuff thank you for all your research and passion
Glad you enjoyed it
Kinda disappointed it was Famicom rather than actual NES, but I guess I'm not surprised since I probably would've heard of it before if it was for NES.
I'm working on actually getting this working on the NES. I'll hopefully be able to show that of in a video at some point.
Wait if it uses sound to read the save games wouldn’t that also mean you could share saves with your friends
Of course.
Huh, I didn't know about the FC keyboard and its cassette interface
I wasn't really confused about the saving to tape part, since that could be done by connecting the NES audio jack / TV headphone jack to a cassette recorder and recording, I was more curious about how to load the data back into the NES
When I heard "Famicom", I just realized that the cycle could have been audio port -> cassette tape -> P2 mic, but that was not how they did it either
Would audio out -> cassette tape -> P2 mic even have worked?
Not at all. The quality of the signal going from a speaker to a super cheap microphone would have a near zero success rate.
I remember borrowing a game from my mate which was on cassette for the spectrum and taking the cassette apart and taking out the tape, puting it in another cassette, then giving the original game back to my mate with blank tape and said, sorry my cassette player snapped the tape and keeping the original game lol
Didn't have a dual tape recorder huh
I sorta wonder what it looks like to feed one of the loading processes with garbled data
Two things:
First, I wonder if it would work (with this specific game or any other tape-based save system) to attach a more modern digital recorder in place of the tape recorder to record the data digitally, but in whatever odd sound format the tape worked in. (I've always assumed that systems like this just recorded data in audio binary. Sort of like how when you picked up the phone when an old style modem was running, you'd hear all that digital screeching.)
The second thing: Anybody else think the enemy on the screen @5:46 looks like Snarf from Thundercats?
You can load and save via any modern audio device as long as you record in a lossless format like wav. Mp3`s can loose information when they compress. Tried it on my speccy48k hooked up to a laptops audio jacks and it worked fine. There are archives of games online that are pre-prepared audio rips so you can load via modern equipment (or record back onto cassette and do it that way if you wanted to make life harder for yourself).
I now know why NES cartridges have batteries: to save gaming progress!
Yeah, I'd definitely prefer the floppy drive over tape.
When you say only one game I thought it was for impossible mission II, excitebike and rad Racer I believe
I bet that Nintendo tape recorder is extremely rare!! Interesting vid thanks!❤️👍😎
That's just a regular old Philips cassette recorder. These days you could plug those wires from the Famicom keyboard into a headset jack splitter and into your phone, and use a voice recorder app instead of tapes.
I bet, I wonder how much they go for.
I was able to get Arkanoid II's level editor to load a level I made and saved on a cassette tape with an AV Famicom, so it can work on original hardware. Maybe using a computer for recording and playback may be more reliable.
15:22 I want the font on that prototype keyboard.
I do too! I'm always looking for cool fonts for my thumbnails, but they are either stupid expensive to buy or just not available at all. A lot of the old Nintendo stuff just seems to be sort of custom one off things done for a particular design.
If you click save and it saves right away with no breathing room for you to unpause and record wouldn’t that mean that a lot of the time you would get currupted data?
No, because you unpause the tape, then select Save.
@@gwishart oh yeah good point I didn’t think about that 😅
While I am glad we got what we got, Japan saved the cooler features for the Famicom and left the NES with basic features. Basicly what NES had, Famicom did too, only of better quality and then some.
15:30 - "Of course the Disk System was never a huge success itself." Wait, previous sources I've seen over the years depict the FDS as redefining the way retail Famicom games were sold, to the point where cartridge releases significantly trickled down for a while.
That would be the bane of AVGN's existence!
Castlequest rocks, but super hard. Never heard that it had a save function. Wonder if this could be emulated?
What am I missing here. Why does the title say ONE game when you clearly showed multiple games that did save to the cassette. Did you mean one that didn’t save?
The first title he shows saves and loads progress from cassette, all of the others just save and load custom built levels from the level editor.
Castle Excellent is like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, it never loses suction... get it?... it never loses SUCK-tion.
Can you use this for ACE? I was thinking, you might be able to use the loading function on one of these games which use a cassette to save game data or level editing and then get the NES to launch your own custom code / Game etc
Faxanadu had the worst passwords fuck up one letter and it wont work on another note could put one in wrong and be at a whole different area in the game
Oof. Castle Quest. I bought that as a kid for $20 in 1989. I uh, did not care for it.
