Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 291: The Media is the Message - PAX East

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Live from PAX East, Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, and RetroRGB's Bob Neal discuss the evolution of physical media in video gaming and its impact on the tech and design of the medium.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. How's everyone doing tonight? That's good. I keep waiting for, you know, to ask that question,

have everyone say, terrible, but... Terrible. Ah, there we go. So what I've been waiting for? All these years. All right, well, this packs in Retronauts. The media is the message. Everyone, thanks for joining us here at Pax East 2020.

I've done enough of these that I keep forgetting what year it is. But I'm still Jeremy Parrish, as I have been all these years. And this continues to be retronauts, but it's a different lineup this time that we've ever had before, unless you count the impromptu podcast we recorded in the hallway a few hours ago. Guys, introduce yourselves. I am Bob, the founder of RetroRGB.com. And, uh, thank you. And also the podcast and everything else that goes with it.

I'm Ben Edwards. I am a journalist who specializes in tech history, and I just got a full-time job at how-to geek now, so I'm excited about that. I run vintagecomputing.com. Thanks. Change is in the air. And in fact, this panel topic was inspired by the fact that I've recently started working at Limited Run games, doing media curation. And Limited Run is all about physical media of games, about preserving games on physical media. so that when they are delisted from PSN or the Switch eShop, it's okay because you'll still have it and you don't have to worry about downloading it or being told, nope, sorry, you no longer own PT.

If we had published PT, you would still have it. But sadly, we didn't. But yeah, the phrase, the medium is the message comes from, I think, the 1950s or 60s, a guy named Marshall McLuhan talking about the importance of television and how it shaped, like, the nature of the technology and the medium kind of shaped the way people receive it. And kind of ripping on that, we're talking about how games media,

the media on which games are published and distributed, affects the way that they are designed and the way that they work. And that's not something we face so much these days, aside from things like PT being delisted and disappearing forever from people's libraries, and Sony coming to your door and saying, you need to give us that file back. But back, you know, prior to kind of the current generation of games, I do think that physical media had a big impact

on how games had to be designed and kind of limited them but also gave them different capabilities and we're going to talk about that. It's probably not going to be as funny as a Bob Mackey panel if you were expecting to be thoroughly entertained with amusement and hilarity. You'll have to wait for Midwest Gaming Classic for that one. Sorry about that.

Yeah, this is going to be terrible, terrible panel. You might not have come in saying you feel terrible tonight but you're going to leave saying that. That's our guarantee. You're going to be like, I got my money's worth, yeah. But now this is more of a historic overview, more of a, I think a somewhat serious discussion about, you know, how video games have been shaped

through the years, and that's why I called in these guys. They're kind of the ringers. They know a lot about tech. They know a lot about, yeah, tech, basically. I knew a lot about tech, but I knew a lot about tech, but I forgot all of it right before I came in the room. Well, I really hope it floods back to your brain as you read these notes that I put together.

So, yeah, I'm going to start by asking you guys here on the panel, what was the first kind of video game that you remember playing? Like, what medium was it stored on? Was it a cartridge, a discette? Was it an arcade board? It was a 5.5.5 inch floppy drive on a Tandy 1,000. And I think it was Zaxon, was the first one that I remember. Zaxon or King's Quest?

I can't remember which game. That's cool. Yeah, I... One of my first games I remember playing was Donkey Kong on the Atari 800, which came on a little brown cartridge and basketball as well. My brother used to frustrate me. I have a brother who's five years older than me, and I was like really little, and so he'd just keep the ball away, and it was really frustrating. But he thought it was hilarious. Anyway, yeah, cartridges.

