Retronauts - 677: Type-In Games

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Kevin Bunch, Dustin Hubbard, and Ozidual talk about the joy of type-in game programs and the process of preserving them in this Retronauts. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week on Retronauts, we're following a paper trail. you're listening to this. I'm your host, Kevin Bunch. I'm not sure what episode number this is, because I haven't bothered checking the schedule. But today, we're following an eminently recycling friendly topic. We're going to talk about type in games. So these are games that you would basically read on a piece of paper and then just type into whatever platform you're working with. This isn't really a group that's necessarily readily accessible compared to just visiting like an online storefront or a ROM site. But there were a lot of really cool, interesting and historically significant programs here that were published. And, you know,

a lot of them are being actively preserved today. And joining me are a couple of folks who have been doing a lot of preservation work. So let's get started. We'll go in, I guess, alphabetical order. So who do we have out in the Midwest? Is that right? Does that count as Midwest where you're at? Does Oklahoma count's Midwest?

I don't know. I'll leave it to the boomers to figure it out. I don't know. I don't know what we are, honestly. But yeah, Dustin Hubbard, go by hubs too, like on Discord and everything. I run Gaming Alexandria and we're a site that hosts like scans

and dumps of prototype. and also the type-ins for all sorts of systems that people have contributed over the years. And you can go to there and download them and play them. And so that's kind of what we'll be going over today. And who else is joining us today? Hi, I'm Osigil. I go by Osirio. It's my screen name. I'm on the Gaming Alexandria Discord as well. So, yeah, I do typins, mostly family-based.

that's that's me and family basics like a really interesting topic too because you know everybody loves the NES it seems everyone loves the Famicom and there's just this whole category of you know video games for the Famicom that were just

not really discussed or talked about or even considered up until I'd say a few years back maybe I don't know six or seven now people are starting to pay attention. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, there was hardly any coverage until recently it seemed like on any of this stuff. So I guess, you know, I want to kick things off and sort of talk about what the heck is a type in game.

You know, as I alluded to, these were games that were, you know, points quite simply. They were published as code listings in a book or a magazine, newsletter, manual. sometimes their author would just sell them directly as like a photocopy sheet of code through advertisements in computer magazines and newsletters. Some of these might also have been available as a pre-written format in a cassette or a discette, you know, like a floppy. But yeah, predominantly we're talking about things that, you know, came on the page, so to speak. And these were also, typically speaking, for platforms that had some manner of like saving and loading programs onto a cassette or a floppy because kind of the whole point of a type in game is that you type it in once, then you can save it and then you can do what you want with that.

Hopefully, some of these are just a massive pain to get typed in, which I guess we'll, we can happily touch. John. But yeah, usually these were written in some flavor of basic, but, you know, not exclusively basic. There are listings and all sorts of other languages and sometimes hexadecimal. Always fun to have to deal with hex code. But yeah, basic, you know, it's pretty easy to use. It's relatively portable. It's not the biggest hassle to convert from one form of basic to another. A lot of the times, I can't say that's true universally, but generally. you can make that happen. And there was sort of an additional benefit to these type-in games, because you would familiarize your users with computer programming

and how computer programs worked. And once you've typed in a game and you've saved it onto something, you can always load that back up, and you can test out modifications to it. You know, I remember a while ago I talked with Mike Morheim, Morheim. I don't remember. to pronounce that. One of the co-founders of Blizzard, and he got started modifying basic programs

on the Bally Professional Arcade console because his family had Bally Basic, and they had the manual programs, they had the newsletters that came in with more programs, and he would just type them in and mess with the code, and that sort of taught him how programming worked. So that was really interesting to me, and it's kind of one of the things that sparked this idea for a podcast. Yeah, there's going to be countless people. like that, they got started doing that. It's just crazy. And I mean, like, I wonder how many, yeah, like, when I was a kid just went to library and checked out, like, books of these and came home and tried to type them in and, you know, just kind of took off with a programming career from there, like you said.

Well, and that's why I like about Gaming Alexandria hosting these is my hope is that once we get, you know, enough typins going, there could be some research into them, tracking down the authors and attaching them to current developers. or that sort of thing. Oh, yeah. That's like with those logging magazines with that. They did a programming Olympics during the 80s for quite a few years. And you would have like early Japanese gaming companies contribute like huge programs, not so much basic, but more like kind of detailed, like hexadecimal entries and stuff like that with assembly language. And I mean, there's some impressive stuff.

And you'll see like the names of the authors that ended up being like, you know, big time developers later down the road in the 90s and 2000s. Yeah, there was a Bally Basic developer by the name of John Perkins, and he wrote Artillery Duel for Bally Basic, and because he was also in touch with the people who were making software for the system, you know, that was sort of his in to the video game industry just generally. So he ended up getting a job with, I think it was action graphics. It was like a spinoff of Dave Nutting Associates. Okay. And he ported artillery duel to an assembly language cartridge for the console. And then that, in turn, got ported around by action graphics to a bunch of different platforms like the Commodore 64, Kleecovision, 2,600.

And then, you know, after that whole thing blew up and collapsed, he went on and he worked on projects like the Nemo, the weird VCR. gaming platform. I know he was involved in that. He was involved in a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head. Passed away tragically young in like 2010, but anytime I interview some of these old folks that worked with him, they'll often just sort of bring him up without me having to prompt because they made such an impression. He's like, yeah, that guy knew what he was talking about. And he got his start making stuff for, I'd argue, one of the more obscure forms of basic out there. Yeah, definitely so.

So what is everyone's history with type in games? Ovidual, let's start with you. Sure. So back in 2018, I'm going to go way back. Back in 2018, I was buying up complete-in-box Japanese Nintendo 64 games to scan, because I used to do scanning mostly on Gaming Alexandria. and I hadn't quite discovered proxy shipping from Japan yet, so it was all through eBay.

There was one seller, Yamatoku Classic, that would list items one at a time over a few hours at night. The good stuff sold instantly, so if you saw something interesting, you had to buy it right away. I got a lot of cool stuff this way. But one day, I picked up something called Family Computer Basic Gawakaru Book 1. The book came with the cassette.

I had no idea what to do with that. I knew you needed some special. software or hardware or something to back up discets. And I assume the same would be true for cassettes. Or, yeah, discets and cassettes. I had other projects I was working on at the time, so I set the book aside for another day. About a year later, I picked up Book 2 in the series. And I think I mentioned it on Gaming Alexandria and Hubbs showed some interest.

I offered it to ship it to them. But again, busy with other projects. A few months later, I sent the two books off to Hubbs, along with some Famcom manuals. Hubs ripped those cassettes and uploaded them to gaming Alexandria. And I did a little research, but the last Ness emulator I used was Nesticle from the 90s. Oh, wow. Yeah, exactly. So I couldn't find a cassette function for it, shockingly.

Yeah. So, again, I worked on other projects. But then a few months later, the pandemic hit, and I suddenly had a lot more free time. But I was also starting at zero. I won't go into all the details because I remember them all. But I found an emulator, navigated Family Basic, using a translated manual. And let me tell you, that is not easy. I know zero Japanese.