1:52 you’re welcome. 5% of your watch time saved and the baked in advert means our man still gets paid!
really interesting video like always!
one completely unrelated thing I found interesting tho. back during the early 00s I used to see a lot of famiclones, and almost all of the games mentioned here (with the exception of wrecking crew and castle excellent) were extremely common to see, being in almost every machine and multicart. do you have any idea why this might be? are these games really simple or something?
They were all early cart titles before the introduction of fancy enhancement chips, which means that they were A) small, so many could fit on a multicart, and B) they didn't rely on any special chip functionality, so didn't require any additional chips in the multicart/clone.
Yep that's it!
Although by far it's a more advanced technology; this reminds me of when PlayStation first offered memory cards. Yes I am that old
The Famicom Disk System was for more than game saves. It was designed to fix the limited ROM space Nes cartridges had. By the time the Nes released here in the states Nintendo had already pushed the console to its theoretically limits and Super Mario Brothers was considered the pinnacle of what it could do.
At any rate, that was before bank switching was utilized and when coupled with the price of memory dropping Nintendo decided to cancel the release of the disk system here in the states. They still supported and sold the Famicom Disk System for a couple of years in Japan even though bank switching made the addition completely obsolete. I do know it made games considerably cheaper for Japanese consumers while it was still supported.
At one point a Japanese customer could buy blank Famicom disks and had games added to them from a kiosk for a fraction of the cost of brand new carts. This all ended with Nintendo of Japan limiting the run of new Famicom Disk games while porting older games from the add-on to the cartridge format.
I will never trust to record digital data on tape as you have to make sure that your recording equipmenp works correctly,you have to make sure that the volume level is correct,make sure that you have enough enough space left on the tape and that your tape is in good condition,but even then things could still go wrong like using cracky audio cables or mechanicle failures in the cassette drive etc,,,
Also the analogue world is random so would i really trust to store digital data on anaalogue tapes???
By the way if i ever want to store multiple files on 1 tape,then i have to exactly remember at wich position i have stored those data on tape,and since nintendo’s official cassette player has no counter,you cannot mark you save files either,
The best way i would consider is to use a
mp3 player with audio recorder,this way you could record and name your save file accordingly on the mp3 player to load them later on.
So i would say,forget those unreliable rutting tapes and just use an mp3 player instead,
And lastly, the reason i think why some companies opted for a save feature on cassette is to save costs for the expensive battery ram.
MP3 is lossy. Use FLAC.
"Also the analogue world is random"... Well, then I have some bad news for you. Nothing in the real, physical, world of computing is truly digital. Even transistors and harddrive platters are, on some level, analogue.
@@jimb12312
But the digital formats of those days were very much designed to take into account dodgy connections and old tapes and whathaveyou's. Datarates were low, there were plenty of checksums/CRC's, tolerances were high and data was a lot more resilient than you'd think. So MP3, even at quite low bitrates, would actually probably work just fine.
Most users in the day would setup and test their tape drive then leave it setup like that. You are talking when cassette was the king in home audio, getting a good quality cassette player, cassettes and cables was not hard and you really didn't need anything like type IV metal tapes on a high end hi-fi unless you drastically increased the baud rate.
@@Rob_III MP3 uses perceptual compression that is optimized for human hearing. Fundamentally incompatible with binary data formats. According to random forum posts it is extremely unreliable for data backup.
@@jimb12312 "Unreliable for data backup". Again: by todays standards and data densities and high datarates we've come to expect. But we're talking 30 - 40 bytes / sec. here. Not even Kilobytes, bytes mind you. Yes, MP3 is lossy and quite heavy compression but - and I haven't tested this or looked it up - I'm convinced it should work. But I agree a lossless compression format would, ofcourse, be better. As would be not using a tape in the first place ;-)
It has been done - I'd link it but UA-cam keeps deleting my comment...
Very interesting! I've never heard of this on console.
Sooo... can you just hook the cassette recorder up to the sound output or do you need a computer extension?
Shame they didn't use it on more games, putting a tape interface into a cart wouldn't have taken much. The ZX Spectrum's tape circuits were almost nothing, just something to square off the sine waves coming in from the audio, then the CPU used software to count how long the pulses on the tape were. Short and long pulses were 1s and 0s. Writing was much the same, count out time periods, and send a pulse as and when.
Ironically Commodore and Atari did something much more complex that was 8x slower. Americans, eh? Clive had a knack for that, alwas seeing things as they actually ARE, at their most basic level, rather than abstracting away too much into expensive systems and sub-systems. The Interface 1 supported up to 8 microdrives, serial port, and a LAN, and that was all done in software too with the same sort of hardware the tape circuit used, ie very little. His stuff cost much less than the competition and I'm sure was more profitable.