Yeah, okay. And my first video game memory is playing Ms. Pac-Man in the arcades. So each of these were very different experiences, and I think each of the games came out differently. Bob, you mentioned a crossover there, Zaxon on Tandy. I feel like the Tandy version was not authentic to the arcade in most respects. No, no. It was more like a worse version

of the master system version of Zaxon. Okay, which was like a better version of the Klico Vision version. Yeah. So somewhere in between. Was it CGA graphics? Yes. Yeah, that was a rough period. But I will say we'll get to cartridges later

because we're taking a chronological journey and cartridges came in after video games had been around for a while to begin with, we actually want to go all the way back to the beginning when video games came on paper cards that you punched holes in, punch cards. We were talking

before this panel to figure out if we have ever actually used punch cards ourselves, and I don't know that we have, aside from like SAT test, which isn't really video games. No, no, no. That predates us. My dad used them

college, that kind of thing, you know. And I still know, up until the 80s, they still had mainframes in colleges where they had to do batch processing on cards and stick them in a thing, and they run them through and load the program, and you get the results a day later printed out for you. Has anyone out here actually done programming on punch cards? One, all right. Cool. How was that experience for you? It sucked. Okay, it sucked. Yeah. Which is about what I would expect. So basically, yeah, Punch card, that's the data right there, the ROMs, the ones and zeros, basically. Like, there's a hole there, so that means, what, on, basically?

Like, that's the bit. Yeah. Each column is a bite. Oh, yeah, that's a whole bite there. Yeah, and there's 80 columns. That's where we got the 80-column screen from, ironically, you know, from an 80-column punch card. So there's not really a lot you can do with a game made on a punch card like this. But in the very early days of video games, computers weren't something you had to.

in your home. They were something you went to a university or to a science lab and snuck in past the military guards to get to. And you couldn't take the video game home with you. You put it on a storage media such as this or a reel-to-reel tape. I found a really great photo of

an authentic 1970s computing experience right there. You put it on these kind of shared storage spaces and everyone could kind of jump in and access the files or modify them. And so there was this real kind of collaborative sense in the early days of games like, is it Space War or Computer Space?

I always get those two mixed up. It's Space War, right? And Zork and so forth, where lots of people collaborated on someone else's original idea, and it just got better and better as it kind of circulated, and more people threw in ideas and improvements to the code and so forth. But again, you know, a punch card, there's not much there. So these games tended to be very small, and they took a long time to load. And Nintendo brought this technology back.

in the early 2000s with the e-reader for Game Boy Advance so you two could play Donkey Kong Jr. by sliding a paper card through a scanner ten times. Hmm. Progress. I don't know about that. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.

And the Barcode Badler, remember that? I do remember Barcode Badler. Cool. But eventually we moved on to the days of the arcade and people started creating custom boards for arcade games. And you could do more with this. Look at all those chips on there. Those chips have got to hold way more than one or two bits or bytes like the punch card did.

So, yeah, these were kind of present and sort of the mainstay of arcades for a very long time. People would build brand new boards, essentially, for each game they wanted to create until, you know, some of the standards kind of came along a little bit later in the 80s. But basically they use, it says, TTR logic chips. What guys, what is TTR logic? I heard that transistor, transistor logic. I don't know what it means. Okay, great.

There's a series of chips made by TI and the logic chips that were just, you know, a combination of gates into an integrated circuit. And then the whole history of electronics and all technology is simplifying, I mean, combining things into other modules you could stick into other things and combining all that into a small package. So at this phase in technology, they weren't doing discrete components as much. they had ICs that combined a lot of functionality, but they weren't using microprocessors yet.

But lots of important games came from these discrete logic boards. Yeah, like Pong, Pong, yes. Computer space. Space race? Yeah, didn't I read. Exidy's death race? Why did you have that one? That's a great game, death race.

Okay, it's kind of very specific, though. Space Invaders, that's another one. No, space invaders used an 80-80 CPU. Oh, wait, what? Yeah. Computer. Yeah. Yeah.

Hayanko Alien actually began as a computer game. So that was probably on a diskette. I haven't actually looked into that one. I kind of let you down. Sorry. The weird thing about this, the discrete logic games, is that they were not programmed, so to speak, with software. They had to list out the program in logic

and how it would manipulate the spots on the screen and everything. I asked Al Alcorn one time, how did you just wrap your head around it? And he just said, I just did it. It wasn't a great answer. Because I was so used to, we think about sitting down at a keyboard and programming a piece of software and running it on a computer,

but they had to wrap their head around, doing it physically, manipulating the video signal at a raw level. Anyway, incredible. But eventually people wanted to bring video games home and make money that way because you can only make so much in the arcades. You can make basically nothing at universities

and military laboratories. So home was where the money was. was, and these discrete logic chips, which required basically, like, you know, custom design every time and were kind of relatively expensive to manufacture versus something that was more standardized, wouldn't cut it, wouldn't cut it, yes, that's what I mean. So we start seeing a transition into home consoles in the early 70s, the first being the Magnavox Odyssey 2, which... One.