And I learned that audio ripped from 35-year-old cassettes doesn't work well. So it took a week or so, and some back and forth with hubs to re-ripe some of those cassettes. And thank you for that, hubs. Yeah, bro. But I can still remember that feeling of loading up and running the first game. game. Here was a brand new Nintendo game. It was lackluster and slow, but again, a brand new Nintendo game. I was hooked. I began posting the games to Gaming Alexandria, along with instructions on how to play each one. And there was some interest, which was all I took for me to keep it going. And the excitement continued through the next cassettes and then sort of snowballed into buying every single family basic book in cassette I could find. I had a whole website listing out all the books that could possibly have Family Basic and them. And then I used that list to keep track while I bought, scanned, and uploaded them all. At some point in there, I began typing them up as well from Mycom Basic Magazine, which

seems to be the big one on Gaming Alexandria right now. I started with the first issues in 1984 and was working through 1985, when I realized I was typing up all the easy games. I wanted to save those for others to help get them into typing in games. So instead, I started doing family Basic type-ins from January issues of MyCon Basic to kind of get a feel for what this was like. So I did January, 1985, all the way to January 1996. So we're talking the year, I think that was the year the Nintendo 64 came out. They were still doing Family Basic games in Mycom Basic. Yeah, that is crazy.

It blows my mind. Like the Famicom was a dead platform by then in Japan. They weren't making new games for it. Here other people were, like, they were still supporting the system with this accessory that had been on the market since, what, 85? Yeah, 84 was the first one, the family basic two point. But yeah, I mean, it's just amazing. And they only got better. Like, going through it all, the 1987, I think through 1990, they were doing three games per issue, which was just, and these games weren't duds at all.

I'd say at least one to two of them were just fantastically well-thought-out games. But I also started doing type-ins for other magazines like Program Potchette has some amazing type-ins as well for Family Basic. I also started doing some of the books I did. But yeah, from then until now, so many other projects have gotten in the way, but I still do try to do type-ins from time to time. In fact, just the other day, I was flipping through Programme Pochette, and my kids were there, and I was showing them, hey, this.

game only has 11 lines of code, so they were excited. I typed it up. They spent 15 minutes fighting over who could get the highest score. It was like, it just brought me back to those old Nintendo days. You know, when I was, I was young with the Nintendo and my brother and I would fight over high scores and that sort of thing, too. So it was fun. Well, it's crazy, too. Like, some of those games you preserve, like what they were able to pull off of family basic and all its limitations, you know, like, especially the later ones. It's just, I don't know, really impressive what they're able to do. Oh, yeah.

No, they did things like they actually mapped out all of the RAM for Family Basic. And they would find places, they would find it, they found out things like if you didn't use certain functions, then this whole section of RAM was suddenly available. And you could hide variables in there, that sort of thing. They found, yeah, they found where all the figures were stored. So the figures, when they were on the screen, moving around and the background, so they could instantly update things rather than calling functions to update stuff. So it almost switched from, you're still using basic,

but you're using functions called peak and poke to actually view RAM and modify RAM on the fly. They're amazing. And they took you a step further, and they write programs where they'd store away data inside the RAM, and then write a second program. So you'd run the first program, it'd store all this data, and then you'd run the second program, it could actually access all the data and use it then. And that way, they took a four kilobyte cartridge and just, it's unbelievable what they've

done. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I always really like about some of these type in games is just the very creative ways they find to get around the inherent limitations in a, you know, the hardware or, you know, even just these basic implementations. they just get remarkably creative with the problems solving. Like some of those late era games for the Family Basic,

I remember seeing those ones where they're taking like portions of character sprites because like Family Basic only has a certain number of like built-in characters you can work with. And they're just like mashing them together in very weird ways to make something completely different and unique. Like that's just that's absurd. I love it, and I love that creativity and the ability to just make this system and this program do something it was very much not designed to do. Yeah, what's that game that has, like, is it Fitruth, Ozzy? Like, is that what it's called? Where you go to the castles and, like, yeah, the characters all built up, like, tall walking characters or whatever out of Mario Sprites.

Yes, that's Fizzreduth. They actually made, they made a tall, so we're talking. So normally, let's assume you're looking, when you're looking at a family basic game, you're usually looking at small Mario from the original Super Mario brothers. You don't get big Mario at all on the sprites. So you're looking at something that took basically two and a half small Mario's and made a creature that looks human out of it.

I thought they did much better with the lady sprites to make that into a two and a half tall. But it was just amazing. And so you have this character now that, can not only just move back and forth, but it can also crouch. So you can hit both, you know, above and below as well. Just truly, like, remarkable. And then they even took it further, the schmups.

I have to admit, I'm not a big schmup fan, but family basic schmups, they, you get two basic ships in the game and two very basic shots. And what they did was they made these bosses that, I mean, some look like faces, some look like massive ships. it's just unbelievable what they did. Oh, yeah. Was it that one, that Spirit of Satan or something?

Is that what it's called? Yes. Yeah. I think that was by Shingo Yasue. And again, I apologize if I butcher Japanese names. But the same person also did metal arms not long after that, which was another.

One of them, they actually had it so that the stars in the background were moving at four different speeds, which, again, why would you do that when you're focusing on speed of the game and that sort of thing, but they didn't lose any speed in the game itself. It still felt like a Polish. Yeah, exactly.

Just flexing right there. Just showing off to all the other basic programmers. Well, that's funny, too, about the family basic was like, so we've kind of scanned early issues of a family computer magazine. And, like, it was right, that started coming out right before Super Mario Brothers was released. and they did a lot of family basic coverage and they have like comics like dedicated to it with like them programming it

I don't know it's kind of funny and like you'll see like those early characters like yeah lady from Donkey Kong and like Mario before we was Super Mario like it's all those kind of sprites just the very early Nintendo stuff right before it took off of Super Mario Brothers so it's kind of cool to see that

you know just in the family basic graphics is well the crazy thing about that too is I'm just beginning to see so I also have a Japanese type-in spreadsheet that I'm working on. So I'm trying to list all of the type-ins from as many magazines as I can. And I went through all the Technopolis that I could find, and I went through all the program Pochette.

We already had Miccom Basic. But I noticed programmer Takeshi, who's the one who did those comics and wrote the games for those, is also in Programme Pochette and Technopolis, too, I believe. Oh, really? That's cool. Very prolific. Yeah. I'm kidding.

Well, I did one recently. Two, Sphere, which apparently it was ported to the family basic after being ported to a ton of others. It was ported by programmer Takasu. That's how I noticed his name. But it's just crazy how that magazine took a middle schoolers program called Sphere. It's just a simple game where you line up three spheres. And they ported it to, I think, 20-something systems by the time. That's impressive.

I'm not going to lie. Dustin, what's been you. Justin, what's, what's been your experience with the, you know, type-in games and then what what makes them interesting for you um the thing that makes them interesting to me for sure is just like uh Ozzie mentioned that like it's a brand new game you've released like you know as a preservationist like that's what you always want to do is get brand new stuff out there for people to check out that you know didn't exist in any form before that so that's real fun taking these type-ins and like just releasing a brand new game and you know

I kind of like hope maybe this podcast will kind of encourage others like realize this is a thing and like you can like get these you know everybody always wants to get prototypes released or whatever like this is almost as good as that in my opinion because these are like lost games that there's no other way to play them unless we you know

go in here and start typing them up and releasing them for emulators and all that good stuff um how I got started with it I can't remember exactly but it was probably like yeah whenever Ozzy met me those tapes I think I remember talking to Frank Sefaldi about it.

And, you know, he's just like, there's nobody that's really covered family basic stuff at all. So, like me and Ozzy and Jonas, Roslyn, the Pitsave, I remember we started the typing task force chat up and gaming out to Andrea. And we are all just kind of like stumbling through in the early days and figuring out, you know, how do we make these work. I remember like just typing them up manually in the emulator first because I didn't realize there were any kind of tools that could like help make this a lot easier. So that was pretty rough. I remember looking at actual images of like old Japanese computers to see their keyboard layout. So I could like know, you know, how to type this character or that character. And slowly, you know, got a few games up.

