I’m not sure how common they are outside Japan, but I have a little (about 12" I think) Panasonic “Let’s Note” that I use quite a lot as a lightweight coding (and retro/indie gaming :D) device that I can throw in even my smallest bag when there’s a chance I’ll have to kill more than a few minutes. They’re designed to be a little bit rugged. I had Ubuntu on it previously, now Mint, and the only problem I’ve had is that Linux somehow sees two screen brightness systems, and by default it connects the screen brightness keys to the wrong (i.e. nonexistent) one. Once I traced the problem it was a quick and painless fix.

They seem to be sold worldwide, so you may be able to get one cheaply second-hand. One thing to be careful about is the fact that in order to keep the physical size down, the RAM is soldered to the board. Mine is an older model (5th gen iCore), and has 4GB soldered on but also one SODIMM slot, so I was able to upgrade to 12GB total. But I’ve noticed that on most later models they got rid of the RAM slots entirely, so whatever RAM it comes with is what you’re stuck with.

Apparently the original game and Brood War expansion are free to install through the Battle.Net launcher these days.

If you have the original discs, the later official patches added the ability to copy the “mpq” files from the CD into the game’s directory, so you no longer need the disc in the drive. Of course, you’re still going to need a drive for the initial installation. That should work for single player (it’s been a few years since I last did it) but I don’t know about online multiplayer.

I haven’t kept up with anime much for many years now, but I can easily imagine that this is the case. There had been mecha anime with angsty pilots and behind-the-scenes politics before, but Evangelion pushed it all to a whole new level by adding mysticism, massively flawed characters, and existential dread into the mix. I know that almost immediately following the initial release of Evangelion we got Gasaraki and RahXephon, both of which bear obvious influences from Evangelion.

I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they’d never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.

Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.

Although I haven’t played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don’t remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn’t limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.

I still search through old games, but I’m looking for ideas that maybe didn’t work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advances that have happened in the intervening years.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks

I played this on PS2 and I remember thinking at the time that it was extremely adequate. As you say, the reviews at the time were lukewarm but I think it’s worth a look for anyone trying scratch that itch who’s already finished the bigger names in the genre.

I’ve never played the GBA games, and I still found Super Metroid bland.

I didn’t have an NES or SNES growing up, so I came to those games a little later on. However, Super Metroid was still the most recent game in the franchise when I played it. There were plenty of rave reviews even then, so I looked forward to playing it once I got my hands on a copy. I even bought a new controller for it.

Initially I actually found the game somewhat frustrating, but once I got used to Samus’ momentum and how the game had been designed to be played, I found it to be very well balanced. But I never felt like there was any real reason for me to go on other than to open new areas. Since it wasn’t referenced in any way (that I noticed) outside of the manual, “The Mission” didn’t seem important. And while the graphics were gorgeous for the time (and still are), that wasn’t enough for me. People often talk about the haunting and creepy feeling of the game’s world, but I didn’t get that. I felt that way about the Prime games, but Super Metroid just seemed empty and abandoned to me, not atmospheric.

A few years ago I was able to play AM2R and stuck to it all the way to the end, even 100-percenting it, and enjoying it thoroughly. But I don’t think I ever finished Super Metroid. I just put it down one day and never got back to it. And I don’t feel like it’s something I need to tick off some gaming bucket list. If you’re not really enjoying it, stop playing and don’t feel bad about it. There are already more good games in the world than anyone can complete before they die. You can’t play them all, so stick to the ones that resonate with you personally.

I’ve been trying to research the various glitches and variations between versions because I’m working on something that uses some undocumented features and precise timing. Unfortunately, I don’t have one good link that explains it well.

The issue stems from how player objects (the 2600 equivalent to sprites) are placed horizontally. For good and interesting reasons which are also technically involved and complicated, programmers can’t just send an X value to the graphics chip. Instead there’s a two-step process. First, the program sends a signal to the graphics chip when the TV raster is at approximately the desired horizontal position on the screen. Then, because it’s often not possible to nail the timing of that signal to the exact pixel position, the graphics chip has a facility to “jog” the various graphical objects left or right by a very small amount at a time.

According to the official programmers’ documentation, this final “jog” should only be done at one specific time during each video scanline. If we only do it this way, it works correctly on pretty much every version of the console. However, doing it “correctly” also introduces a short black line at the left side of that scanline. If we instead send the “jog” signal at certain other times, no black line appears. Additionally, the exact distances moved change depending on when we send the signal, which can be worked around or are sometimes even beneficial.

Kool-Aid Man uses these undocumented “jog” timings, as several games did. But it displays a score counter at the top of the screen by using the player objects placed very close together. It seems that the console versions in question (later 2600 Juniors and some 7800s) are more sensitive to the timing being used, as you can sometimes see the parts of the score flicking left or right by one pixel.