Sorry, MagnaVox Odyssey 1, yes, I guess that came first. Thank you, Benj. It's not like the Xbox, where they made. make the Xbox music, then the Xbox One. Microsoft makes it really confusing now. Xbox is backwards. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, so the Odyssey One actually had all

of its games built into the system, but it did use something kind of like cartridges or cards. As you see on the right side there, all these things came with the Odyssey One, plus it came with screen overlays that you stuck on your television screen to pretend you were playing like hockey or something,

even though it was just the same little dots moving around. But those cards on the right side, those were jumpers that you would insert into the console and it would basically change the arrangement of the circuits inside and cause it to activate a different built-in game. So the games were there. You just had to like manually, physically switch the computer around to bring those to life. So that's a pretty limiting, I would say. You were kind of limited to what was built into the console. Yeah, there's, the Odyssey One had a whole bunch of modules, like a spot generator modules

and a line generator module and different sort of logic. You turn on and off whether the balls will collide with each other and disappear. And that's what those cards are doing. They are jumpering those things on and off. And if you think about it,

I don't know how many bits of storage that is. There's 28 pins on each side of one of those cards. Somebody could do the math, but that's like, you know, like 256 bits of storage. Sounds good to me. Programming the console. This isn't tax season,

so you can just make up. Even though it's not, yeah, I just made that up. But, you know, even though it's not a software-based computer inside, it was telling the program what to do. I mean, the console, what to display. And they made up for the limitations of the games with, I think they had three spots. Two player-controlled spots and a ball and a net. And so you could move the spots around, turn them on off.

So they had the overlays, and then they added in this board game paraphernalia, which is these, you know, you could do a roulette game or you paste the cellophane thing on the screen with a roulette wheel and one person has to close their eyes in the instruction that says, close your eyes and fiddle with the knobs and see where it ends up so you can gamble with your friends doing that. There's a lot of kind of trusting your friends to play correctly when it came to the Odyssey.

Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, see, I knew Ralph Baer who created this, and I played it with him in his basement in 2012, who's one of his prototypes, and he, I was like, I think you let me win. Because he's really good at it, but there's also, there was an English knob. It's not like Pong had this incident reflection circuit where it would actually bounce off the paddle at the angle it hits it, but the Odyssey had no such thing. You had to actually move an English knob to surprise people.

So like at the last minute, as the ball's going by, you can like go whoop and go around those guys things. But the important thing is for the relative, you know, for the, you know, for the, purposes of this conversation, those were all built into the console when it shipped. So there wasn't something you could add to the console. You could interpret the spots in a different way, I'd say. They did add on extra kits kits and stuff you could buy, but they had extra overlays and little parts. So yes, very limited.

But consoles would expand considerably three years later when a company called Fairchild Electronics or Fairchild something or another came out with the Channel F. And that was the first console to have cartridges. And I was going to ask like, hey, what's everyone's favorite form of physical media for video games? but everyone's answer should be cartridges because they are the best. They are versatile and amazing, and they have the limitations, yes, absolutely. They tend to be more expensive than optical media or magnetic media. They tend to be lowering capacity for the price. But they're so good in so many other ways.

They're so durable. You know, a Nintendo cartridge or an Atari cartridge. You can plug it in if the contacts are clean. It's probably still going to work, where you can't necessarily say that with a third. 30 or 40 or 50-year-old diskette. You can do so much to add on to cartridges, and we're going to look at the way that actually happened. But the important thing about cartridges

when it came to console design is that the console didn't have to have games built into it. It could just be a device that ran programs, and the program code was in the cartridge. So anytime you put a different cartridge in, you would be running a different program, creating a different game, or playing a different game,

and it was really only limited by the technical capacity of the console and the storage capacity of the cartridge, I guess. Games as software was a revolutionary idea, although it was inevitable. But I did a huge article for Fast Company about the origins of the video game cartridge back in, like, 2014 or 15, if you want to look that up. I found the people who invented the cartridge idea, Wallace Kershner, and Haskell. I forgot his name. Yeah. And they worked for a company called Alpex.