And then like, you know, we're all just real excited. And so we started getting more and more done. Started posting them on the website, made like little high score list to like make it kind of competitive in a fun way. So like, you know, everybody's like, oh, I've got more programs out there than you do. stuff like that. But yeah, I think the other stuff that interests me is like just seeing, like said earlier, developers of, you know, games we love growing up. And this is being like their early work and getting to see like kind of how their

process is developed over the years or in their game design decisions and just seeing like the crazy stuff they came up with with all these limitations of basic. Yeah, I, in researching this, I came across like a Jeff Minter type-in game for the Commodore 64 that, you know, looking into it, this was his first, like, real experiment with the C-64. He had written this Vick-20 game called Rock 60, or, yeah, it was just rocks. And it's like a missile command clone, but it's on the moon. You're like a lunar lander. And he did a type-in version for the Commodore 64 when it came out to, like, test its capabilities versus the Vick-20.

You just sent it off to computers in video games magazine, and it got published. Nice. Yeah, that's like his first Commodore 64 game. I don't even think it's on the Minter collection that's out there now. But, like, you know, someone typed it in at some point because I found it online. So it's pretty cool to see, like, these early works from folks who've gone on to make a real name for themselves. Yeah, another thing, I just thought too, which is, like, mentioning that, like, we did, like, basically. early on, all we had was Mike on basic scans that somebody had done at some point

uploaded the archive to go off of. And then we kind of discovered, like, Technopolis and Program Pochette. And luckily, I think some Japanese scanners were, like, selling copies that I think they'd already scanned. They'd cut the spines off of them. So they were all available at a pretty good price. And the Video Game History Foundation actually funded that. And we got those purchase and started scanning those in.

And so, like, that just opened up, like, all these, you know, new programs for us to get the type in. And like I mentioned earlier, the log-ins with the program Olympics. And on top of that, like, they also, like, every issue had, like, three or four really well-made homebrew games, basically. They weren't all basic, but, like, I said, assembly. And, I mean, like, there's so many cool things in those that I'd like to play some day, if we get the time to ever, you know, type these in. Right. But, I mean, that's why, like, really, we just need to get more and more people involved if we can because, like, There's just so much to do.

There's hundreds or even thousands of these programs out there that need to be preserved. Yeah, I definitely owe submitting a couple to you. Yeah, my own history with type in games. It's a little fussier. Like, I remember, like, I had a series of computers as a kid. You know, we started with a Ti-99-4A and then got a Commodore 64 and then, like, a Windows PC. and I know that we had some stuff for at least the Windows machine that you could type in, but I never really gave it a shot.

But my first real experience with this stuff is when I got a ballet professional arcade. God, almost a decade ago, as of this recording, I think I got it in 2015. And I got like a basic cart not too long after that. And I was interested in, you know, what programs are out there for it. And this website, Bally Alley has a, has like a ton of them that have been preserved by, you know, the guy who runs it at him and is one of his friends, Paul Thacker. He's been a big part of that. And for most part, those are things that they've ripped off of cassette tapes because that was a big way that games were distributed on that platform. But they also, on that website, had a bunch of scans of basically game listings.

and some of them were represented by these, you know, cassettes that they'd come across over the years, but not all of them. And I remember it was at Magfest 2020, like a couple months before the pandemic really hit. I gave a talk with Rachel Simone Weil about, you know, about the Bally, the Astrocade. And, you know, I think it came up. Someone asked if we'd ever tried typing any games in on that and using, like, Bally Basic, and, you know, the Bally computer, it does not have a full keyboard. It has a computer console, whatever. It doesn't have a full keyboard. It has a, like an 18 key keypad. Oh, out. And to, like, type in stuff, you have to, like, push certain buttons to, like, access different functions. It's just a giant pain. So, you know, I answered quite quickly. And I'm like, no, I haven't bothered. It seems miserable to try and type in stuff on that thing. And she agreed. But I looked into this more, not too long afterwards,

and I found out through Bally Alley that there were tools to actually type in at least 300 bod games for the first version of basic, much more, like, efficiently than having to go through the keypad on there. So I gave it a try. I typed in a couple of games in, like, a notepad document and was able to convert that into program code. into a wave file that I could load up on the system. And it kind of worked. There were some errors in there that I've had to clean up. There are always errors.

That is the downside. The O's and zeros, you typo those and stuff like that. That's always fun. Yeah, for me, it was discovering that the ballet does not have enough memory to have spaces. So anytime I saw space in, like, the program listing, I just had to ignore it. Oh, wow. And that was, like, very, like, hard to wrap my brain around. Oh, yeah.

But it worked. So I typed up two games for it so far that were on the verge of being lost, I guess you'd say, because they weren't playable. They were only these old dusty type-in listings that no one had touched in, like, the 25-odd years that website's been online. So one was a Star Trek clone from, like, 79, one of the first, like, basic. games on the system. And the other was, uh, what's it called falling stars. And it's, it's a like a very ambitious sort of a missile command clone. And like, Bally Basic is not very quick. And this was an earlier game. So it was especially not quick because they didn't have access to all the fun techniques to speed things up that came up in the later works. But,

uh, like, it's a cool game, uh, the way it's set up to like stop these, uh, I guess, meteors from coming down on your city and I had a lot of fun with them. I used them in some video projects I was working on and submitted them to Bally Alley and yeah, I absolutely owe them for gaming Alexandria as well

because now that you can run these in the maim emulator which you could not do when I first gave that talk that I was aware of. Nice. But yeah, it's a cool little system, it's a cool version of basic. And since then, like I've had a continuing interesting trying to type in some more.

I just, again, it is a little bit of a time-consuming process to get everything in and debug them and all that fun stuff. I can't say anything. I haven't done any. I don't think of any year or two. It's been a bit for me too. Ozzie's been holding up, you know, I mean, he's been doing tons of work for the site, and I'm so glad he took that on for me.

So I like, you know, focus on the scanning and stuff. I mean, he's like, he takes care of all that. So I can't think enough for that. case. I mean, it's great. Otherwise, this project might have just died on the vine. So, I mean, really, I mean, you helped keep it going. So thank you. Yeah, definitely. Not a problem at all. Like, I'm really interested in some of the really early stuff, too. I know there's a bunch of type in games for, like, RCA computers, including, like, some internal platforms that they were working on at the company that eventually developed into retail products.

It's like when I was researching, you know, the internal RCA papers at the Hagley Museum, they had a, it was like a whole bunch of just like program hex code listings for games that were not represented at any of the cassettes that we were able to turn up and digitize. So at some point, I really need to go through those and see if I can type them in. Yeah, very cool. It doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Hopefully you can find some tools that'll make it easier because, yeah, at least we had those for the Japanese computers. Otherwise, I don't know. I mean, the good news is at least they're all short because they could not have a lot of memory.

True. Yeah, it still won't be fun to do. It wouldn't be fun. That's why I put it off. Yeah. But they exist. And I've gotten to try a few of them out that someone else had typed in at some point. And they were actually pretty cool.

So, like, those developers were having fun with the machine, even if it was kind of limited. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to be. Uh, uh, uh, uh,

I guess that's a good. I guess that's a good segue into sort of like the next part of this talk I wanted to like touch on real quick. And that's sort of like the history of type in games, sort of a quick overview of these things. So like, to my knowledge, this was one of the earliest ways that games were distributed because, you know, type and listings kind of go back to the late 60s when they were being published in the, you know, Deck, Digital Equipment Corporation's EDU newsletter, which was overseen by David All at the time. And through program libraries, like Hewlett Packard had one, Deck had, and other companies did. These were generally for like mini computers using teletype printers or, you know, a monitor if you were so fancy that you could afford one. And, you know, Deck had their user newsletter Deccas as well. And that included program listings.