The Atari 2600 also has a hardware collision detection system, which reports when any two moving screen objects overlap with each other or the background. Once a collision occurs, the relevant flag will stay set until the program clears it. Kool-Aid Man uses this system to detect when the player character touches enemies. But the program only clears the collision flags once, at the bottom of each frame, and the same player objects are used to draw the score. So when the two parts of the score flicker into each other, it registers as a collision between player objects, which the game interprets as a collision between Kool-Aid Man and a Thirsty.

As you mentioned, I’ve read that setting the console switches a certain way can prevent this issue, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that setting some switches one way rather than another causes a conditional branch instruction that checks the switches to branch rather than fall through, which takes one extra instruction cycle (or vice versa), which is then enough to stabilize the score display and stop the parts from colliding.

There’s a… not exactly a bug, but an unannounced change, in the graphics chip in some later versions of the Atari 2600, which has been named after this game by the fan/homebrew community. On most 2600 console versions, it’s possible for a game to perform a particular graphics operation at an unintended time and get an undocumented but consistent and useful result.

On the differing consoles, the result is slightly different, and because of the way this game is written, it often causes a chain of actions that end up making Kool-Aid Man bounce around continuously as if being hit by enemies, even though nothing is touching him.

When all you have (or you try to convince others that all they need) is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I guess this shows that it isn’t.

Who else remembers seeing images like this – that would’ve taken a few seconds to a few minutes to render even on high-end graphics workstations of the time – presented in gaming rags as examples of what PS1/N64/Saturn and later PS2/GameCube/DreamCast/XBox were “going to be capable of producing”?

I haven’t done it myself, but briefly flirted with the idea a while ago. This seems to be a solid guide, including tips specifically for the Surface Pro 8:

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup

Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.

One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would’ve blown out and ruined the game.

I don’t think that an NES or Master System port could’ve covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could’ve replicated a lot of the arcade’s scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.

Guys, I know AI slop sucks, but maybe don’t shoot the messenger (downvote OP)? I think it’s worth knowing how mainstream media is presenting this.

Found in an Edinburgh charity shop, so while it’s not impossible, it’s unlikely.

EDIT: Also, an NTSC signal on a plain PAL TV would be black and white (not even false colours) even if you got an otherwise stable picture.

It’s easy to forget, but these old systems didn’t connect to the TV with composite RCA connectors, but via RF. So we’re not just dealing with straight PAL, but with PAL over a broadcast system. Scotland was using PAL-I for broadcast, while Poland seems to have used a combination of PAL-D and PAL-K. Differences in channel ranges and bandwidths, and sound channel offsets, could make it difficult to tune a TV set designed for one system to a signal from another, especially if it’s a more modern set designed for automatic operation, as OP’s set appears to be.

Yes, they’ve changed the Pitfall image. Originally they were using the first image from CrayonRosary’s post.

Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these “Easter eggs” that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.

One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on “plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That’s all it does.”

Except if you read the manual you’d know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.

I’ve seen some people insist that their manual didn’t say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.

MDN is great, especially for finding current best practice, but I’ve always found their material much more useful for reference once I’m already familiar with the general usage of whatever I’m trying to use. I often find it difficult to get to grips with something new just with MDN.

I usually go read W3Schools first. It’s mostly a bit out of date, but not so much that it’s useless, and I find the tutorials much easier to digest. Once I’m comfortable with the basics, I switch to MDN to get up to speed.

And OP, it sounds like you’re already wary of this, but don’t let yourself be tricked into using a hodge-podge of libraries for every little thing. A lot of JS programmers will tell you that you “need” some library or other to provide a function that you can often replicate with just two or three lines of raw JS, if you know what you’re doing.

I think the JS library addiction stems from the bad old days of browser incompatibility, when almost everything had to be wrapped in layers of complex compatibility shims.

In some places, the ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 war was epic. Likewise for Amiga vs Atari ST. Magazines for one fanbase would regularly mock the other. And I don’t know what the TRS-80 was going up against, but I’ve seen it called the “Trash-80” more than a couple of times.

What can help proof someone against this excessive dedication to one platform isn’t which platform you start them on; it’s starting them on multiple platforms as soon as possible. Getting them interested in the individual games rather than the fan club nonsense.

As human beings we naturally oversimplify things. So when our entire experience has been A, and the people around us frame the world as a choice between A and B, we’re naturally going to defend A with our life. That’s because without really thinking about it, we’ve bought into the idea that A is either right or wrong, with no middle-ground, and we hate to be wrong.

That is just inviting people to start throwing out names of lesser-known systems. Can we narrow it down to Western (including South America), Eastern European, or South-east Asian before we start?