that had done some adding machine equipment. And they invented this idea in the early 70s, about 73 of doing a plugable cartridge to change software out with an 80-80 chip. And they got Fairchild's attention, and Fairchild licensed it, and then the rest is history. And Fairchild is the, everybody loves the Jerry Lawson story,

one of the Black Pioneers. It's the last day of Black History Month, so. Right. Yep. So talking about the things that cartridges can do that you can add to the cartridges. Here's one of the most famous examples of a cartridge that does way more

than, or lets the console do way more than it's supposed to do. And this is Akumajo Dinsetsu, or Castlevania 3. The Japanese version ran on a special chip. It was a series of chips that Konami created that they could only use in Japan because Nintendo of America was like, actually, we want to control everything,

and so you can only use certain chips that we create and would provide. But in Japan, they were a little more free to do stuff. So everyone remembers the adventures of Luke Wilson as he fought Dracula. He's not the only Wilson that likes games, but his brother's more into, wow, thanks. I workshopped that one for a while.

But yeah, this game, not only could it do way more than the Nintendo or the Famicom could do by default, which was basically Super Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers was the NES hardware at its fundamental level firing on all cylinders, doing as much as the console inherently could. These chips had additional processors inside of them. They could add extra memory, extra storage.

In the case of this particular cartridge, it had the ability to play extra sound channels. So the music was much richer. There was better animation in the backgrounds of the screens, the stages, and there were more animations for characters and so forth. It was really, like, if you played this immediately after playing the early Nintendo games, you'd be like, is this really the same console? but it was. And Konami, that wasn't the most advanced chip they made.

The most advanced chip they made was actually the VRC 7, which was in this game, Lagrange Point. And this basically, you notice that this cartridge is way taller than Akumajo Densetsu? That's because the VRC6 is a huge chip. It's like the size of an NES cartridge, basically. And Famicom carts were half the size of an NES cart. But the reason it's so big is because it had a separate sound processor

inside of it. It had basically the equivalent of the FM synthesis add-on that Sega created for the master system in Japan, which was a module that plugged into the system. But you didn't have to have a module to hear the amazing, like, arcade quality sound in this game. It was built into the cartridge. It was also really, really expensive. But when you plug this into your system and you hear the music coming out, you're like, how is my Nintendo doing this? And that's because a cartridge is able to do that. You can put that stuff inside. Do you guys have any NES or Famicom or other carts that you're especially like, I can't believe that happened? Super Mario 3 probably for me.

Just seeing the difference in graphics between number one and number three, it was pretty mind-blowing as a kid. It's still pretty fascinating now that I actually understand why it's so much better. But it just doesn't, nothing would ever compare to the fact of plugging both games in and just going, I can't believe this is the same console. Yeah, Castlevania 3 is amazing, which you were just talking about. But also, I, you know, I was sharing with Jeremy, I did a piece a long time ago about weird internal cartridge expansion chips and stuff. And the weirdest one that I ever saw was for the Odyssey 2. That was actually the Phillips Video Pack G700, whatever it was in Europe.

That console is so primitive that when they want to make a chess game, they just made a cartridge and put a little wire out to it and a huge extra computer that you put on the top of the thing to give it more horsepower to play a game of chess. And it's all coming through the cartridge port. Yeah, I feel like adding another computer to your console is probably taking things a little too far. It's 32X. That's taking two things too far.

But, yeah, that same trick was used for Go games in Japan, which is basically Japanese chess approximately. There were some NES super Famicom games that actually had arm chips inside of them, like the same processor or more powerful than what ran the Game Boy Advance was showing up inside of cartridges in Japan only because Nintendo of America was like,

that's ridiculous, let's not do that. But these cartridges sold for like $150 a piece. They were really expensive. But if you wanted a very detailed, accurate simulation of the board game Go that could challenge you like no other than you wanted one of these games from, I think, SETA, that had its own, basically, computer inside of it.