They have their, like, Deccas program catalogs. You could get programs on, I think it's, like, paper tape or some sort of audio format, or you could get them as program listings. There's a ton of these on bit savers, and I think at least some of them are represented already as, like, binaries that you can load up, but not all of them. There's some really interesting ones in there, like the golf game where you serve, not as the golfer, but as Arnold Palmer's caddy. like picking his clubs for him.

Like, that's, that's just clever. That's a very clever way to approach, uh, like the limitations of a PDP8 or whatever. True. Yeah. And I think that's from like 1971 or something. But, uh, wow. But yeah, David Oll got a lot of these submissions. Uh, in 73, he compiled a bunch of them plus some others.

He'd come across and he published the book, 101 basic computer games, uh, which was all type in listings, 101 of them. and they were targeting a deck computers, but like, again, basic is something that you can sort of adapt to different computer formats. So, you know, this sold outside of the deck ecosystem. Eventually, he did some reprints of it once a microcomputers really took off, you know, around 77 and 78. And then, you know, all sorts of different magazines were publishing these things as well. In the U.S., there was creative computing.

I don't remember if people's computer company was publishing any of these, but I know there were others. I think Byte even published a few. In Europe, you had computers plus video games. There's OMZ, there's Miccom Basic. There's a program put chat, which we've talked about. There's a whole lot of them. Basically, any sort of computer-focused magazine in the 70s and 80s probably had type and

games listed in there somewhere or another. And, you know, just magazines. Like, there was fanzines and newsletters for specific platforms. Like, oh, yeah. Yeah, like the Valley Professional Arcade, which I've talked about. Like, you could find a ton of program listings in the Arcadian newsletter and in a cursor or, I forget what the other name for it was at some point, Basic Express, I think. The Cosback VIP out of RCA, they had the Viper newsletter. Plus another one that I came across when I was researching internally, the internal RCA papers.

like Joe Weissbecker, who developed a lot of this computer hardware. He saved a couple issues of some regional VIP newsletter that I'd never heard of. And I don't think it's scanned online other than the, like, photos I took. Wow. So, like, yeah, and I was flipping through that. And I'm like, oh, here's some program listings in here for games that probably no one has seen for, you know, 40 odd years. Interesting. Very cool.

Yeah. And they sort of persisted. Like, you've talked about type in games for. the Family Basic into the 90s. So, like, even after, you know, cassettes and floppies and other formats became more popular ways to distribute games, like, there's still, like, a market for just picking up a magazine and trying to your hand to type in this stuff in yourself, a very, like, cheap way. And, like, the later ones, you can tell, like, the people must have, like, really loved working

on, like, Family Basic in the 90s because, like, why else would you do it? You know, like, why would you put yourself through that? But, you know, because of their love, you can tell they just, like, made really great stuff. Like, they're really pushed it to the limit. So it does seem like the later releases for all these. Like you talked about with the early, uh, ballet basic games were kind of simple, but they didn't know the tricks or how to access all this stuff. Whereas later, like, it's just so much better.

And the system's so much more opened up for them. Mm-hmm. Well, and I remember in the notes of one of the family basic, um, gate typins from 1996, they were actually lamenting the fact that, all these authors had disappeared and were no longer posting family basic games. And like you can see, I think even up to the last one, which was April 1996, they're talking about, hey, I really miss, you know, so and so and so. I have really loved your games at where'd you go?

That's so cool. Yeah, I mean, I kind of wonder if my Com Basic itself was finally like, you know, there's no way. This console is so old. We can't keep doing this. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. You know, I wonder if there's, like, a Japanese effort to just, like, track down these people and, like, you know, where are they now and that sort of thing. I really wish I knew more Japanese so I could, you know, bug, you know, onion soft and such about that. I do wonder how much work we're duplicating sometimes, but, you know, it's just hard to know. It's, you know, what's been lost from the Japanese websites and what's out there and everything. So, I mean, at least now we know we're getting out there on game out. Alexander where it's easy for every bit to download and find.

I mean, I know there's interest over there because there is that like version of Family Basic that was designed basically what, four emulators and what the late 90s or early 2000s that just adds in a bunch more RAM and everything. Oh, yeah. There are even games made for it too. It is, I think they have 16K RAM in there or something like that. It was, yeah. And you know, there's like competitions for this stuff, uh, even back in the day.

and even up to now, I think, you can find, like, oh, programming competitions. And whoever does the, makes the best game that we all agree on, we'll give them something or other. Well, and there's still games being written, like Famicom. Famicom World? I think they have a forum. I saw recently they had somebody who just made a game on there for Family Basic. And I've seen that a few other places, like on YouTube, you can find people who post their games that they've just created or adapted or One of the other fun things with Family Basic, and I'm also seeing with other typeins is people will just convert audio from something else into this.

Because all of these systems have their own hexadecimal way of representing audio and creating beeps and boops and whatnot. But yeah, so there are people out there still making Family Basic games, throwing them up on YouTube. They'll even like really quickly zip through their entire type-in so you can see each line by line if you pause and type it in yourself. just so here we are what 40 years later it's still going yeah i i have to imagine that these also exist for like the the hardcore commodore 64 programming scenes and then you know europe oh yeah for sure that work in languages that i don't speak oh man yeah it is very fascinating to me just with like uh with bally basic too you know you had these people who were figuring out okay, how can we mix in like assembly language once we figured out how that worked?

How can we mix in like the built-in program routines and the systems operating system? So we can just use its like calculator function to speed up our games. And then that does a lot. And I know it's not exclusive to the Bally Arcade because, you know, a lot of these magazines that y'all are scanning in and you look through the listings like, oh, it's a mix of like basic and assembly. and it sounds nightmarish to put in. Yeah.

Yeah, you have like the basic loaders for the assembly a lot of the times too. And like it'll be like three different things. You have to load in a specific order and blah, blah, blah, to make it run. But if you do it, you get a really cool game. True. Very true. Yeah, I actually ran into in Beat Magazine recently,

somebody created a way of entering hex into family basics. So you'd run one program and then you could actually type in the hex when you ran that program to have it entered into RAM. And I was like, a part of me is like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. But the other part of me was like, why did you just do that? You made it so much work off like sedentated. What kind of cycle are you? Yeah.

I mean, it's called Mario RPG. So it clearly predates the real. You know, you want that speed. You want that space. You got to go, you got to go deep. And there's the beginning of Square Annex right there. No. Yeah.

Yeah, I really wonder how many, like, early square people cut their teeth on a, on typing in stuff for like the PC, uh, you know, that's 6,000 or whatever it is, 6001. I know, um, Sakurai, he, uh, he had a tweet, what was it? 20, 21, 22 somewhere in there where he was basically saying, happy birthday family basic. I got my start on you, you know, that sort of thing. It was, it's just impressive to see how many people started on different systems. And if I remember, right, there are some older, either British or American computers, where they used to use those to develop Nintendo games. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I know the, I know the Commodore 64 because it had a 6502 processor. Like, that was helpful. The Apple 2, I know it was used for, like, Atari 2,600. I wouldn't be shocked if that was used for other hardware as well, because it also has 6502, and it's very, like, adaptive. So, yeah, I can see it. I do want to touch on, like, what are some of the tools? Like, we've sort of alluded to there being tools out there for these sorts of things. Like, what is the process of bringing a type in game to life in the year 2020?