So... you could do the same on the NES, just a couple of logic gates, maybe a transistor or two, couple of passives, and 2 jack sockets. Easy! And probably cheaper than battery-backed RAM.
I've got the expansion board for the nes so I can use famicom accessories. I tried saving excitebike and I do get an output but I'm having trouble loading the saves.
Pretty awesome. Also a cheap way to store data.
It's quite off topic, but are you using composite to connect your famicom to the TV directly, or do you use an upscaler?
It's just straight to my TV via composite. I just got lucky with my TV that it happens to look pretty good.
Why didn't they use tapes for game music
Nice! but I miss the sounds that was recorded !
Wait, Castlequest could save to cassette? I didn't know that.
What do you hear when you play the tape?
Why is Snarf in the game?
So how does it sound?
When you load you got extra Live in Castle Excellent? When you shew first time Save menu you had 2, after loading you have 3.
I smell an exploit!
Legit good game. Used to play it alot.
The B in pcBWAY is the wrong font and its driving me crazy.
I always thought that it looked a bit off somehow. Now you mention it I can see what you mean. But I just use the logo they supplied.
Ok I have a question
Who did your sound track?
It's all free stuff from the UA-cam audio library.
Bad Snacks, Sarah The Illstrumentalist, Yung Logos and NoMbe, Joe Bagale and Cheel are the artists I used in this video.
The US version of this game actually made up for the lack of a save feature by drastically increasing the number of starting lives to reduce the risk of a game-over substantially and allow players to make it further.
Okay, so I did eventually decide to recreate and play the Lode Runner level shown at 10:18, and included it at the end of this video here:
ua-cam.com/video/bMyTFt95BDA/v-deo.html
You may want to consider speeding up your dialogue a bit in post production for better flow. 1.25x is maybe a bit too fast, so maybe a touch slower than that.
Thanks for that suggestion, I will give that a try!
Super
"NES games" in the title and proceed to present a bunch of Famicom games 🙄
are you called Jeff?
Nope
1st.
Also, In b4 nikku UwU
Didn't ask
@@turrican3839 no momentum
Oh, we have the same Philips recorder
Great minds think alike obviously
I was confused why they had an audio INPUT in the first place until you explained that this was in fact the intended use, copying what home computers of the day often did. It's just a _convention_ that the stuff you save to cassette is typically edited levels and such, while progress gets battery saves.
No playback of the data blast? Lol
0:12 "oops, you bumped your NES cart the wrong way. Your 'blissfully easy' save data has been completely erased."
As far as my personal experience goes I still prefer the annoying passwords over the shoddy save batteries of the era. The battery carts were like playing a lottery: some worked great and others would lose their data over a slight breeze. A properly written down password was failsafe as long as the paper wasn't ruined.
AND today many games have ONLY auto saves.
6:06 what is the name of the game from the screen? I liked that one as a kid, but I don’t remember what was that.
That actual game in the video is called Pen Pen and is a Famicom Basic game, but it's a clone of Binary Land, which is a really fun game. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Land
Figuring out Tonkachi Editor for Super Mario Bros is a heck of a challenge, especially since you'd have to translate all the docs it came with (and it's not exactly intuitive to start with). It's no surprise there's very few ROM hacks actually using Tonkachi Editor...
I found it interesting that the famicom not only functions like a keyboard but also serves as a modem to convert digital into analoge and vice versa.
it wasn't kidding about being a Family Computer
Admittedly, that keyboard accessory is literally just a keyboard with mic and headphone jacks on it. I'd be interested whether it's some separate thing or if it just runs off the same circuitry that makes sound to send to the TV and processes sound from the mic on controller 2. It's completely possible to generate the sorts of sounds needed for this using the PSG chip, and it would absolutely be possible to create games that can load and save tape data without the keyboard, but you'd have to be very quiet while it's working and bear with the screeching noises it makes.
I restored/repaired the phillips casette recorder you used in this video ( video of it is on my channel )
ZX Spectrum? Castle Excellent looks like a game from the PC-8800 series to me.
"Which gives me a LOAD of options... haha, I saw what you did there!"
"Or as long as I'd keep it on the tape without erasing it..." OR... until it gets so old that it just loses its magnetism naturally.
All of this talk about saving with audio and you didn't let us hear a sample? 😮💨