Yeah, are you going to do the FX chip? I think first we should look at this little guy, the Aladdin deck enhancer. This is, like, the exhibit of video game cartridges. I heard you like a video game, so we put a cartridge inside your cartridge. So you plug this, the deck enhancer, into your NES,

and then you could plug these little mini cartridges into that. I'm not really sure what the advantage there was. Was it to work around the lockout, system? Yes. Yeah, I think so. So they didn't have to duplicate the lockout chip every time and it could be lower cost. But I got an Aladdin that was new in the box on eBay like 20 years ago and it never got

to work. I think it was just junk, like new old stock that never worked. So I don't even know if they actually worked at all. Has anybody got an Aladdin to work before? Yeah. Okay. Did it work? No.

It worked, yeah. It never worked for anyone. But yes, it does. It doesn't. The market is a cool game. Yeah. yep so it's a smaller it's just dumb it's more plastic

I don't know there was a lot of empty space in NES cartridges in fact I have a small story about that the NES game 720 my brother had it when I was a kid and he put it on the back of my dad's car and then later like where's the game we're like oh crap

he drove off with the cartridge on the top of the car so we went around the neighborhood and looked for it and we got it and it was all crushed and we put it in it still worked But, so then we took it apart and like the only the bottom third of the cartridge has a PC board in it. So the top part that got crushed, luckily they got run over was fine. So we still have that, I still have that crushed cartridge and I, you play it every once in a while.

So next up is kind of a more enjoyable version of the Aladdin deck enhancer, and that's the Super Game Boy, which was basically a cartridge that had a Game Boy inside of it that then could output video to the Super NES. And so then you'd plug in a Game Boy cartridge and you could play Game Boy games. But not only that, you could play Game Boy games with enhancements. You could change the color palette. Some games had borders and special color palettes programmed into them.

The one that I showed here is actually the fanciest of all the Game Boy, Super Game Boy games, Space Invaders. You might think, a 1970, what, 8, 77, 79. We're making that numbers again. 78 and a half. So this, yeah. Anyway, you're probably not. not getting hung up on the numbers, but you're probably thinking to yourself, how could this game from the 1970s have been the pinnacle of a device released in 1993? And that is because

Taito, in all their insanity, put a Super NES game inside of the Game Boy cartridge. So when you play it in the Super Game Boy, you can choose to boot into the Super NES mode, and it just resets your system, basically, and relaunches, and you play a Super NES version of Space Invaders. That is not accessible by playing it on your Game Boy, obviously. Like, The Game Boy game is also still in there, but it was just a thing they could do. They took advantage of this really esoteric feature, and no one else did, which makes this very unique kind of Game Boy game. So if you ever have the chance to buy the American Space Invaders for Game Boy,

do it because you're getting two, two games in one. Yeah, my favorite Super Game Boy game that does something weird is Street Fighter 2, because you can actually use a second controller port to play two-player, one-on-one, head-to-head. in that game. Anyway. Bob? I think we're about to just send a bunch of people out to scour Space Invaders now. I mean, it's going to go for cheap. It's like five bucks.

So that's two, two games for the price of like half a game. It's very inexpensive. Bob, do you have any favorite Super Game Boy enhancements? Any... Zelda? The Link's Awakening, I think if you put the DX version in, it changes it has the different palettes on the outside.

My cousin always loved Donkey Kong. He loved the different thing on that, too. My favorite Game Boy game is always going to be Metroid, too. But that was before the Super Game Boy, so we missed out on the DX. But they put it on the box. They did. They did. It was alive.

Well, I guess it made the game a little more, like you could see Samus a little more easily. I don't know. Yeah, you could see everything a lot more easily. I mean, the Game Boy screen was pretty terrible. That's true. This was before Game Boy Pocket. Yeah. True.