I guess this will go up in 2025. So in 2025. For me, I mean, I mainly use something called Dumpless Editor, which is actually by a Japanese programmer. And he's got like presets for various systems, like the early Japanese computers. and he's also like we can download and add these fonts to him so it makes it real easy to type in the games in this program and then export them to like the various formats to run on emulators of the computers or just this audio which you actually like just screen to the original hardware

if you happen to have that so like no more having to load up an emulator and manually type it out that way it also has like stuff that'll like look for errors which is especially helpful for hex and decimal stuff a lot of the hexadecimal listings have checksums in them at least so like for a section of code if you do miss one of those numbers or whatever it can alert you that like you got one wrong so you don't get to come through literally hundreds or thousands of lines of hexadecimal trying to figure out which ones you miss and with this program it makes it real easy just to input that in and it'll format it properly for you it even has it to where like each magazine published like the hexadecimal stuff

in different ways and you can like pick like logging magazine eight column or four column or whatever and it'll like format it for you properly so that's really cool um it's also been really useful for me with a tape recording uh cassette games preserving them that way because they can take the audio and just like usually read the program file you can just like easily export that out whereas before i had that i was like just recording tapes over and over and over and over and over and trying to get it like the perfect audio for these ancient Japanese command line programs to convert into something usable. I mean, it was a nightmare. So this thing, I mean, it works like flawlessly almost all the time. And it's just been a real lifesaver. But yeah,

so once you get them all typed up into that and you get them exported out in the proper format, you just open up an emulator and play it. But the other trick with that is a lot of these Japanese emulators require specific bios files. And, you know, the Japanese are, way more leery about infringing on copyright than you know we are over here in america so like you would have to hunt these down and that could be real difficult at times um but luckily somebody about 10 years ago i can't remember their name on top of my head which is bad but they put together the neocube uh rom and emulator packs which are just like huge collections of japanese roms and games that you know for various systems you can download and play and in the emulator pack

they have like multiple of the early computers and they have the bios files all ready to go. I did take that about a year ago and I did a YouTube video showing like how I, my process of doing type-ins just to hopefully get more people to maybe get involved and they can see how it works and see if it's something they want to do. And I took his Neo-Coba emulator pack and updated like the versions of all the amulators I can find and I've got that included in the YouTube video. So if anybody ever wants to try these games out, you can download. that there and load them up through that.

The other piece that I forgot to mention was OCRing. So you don't have to manually type in all the stuff if you don't have to. And there's a program list OCR program and you can like take scan magazine pages and feed it into it

and just draw zones or boxes around the text and it'll OCR that and now put it to, you know, notepad or whatever and you can copy and paste that. It gives you a real good head start. And I mean, that's absolutely necessary for like we talked about the hexadecimal games because that would just take you, you know, hours and days to type that all in manually and hope you got it

right. So, uh, I think a guy named nine tails made some, uh, train data. Yeah, that's what you call it for a Tesseract. I might be mispronouncing that, but it's like an OCR program. And he's like designed specifically for like Japanese, uh, gaming magazine. So it does a real good job of recognizing it that way. And I've always kind of wanted to maybe set aside some time at some point in my life and like do more of that kind of thing, like train more data to where like you can make it even better and just like work almost every time. Because like I talked about earlier with the O's and zero, sometimes it usually gets those

wrong and there's other things like that. D's it'll mix those up. But if you have high resolution scans, which is what we try to do at Gaming Alexandria, it really helps it capture that more accurately. But that's the kind of tools I use. I don't know what Ozzy uses for Family Basic, though. It doesn't have a dump list editor. It doesn't support that, unfortunately.

No. And I have to say, so I want to take a step back. There's something about going in and mass producing these games and getting them out to people, and there's that. But there's also something about typing in your own game. typing, not your own game, a game somebody else wrote. But when you spend that half an hour to an hour typing it in and then troubleshooting and that sort of thing, you really get this tie-in to the game. You really feel tied to the game.

You feel like this is your child almost. And so it's something that I wish I could replicate for everyone the first time. I mean, so many people are jumping on these family basic games and just playing them. And that's cool. That is what they're there for. That's why I'm typing them up. But I highly recommend going in there and typing one up for yourself, finding a simple one or something like that. And most of the time we were talking about prototypes and that sort of thing.

These are very much like alpha prototypes. These are people who are creating, have a single idea or two or three ideas, especially for the beginning games. And they're just brilliant ideas. And seeing them work is just amazing. Like you can see one of my favorite ones is there's one, a flight simulator one where you're just a target, kind of like in Star Wars, here's moving around, trying to keep track of a spaceship to shoot it, but the screen is fighting you and you're moving around. It's really simplistic and not a great game, but just the feeling like you're a fighter

and the gun is fighting you as you're trying to aim at the spaceship and it's moving around. It's just amazing. So a little aside there, but that's one of the nice things about Family Basic and one of the sad things about Typins is so many people on the Discord. are doing Family Basic. I'm going to butcher your names, but Zimwix, he has created a audio system to convert audio formats

because you have Messen, again, may have Richard that one, which is what a lot of people are using, but you also have Virtua NES. And Messen has one audio format that uses. Virtua NES has another audio format. Oh, yeah. You have the wave audio format,

and then you have tools that can convert the type-ins into actual ROMs so that you can play them later on as well, which is what we tried to do for as many of them as we can to make them more accessible. But that's one of the other kind of miseries of having so many emulators. But, I mean, I've done everything from, I hooked up, I have a Famicom. I even have a square button Famicom that I love just for the feel of it. But I have a, so I have the Famicom so I can hook my family basic up to that. I have my N-E-S with something called an N-E-O-X-P,

E-N-I-O, space-X-P, and they don't make them anymore, but it was this adapter that allowed you to plug in, for example, the Family Basic to the Nintendo console. So that was actually what I did some of my first testing, comparing emulator versus console to make sure I got that right. But, I mean, the feel of that is just, it sends you back to a time that you didn't exist in, but it is amazing to do that.

that. But for me, I've tried everything on the emulator from, I had a way to convert text documents into basically the hex. I translated each of the commands into the hex and tried to do that. And Zimwex, I believe, has a similar thing. But when you get right down to it, I just love going into Virtua NES, booting it up. The key mappings are horrible, so I have to remap a few keys each time. I actually have a safe state with keys remapped. And then you just type it in. you're giving up a couple hours of your life, but you just you get that tie into the game. And so

when you see that alpha awesomeness, alpha prototype awesomeness, you really are like, that's so cool. And I brought that to exist. Yeah. Brought that into existence again. And so, yeah, it is, it is. But

there's the whole gamut for family basic, lots of different ways. And it's one of my, I talk about having all these other projects. I do, unfortunately, I do like N64 translation hacks for some things, and I still have to update some of those. So I have lots of projects going. But one of the projects I want to get into is expanding and really writing up the documentation on the Gaming Alexandria website for, here's how you get into this one. Here's how you do this one. And I mean,

the spreadsheet I has has 9,000 type ins listed on it. That's not even listing some of the big magazines that are still out there. And that's just Japanese type ins. So there are so many out there and so many consoles. And yeah. Yeah. Listeners, we need your help. Pick whatever platform you're interested in and then see what you got because there's a lot out there. There's so much like, yeah, just like solid gold games, I guarantee you out there.