Also, you have another Game Boy gadget here, another personal favorite. Sorry, I only had a photograph of Blue on Blue, so it's a little hard to see, but that is the Game Boy camera, which, which, as the name implies, is a digital camera built into a game cartridge. Try doing that with your CD-ROM, I ask you. It's not going to happen. Yeah. It'd be spinning around real fast. That camera is the weirdest thing. Another great one, Wari Aware Twisted. This has an accelerometer inside of it. Basically, there were a few other games that did this, but I think Wari Aware Twisted did it best. Basically all the games, the mini-games, microgames, I guess technically, in this game, control

controlled by tilting the system. And it could register all those different degrees of motion. And they just built that right into the cartridge and made for a really unique video game, like really like no other. There's another one here. You can't really see the title, but this is Robopon from Atlas,

which is maybe the most ridiculously overloaded Game Boy cartridge of all time. It has a real-time clock. It has a battery backup. It has an infrared port. port. And I want to say it has a rumble feature. There's like four or five, what's that? There's a speaker. Okay, so there's also a speaker inside the cartridge. So they basically made their own video game

system for this really kind of like okay-ish Pokemon clone. It was peak Game Boy. Let me tell you what. Yeah. They must have had a lot of money to waste on that project. Atlas? I don't know. This was before Persona hit a big, so I don't think they had any money. What were they thinking? Like, yeah, this is going to be awesome. We'll put a speaker in it. Everybody's going to buy it. I don't know. They were at least like three or four versions of it in Japan. I think only one of them came here. Maybe they love it. They were there. Yeah, okay. Well, there you go. Yeah, it was like, you know, there was this kind of Pokemon arms race going on where everyone was like, we have the ability to use turn-based battles to catch little things and trade. them, but everyone else does that. So what can we do to make it different? Some people said,

let's do Hello Kitty, and some people said, let's make it Mega Man. But Atlas said, let's just give people this insane cartridge that cannot possibly be emulated. And so it's still a very valuable cartridge now because you can't emulate it. Piracy, yeah, protection against piracy. Okay, so apparently you could point a remote control at it, at the IR port. That was built into the game cartridge. Fortunately, Nintendo's next system, the Game Boy Advance, I think, had an IR port, didn't it? No. Color.

Okay, that's right. And then they took it out for the advance because Nintendo always takes out a thing that you like every time, so you'll buy the next one that'll take out a different thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then finally, a personal favorite of mine, Boktai, the Sun is in. your hands. This is the game where Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima

said, you nerds need some vitamin D, go outside. He also, what's that? Yes, that's true. I did beat this game sitting by a bay window in my apartment as the sun went down behind the building across the street and I was fighting the final battle

like this. But this cartridge and the clear part of the top has I think a UV sensor built into it that detects sunlight or if you're very, very clever in an ultraviolet light or infrared light or whatever. You know, one of those black lights that they used to use. Yeah, I did that. But it basically gave you like this real day, night cycle

within the game and you could use actual sunlight to charge up your vampire-killing gun, which was pretty clever. Yeah. It would have been cool to do that with Castlevania, too, which has a day-night cycle. I feel like a terrible night thing. have a curse. That would have been interesting.

Strangely enough, even though this is, they're both Konami series, Boktai and Castlevania did not cross over, but Boktai did cross over with Mega Man Battle Network in Japan. So there was a vampire boss, Shade Man, that you could fight in the third game that never came here. Shade Man? It's so easy a

Shave Man can do it. Thank you. That's why I'm here. And I think this is the last of the weirdo Game Boy cartridges we're going to show, But this is the one I mentioned earlier, the e-reader, where it's basically a barcode scanner that uses, like, micro dot technology, and you scan your paper card through, and then you scan another

one through, and then you scan another one through, and then you scan another one through, and then you scan another one through, and then you've got pinball. And then if you want to play a different game, you do that all over again, and pinball goes away because there was only enough storage memory inside for one game at a time. But I think most people actually did not use this to play NES games. I think they mostly used it to get furniture for animal. crossing, which was actually a very good use for it. And there were also some really, really

weird levels that someone created for Super Mario Advance 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario Advance 4. That's how they get you, binge. Numbers are imaginary. They mean nothing. Nintendo's never been good at naming things, I'll just

tell you that. I don't know. That's a mouthful. Anyway, yeah, so this technology did not last that long, but it's interesting and kind of and now we have Amoebo, which is also pretty much gone away. So time is a squared circle. Thank you.