Like I'll bring up one I did that I'm probably the most proud of was 3156 Coro Coro, which was like a square game that was thought never released or lost. and Chris Culler reached out to me because he had found a mention of it on a Japanese website when he's doing much of research on Square about that it was actually released but only in type and format and like I think I just happened to scan that magazine and so he brought up to me and at that time I'd really no idea how to do like hexadecimal code on these things but figured it out through Domplis editor and got that going and out there and the coolest part was once it got released and tweeted around and whatnot,

Sakaguchi, you know, Final Fantasy fame replied to it basically like, oh, that brings back memories or something like that. I was like, wow, that's really cool. So, and I mean, yeah, it's just kind of cool. Like, this was a lost game, a Squarespace off game in like 2022

that, like, we still haven't released. You know, how many more other things like this were out there? I don't know. So, I mean, it's just, it's cool to discover and get this stuff out there. Yeah, you mentioned in here that it's, that was written. by Hiromichi Tanaka

who went on to work on Secret of Mata and Saken Densetsu 3 and Xenogiers and Kronocross Like that's a That's quite the pedigree Like this is one of their first works That's like super interesting Yeah

And it's just like How many more of these games are out there like that Probably quite a few Thank you. Yeah, like, you know, like I said, I worked on ballet arcade stuff. And there's different tools for the different flavors of basic. I've worked in the 300 Bond Basic, which is the first version that came out. And there is a tool to convert like a text file into a format that its basic can make sense of.

And then another tool, these are both command line. tools, of course, because they're, you know, quite old to convert that into a wave file. And then you can load that up on your system or, you know, now that MAME supports, you can load it up on that as well, although it's a, there's a whole process to setting it up on MAME. I know Adam Triunfo, who runs Valley Alley, he's put together like a YouTube video explaining how to do that. So if that's of interest, you should check that out because I cannot do it justice.

I just used an actual ballet system because I had it. So I had to test that out and see if it worked and if it crashed and if it did, I had to go back to that text file and try and troubleshoot it. But it was a fun process. Like Ozzy said, it gives you a sort of ownership of this game that you didn't write it, but you're helping revive it from sort of like a stasis, a hibernation. And one thing that I found really fun putting together these type-ins and getting them running again was that, you know, I shared it in the Valley Allie email user group, which still has some of the old timers from back in the day of the system. Nice.

And it inspired one of them to, like, write his first new column in decades for typing in on the game, on that game system. Just like, yeah, here's this game that just got typed in. And here's how, you know, me, as someone who was writing games for this thing in the, like, mid-80s, and here's how I would have tightened up this code and, like, left all this extra RAM in that I could have used for other functions. And, like, that's just fun. That's just a fun, like, experience that it inspired someone who had worked on this stuff to, like, critique someone else's program decades later. Yeah. There's ways you could have done this.

But, you know, this was an early work. I didn't know that yet. So, yeah, I know there's a different process for 2000 BOD programs. I think it's probably less convoluted, but I haven't learned it yet. God only knows for the, like, expanded basic games. I don't think there's too many typings for those that have been scanned, but I'm sure they exist. Oh, yeah. You know, the program list editor, I did reach out to the author of the, or dump list editor, good grief.

reached up to him about adding family basic support. And he was like, nah. He didn't seem to care. He's a good guy. He's replied. He's implemented some other things for me and helped me out with like various recordings trying to get them converted. But it's just funny.

He's just like, no, I'm not really interested in that. I was like, oh, okay. Fair enough. Yeah. I'm not too worried. We've got enough talent on the site and enough focus on Family Basic. I think in the next few years we'll have some neat tools for that. Yeah.

But, I mean, that does bring up something, too, I wanted to discuss as well, is there are so many other websites like the FM Towns website and the Bally Arcade website where there are kind of these hidden typings and, I mean, and Japanese websites as well. And I really hope that at some point we can reach out to them and see if we can bring those in, maybe not necessarily lists them on Gaming Alexandria if they want to keep them separate, but at least link to them and point them out and kind of make a central hub. So that these, because, I mean, it feels like gaming Alexandria is just the next iteration. You know, we're just doing Family Basic now. Somebody else has done Bally Arcade. Someone else has done. Let's, let's not just like leave all those as separate endpoints and bring them together. You know, keep all of our sites and hopefully whatever future sites together.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm really interested, you know, the OCR tools are improving. And I know, you know, the video game history foundation. has, like, a really powerful and robust OCR technology they're using for their stuff. Yeah, that looks so cool. When their library goes live, which I think it probably will be by the time this episode goes up. Oh, neat. And I know they're, we've got a pretty sizable collection of magazines, and I don't know how well their system works for Japanese text, but it works pretty well for, like, Roman characters.

So that'll be pretty interesting to see what type ends. It can, like, pop up and help, like, populate. for something like the Commodore 64, the Atari 800. That'll be very interesting for me personally to see how that goes. Yeah, I do wonder how going forward, how we can leverage AI to help with this kind of stuff, because I'm sure there's all sorts of great ways that we could, you know, give AI some good uses for some of the bad ones.

But, yeah, it could definitely be a helpful tool down the road for this. Yeah, it would be nice to have some positive uses, if any. I think you would even be cool to have with emulators an auto entry system for various consoles, that sort of thing. So, you know, you just give it a wall of text and it's able to just bring it into the game. I think that would be the best way to preserve these games because you just have a text file. Because not only do you, because then when another person gets it and brings in, they can actually see the code and see, like we have notes on gaming out,

Alexander, hey, you want infinite lives on this, just do this. You want to do this? Just do this. So you can actually mess with the code. Yeah. And that is how one of the things I've loved about Mycom Basic is so many people will call back to other games that they saw. And they're like, you know, I started with this code and I tweaked it and then adjusted it. And now I have this game.

And it's just, it's crazy how there was this buildup. It wasn't just a whole bunch of people working separately. It's suddenly I have this an idea after playing this game and I adapted to this. And I love it. Yeah, I know Pekin Pokes were a big deal for like ZDX Spectrum users in the 80s. You know, they'd have these type in games or even just games they got on cassette and they would load up the code and just try modifying it with peek and poke and poke and see what happens. And yeah, going back to the valley again because it's what I have experience with. I just covered a game in my video series, the Atari Archive one, Math Grand Prix.

and it reminded me of a ballet arcade basic game called Horse Race Math, and I was looking into the history of this, and it was never actually, like, published, but, you know, they were able to find the files for it when the Valley Alley folks were going through the Bob Fabrice collection of materials from the Arcadian, and in it is there's a letter from the guy who wrote it, and he's like, oh, yeah, I took this existing horse race game that, you know, such and such person wrote,

And I just modified it for this. And I'm like, that's, you could call that a modification. I feel like you did a lot more than just like, yeah, I think you're underselling what you did here. Because the original one, it's like a horse race gambling game. And this is literally just like, you answer math problems. And if you get it right, your horse moves forward. Like, that's, that's pretty dramatically different. But yeah, that's the sort of cool stuff you could do with like these code listings.

And honestly, personally, I think it's always fun to just watch like the code. run on a on the file computer definitely I was going to say too I was trying to think earlier about a family basic with loading it actually like the games themselves Ozzie can probably talk better about this but like you have to use specific tools to take like the family basic games once they're basically compiled in the emulator to convert them to like

you know traditional ways we play NES games like the NES ROMs like before that you'd have to like yeah just just manually and put the text again. What was that program? You did one for me early today, actually. Yeah. S. S. Stones?

Yep, S-Stones. It's, so Virtua NES, I believe, is a Japanese Nintendo Famicom, I believe, I believe, I guess, emulator. And somebody used the S-created an S-Stones.E, which you can then, like, drop a ST-0, which is their save-state file on the E-X-E. and it works most of the time sometimes you have to fiddle with the game first and save state after you run it once

but I believe I cannot remember I want to say Iientai and probably miss saying a name there too I think that person actually created one that's a lot more functional I just again too many projects haven't looked into that one yet but it's once you get

so it's just an NES game I mean there I saw somebody who saw the latest round of Twitter and Blue Sky posts on those. He went in and he actually was on Twitch with the games. It was very cool to see some of the games. And, you know, he just dropped an AES file into an emulator and ran them. Yeah, way easier than doing it the other way. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, there's some really interesting, like, Japanese games on the Gaming Alexandria type and listing page that I'm just, like, scrolling through right now. I'm like, oh, I don't know, some of these are just obviously, they're, like, ports of, like, board games, I guess you'd say. Then you have, like, really weird stuff of, like, puzzle games and, like, word games and just, oh, there's a lot of, like, really interesting stuff in here. Like, this MSX game that's like, what, it's a music thing that's just, like, playing music on the MSX from Sega's PowerDrift. Oh, yeah, yeah, a lot of music programs, yeah. I love music programs.

I'm like, okay, well, let's just dedicate all of this processing power to playing a really sick tune. When I did a ballet arcade video about the history of the system, like, I kept popping in music from those kinds of music programs that someone had done in Basic. Because there was a program that one of those developers had come up with to, you could use to like program music and someone really ran with it. And he just wrote a ton of music programs, popular songs, and public domain songs. It was super cool. Yeah, there's some that, like, they would just, like, especially the Japanese magazines, where it would just be like a drawing of an anime character would show up in your screen after you typed it all in, you know, stuff like that. I mean, but I mean, you know, back then, that was so cool, like, still to do that because where else were you going to do that?

And kind of same with, like, the music programs you talked about earlier. where, you know, where else could you listen to an arcade game song other than at the arcade, well, now you can't at home if you type this in and, you know, you can play if your heart's content, I guess. Yeah, I mean, as a kid, I probably would have loved that. Oh, yeah, me too. Or like this, this cool one for Apple 2 using AppleSoft Basic. It's a, and it's a Japanese game that's like a first person sort of, I guess, kind of a flight game. It's called Combat Fighter, where you're just like using the paddles. That came with the Apple 2 to navigate around a crosshair so you could shoot the enemies.

Yeah. Like, that's simple, but it's cool. That's a cool idea using the very limited hardware you've got to work with off the stock Apple 2. I remember doing one called tree where you're a turtle climbing a tree and you fart on bugs to kill them. See, you're not going to get that in a retail game. Yeah. Unless it's, I guess, unless it's like a ZX. factory game. That does not like something that they would have

sold on cassette over there, but like anywhere else. We were like, all right, what do we call this? Is it a turtle? Then the stink bug? We called it a portal, toodle. We have fun. Yeah.

And, you know, I'm very interested in the, you know, I'm very interested in the, you know, sort of like these very early, uh, type in games, too, and how they sort of became influential in their own rights. like Hamarabi, that's by Doug Diamond, worked at Deck. He wrote that in 1968 in Focal. That was eventually reported to Basic and published around like 71 in the EDU newsletter. And then David Al picked it up from there and included it in his book. And that's like an early resource management game that's been like extremely influential. Yeah, people have played the hell out of Hamurabi over the decades. you'd find like probably five versions

in any given platform or yeah Star Trek, the friggin Star Trek game. Yeah. I love Star Trek. It's important to everything. It's imported to everything also at least five times. Family Basic as well. Yeah, I'm sure there's a family basic version there somewhere.

Yep, it's actually going to be on the website, hopefully in the next month or so. Oh, sweet. Perfect. Yeah, I do like that every time someone digs up another one, I get pinged in gaming Alexandria Discord. I'm like, oh, man, throw it on the pile. It's the Star Trek guy. Yeah, but like, that's from 1971, and it was, like, written by a high schooler who saw

space war and was like, well, I don't have access to, like, coding for the PDP system on my, like, stolen university library account. I can only program on this Sigma 7 computer with the teletype display. What can I do with that? Oh, I really like Star Trek. Maybe me and my buddies can brainstorm something. He came up with like this strategy game where you're like hunting for Klingons across a sector of space and

he eventually ported that to the HP 2000 program system and from there it got submitted to Deccas and got included in the basic computer games book. Got expanded on by Bob Lidom who typed it up in there and was like this is pretty good but I could make it

better and he added in like all sorts of quality of life improvements and some, like, gameplay tweaks. That got sent off to All as well. Like, All contacted him after seeing him talking about it in a people's computer company issue. So that got included in the second printing of basic computer games. They even got the permission to call it Star Trek because Al ran into Gene Roddenberry and asked him. And Roddenberry is like, yeah, let me go check with Paramount.

And they were like, all right, you're good to go. Didn't even cost him anything. Oh, the good old days. And when I talked to Bob Leadham about it, he was like, yeah, I was getting mail about that into the 2000s from like across the globe from people who were playing Super Star Trek or had questions about how to like make it run on their system because, you know, they were all using different flavors of basic and I would usually like give them some like programming advice. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, I don't know your specific system, but here's some things that can try, you know, just play with the program until. it runs and you know that's that's a that's a good message for these sorts of games like that's that's why they're so robust i guess these early ones yeah yeah one thing i was thinking of too what you were talking about family basic was uh there's also been kind of rom hacks of some of the games

that were done because like we talked about earlier with the graphics you know family basics it's pretty limited certainly maro sprites and some other random ones i know garret gilchrist has taken a couple games that were type-ins and like totally redid the graphics where they look really cool. And like so that's like another option people can do like say you do a family basic game, but you don't really like how it looks. Hey, go in and hack the graphics too. They can really shine. I mean, there's so much cool stuff you can do with it.

Yeah. Yeah, I can actually name those too, like Excalibur 2, which looks like a really cool game even before he did the graphics on it. And then I believe he did the tragedy at the Ice Drift Museum, which is a amazing game on its own, but he turned it into sort of an Amongus port, which... That's right. Yeah, yeah, I forgot about that one. That was cool.

Yeah. I feel like this game deserves some description, because it's truly, like, wild for a 1984 family basic game. Oh, for a tragedy at the Ice Drift Museum. That one's actually, I think it's 1990. You know, yes, for Family Basic, but in the 90s, I believe it's one that was created. Oh, okay. So it's very unique in that what you're doing is,

you start out with these penguins, you're this penguin in the center, and you're watching these penguins walk around you in these eight different squares. And you can do two things. You can tell whichever penguins are currently in the square because, you know, some lag behind. You can tell them to go the other direction, or you can mark some of them. And what you're trying to do is trying to find who the murderer is, because every few squares, a penguin disappears. So your job is to find who the murderer penguin is. And there are eight stages. And with each stage, you get one more murderer penguin.

And the story behind it, too, is, it's like four or five lines. But that's another thing I love about these, is they really have these fun stories behind them. I don't have it up and front of me. But the final really cool thing about that is the author, Takashi Endo. He actually talks at the end of it about how he had just completed the Nintendo Dentsu Gaming Game Seminar. and he'd been doing that for a year and afterwards he was like I have to do something with my knowledge

I want to show off hey I create something memorable and he created this game right afterwards and it really is I would highly recommend it yeah if it's just like a genuinely good and novel concept for a game

even outside of Family Basic the fact that he made that work in you know this increasingly archaic a format of running games. That's really cool. And actually, if you don't mind, I want to go through the story for it real quick.

It's quick. So here goes. Kenji Tahara and my friend, Detective Shigeru Yamato, left Ueno at 1157 and headed for Hokkaido on the Thunderbird 3. After enjoying the snow festival at Mount Osore, we ate the local specialties of bear,

reindeer, and marimo, and then visit the Miki family's ice drift museum where a death threat had apparently been sent. I was shocked to see that all the family members look the same and Yamato said with a look of disgust the brain is not where we think. It's just a few lines but

it builds this story in your mind and then you go in and you play the game and I mean there's another one, a brick breaking game and they have a similar thing where it's just oh the elder happened to have this ball that can kill these aliens that landed in our well and we just happen to have these paddles. So we're going to go into the well and we're going to kill this evil alien with these

paddles and it's a brick-breaking game. But the story behind it, you read the story and that you play the game. It's just so cool. Oh, man. Yeah, I'm really impressed. There's a, so this game for the Cosmic VIP that was programmed in Pecks. I think I mentioned earlier, Roundup. This was written by Brian Astell, who was not a member of the like computer programming team. I interviewed him some while a while ago. He was originally part of, like, the part of RCA that worked on, like, TV technology. But he was really interested in computers, so, like, he kept sort of, like, shoehorting his way into it by, uh, by writing these games and, like, submitting them for their game

manuals. And he submitted this one where you have to herd sheep into a pen using, like, five dogs. Uh, the sheep do not, like, they don't really, they're not, they don't really care about the dogs. They're not really scared of them. So there's a bit of work involved in getting all the sheep into the pen. They can also just escape your field entirely because there's like an open gate. And if they do, you lose the game. You lose the game if you run out of time. But you're scored based on how quickly you can get all of them into this pen.

It was published in the second Cosmack VIP game manual, which wasn't scanned up until a few years ago, actually. So that's online now. I don't remember if it's on the archive, but it is on Hagley's website, and they're, like, computer, Joe Weisbecker, digital collection. Anyway, every time I interviewed someone about, like, the Cosmec VIP and, like, the game manual, they kept talking about, like, Brian Astell's works, and they're like, this guy, like, had some really great ideas for a game. And this was the one that they just kept coming back to, even if they couldn't necessarily remember the name. And I finally asked him about it, and he was very, like, humbled about it. He was like, pretty good, I guess.

Didn't realize everyone liked it so much. I'm like, didn't you? Really? He did not go on to a career in games, per se, but he did work on the, like, game technology that used the RCA video disc. And then after that, he went on to work on, like, MPEG developing that standard. And, like, what was the other? thing he really was proud of. You know what? On televised football games, how they can mark up on the screen, like, which

plays they're doing. Apparently, he developed that technology, too. Oh, wow. Also, extremely proud of that. Yeah. Yeah. And I can't say it all started with Roundup, but I like to think there's, like, there's a trajectory there. Yeah, let's go with that. I like that, too. And I'm pretty sure that is included in the Emma 02 emulator that runs all of these, like, 1802-based Hardware, so you don't have to type

it a bunch of hex code if you want to try it out. That's always good. That's always a plus, because, as we've established, hex code is miserable. Well, does anyone have any final thoughts? I feel like we've touched on a lot of stuff about typing games and how cool they are. I don't think so. I think I've rambled about everything I can think of.

If someone wants to get involved with getting these things typed in, what process would you tell them to follow? What should they do? If they're willing to get on the Discord, that'd be best because, you know, there's tons of us there that can help get you started and kind of, yeah, just help with any questions you have. Like I said, earlier too, I made a YouTube video that's out there on the Gaming, Alexander YouTube channel that kind of goes over just my,

basic process of doing one of the simpler type-ins from a micom basic. It's about 25 minutes long. So if you think you might be interested, maybe watch that first and see if that's something you think you'd like to do. And then, yeah, like I said, join the Discord and go from there. And if you have any family basic questions, Ozzy's your man. Yeah, I would also throw it out there, too. Even if you see a computer's not emulated in maim or anywhere else, we have seen.

the games or systems become emulated because of type-ins or other things. So it's worth it to even begin looking into it and typing it up because the more that's available for emulator creators to work with, the more likely they are to work with it. That was the RX-78, wasn't it? Yeah. Like you've got some games running for that, and then there was an emulator. Yeah, that's not a great system, but I need to do some of the type-ins for that for sure to check them out. They're probably better than the actual retail games.

It's not a high a bar, really. I was going to say, you know, even though Gaming Alexandria does have a lot of stuff from Japanese computers, because you've been scanning a lot of Japanese magazines. Like, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to focus on Japanese computers either. Like, if you're really interested in typing games for the Zetex spectrum, like I know there's, you know, a ton of stuff from Eastern Europe and the mainland, and not just the UK. Like, if that's something that interests you,

like, I'm sure you can find people who care about that stuff on the Discord. I know there's folks from Eastern Europe, for example. If you like, you know, the Atari 800, the Commodore 64, the VIC-20, even have some games in there from, like, the Commodore Max. Oh, well. Which, you know, who cares about the Max?

But someone did. They wrote games for it. You got sickos in there to like the spectrum. Like, I think you may like the spectrum. loves a good sickos. But yeah, like, regardless of whatever platform you care about, like, you can, you can find an interest there. You can find probably someone who could help point you in direction of resources. And you could always submit your listings.

Yeah, for sure. Please do. Definitely. Get them put up on the website. We need all the help we can get. Like, mentioned earlier, there's like thousands of these things that are still left unpreserved. So please come help. Mm-hmm.

And so far you have 11 people who have submitted. stuff so far so. And one of them did like, God, 50 or 100? 91 is the last character. 97, I'm sorry. 97 from TWA. Yes. What TWA did was amazing. He took a single issue of Micon Basic and tried to type in everything in it, I believe. He ran into some emulators that didn't exist and apologize if I'm butchering that, butchering that, but that was my memory of what he was working on there. And he did some others from other issues as well because he was interested. But, yeah, it's very cool to see what he's, that's the reason it's not all Family Basic and MSX. Yeah.

It's crazy. He jumped around to so many different computers and figured him out. And I don't think he OCR's stuff either. Like, he types it out by hand, which is even more impressive. I don't know how he does it. I'd also like to throw it out there, too. We are looking at Japanese type-ins. We're either purchasing them ourselves, scanning them in or working together to get them scanned in.

But we're throwing them on archive. Archive has tons of magazines. As I'm looking for the Japanese ones, I'm seeing as many English, Spanish, you name it, language magazines out there. If you see one, you don't necessarily have to go through us. If you see one, you're interested in, type it up. But please, when you're done, like create an audio file. Even if you don't know how to get running again, send it to us. We'll figure it out.

We'll figure out how to make it playable for everyone. But just enjoy type-ins. They're awesome. Make a save state if you can. Yes. With the love of God, don't make yourself have to type in a bunch of lines of code a second time if you don't have to.

All right. Well, this has been Retronauts. This is a Patreon-supported show. You can support us at patreon.com slash Retronauts. At the $3 level, you get each episode one week early and at a higher bit rate. And at the $5 level, you also get access to Friday bonus episodes, Diamond Fight's weekly columns, and the monthly, this month in Retronauts, and the Retronauts Discord server.

So I have been a subscriber for quite a long time, and I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed the conversations in there, too. So if that sounds appealing to you, by all means, feel free to join up. And where can we find you folks? Zidual, let's start with you. Best place is Gaming Alexandria and Gaming Alexandria Discord. And it's pretty much the same for me too. And the website is just www.gamingolexandria.com.

We have a Blue Sky account, a Twitter account. And like Ozzy said, the Discord is probably like the place you have the most fun talking about this kind of stuff with the rest of us. So feel free to join. We'd love to have you. All right. And you can find me all over the place. I'm on Blue Sky under Ubersaurus.

I'm on YouTube under Atari Archive, and I have a commensurate Patreon that supports that. And I also have a book, Atari Archive Volume 1. You can check that out as well. It's for sale through limited run games and on Amazon. So with that, thank you for listening, and warm up your fingers. Get typing. I don't know. I'm going to be able to be.

I'm going to be. I'm going to be. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be.