No, no, okay, so someone pointed out that, sorry, I don't know your name, but someone pointed out that the Super Mario Brothers Advance, Super Mario Advance for E-reader setup, can be played or emulated on Wii Virtual Console, but it's actually WiiU. So it's still available. It's like eight or nine bucks. So if you want to play some really strange Swamory Brothers three levels, go download that to virtual console on the dusty WiiU

that you're not using for anything else. And remember, like, oh, wow, this was a really weird system. What am I doing? But you'll also get to play some really strange levels to go with your weird system, and it all kind of fits together nicely. But I didn't want to turn this into just a Nintendo Love Fest. There's also Genesis and lock-on technology.

Did you guys ever do this? All right. Did you guys ever do this? Oh, absolutely. Tell us about it. So, the short, short version was when they were making Sonic 3, they knew that they weren't going to have time to complete it before the holiday season. So they decided to split it up into two different games.

And they had what I thought was a really neat idea of being able to lock on Sonic 3 to Sonic and Knuckles. So they're both each independent games, but when you put them together, it unlocks different things in Sonic and Knuckles and Sonic 3, and Sega made it so that if you plug Sonic 2 into it, you could then use Sonic Knuckles in Sonic 2. And I just recently heard something about how the way they did that was by including the Sonic 2 ROM on the Sonic and Knuckles cart so that when they plugged it in, you're not actually using the cartridge,

it's just kind of authenticating it, and that's how you're able to get to different things that didn't exist before. So it's just as much a lie. as blast processing was. I'm a little offended. You could actually play the game, though, and that's the difference. Whereas burst mode,

which doesn't really even exist that much, is, yeah, the little marketing thing. I always wondered how they pulled it off, putting knuckles in Sonic, too, yeah. Yeah, and they were going to do the same thing with Sonic 1, but they ran out of time, so then I think you just get, like, another, like, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, the bonus levels, right, exactly, yeah. Wow. Benj, I think you wanted to mention the FX chip. Well, what I was going to mention is, like, when we were talking about the weird chips you put in a cartridge, and one of the wildest ones is the, in Virtua Racing for the Genesis, it has an SVP chip, and that cartridge cost.

It's like a special DSP chip that runs at 23 megahertz. It's like a super high-speed chip for that. Yeah, the Genesis is like 7 megahertz? So it's about three times. It's about three times as fast in terms of just pure megahertz as Genesis itself. It's a good version of Virtue Fighter, although it's kind of, I mean, not virtual. Virtual Racing, but it's kind of low resolution, but it just made the cartridge cost $100 a piece, which is crazy, and they never did that again.

But that's the weirdest, like, most powerful chip I've ever seen. I think it may have been more beefy than the FX2 or something. Maybe. I still think the Shogi and Go chips in Japan only were probably more powerful, but they're, like, at a certain point, you're just like, why not just buy a computer? you can't put a computer in your pocket right that depends on the computer well you can now

exactly see technology caught up with us back then you couldn't but yeah I think that's I think that's about it for the days of cartridges and the cool things they can do we still have cartridges these days but Nintendo doesn't put weird stuff into their switch chips anymore I guess because it has the little hatch that you close over the top of it

basically ever since the 3DS I want to say they started putting a little little clasp over their cartridges so you don't lose them, which I guess is good. But it does prevent these big weird things dangling out. I kind of miss the days of using a DS light

and having some big weird bulging things sticking out from the Game Boy Advance slot. Those were good times. Not safe for work. What's that? Not safe for work. It was perfectly safe for work. I worked at a video game's website, so it was fine. Okay. You know, there were cool things like the Arkanoid

DS paddle, where it was like Game Boy cartridge that was actually just a DS paddle, like a paddle controller for your DS, and you could play a great game of Arcanoid on your DS. Wasn't there a RAM cartridge for the DS that you could put in to play? It was just for the browser? Okay, for the web browser. Oh, yeah, and there was also a play-on for Game Boy Advance, which turned your Game Boy Advance into a multimedia player. They should be doing this presentation.

They know more than that. No, right? It's great. Should get a mic's out there. Anyway, I'm lingering on cartridges, but it's just because they're so cool, because now we're on to the next stage of history, which is discets. And, all right, we've got some discot fans out there, so what's up with that? I mean, I ask this in all seriousness.

They always seem like a very fragile and difficult sort of media. You can't touch it in the wrong place, or your game will disappear. And also don't leave it in sunlight, and also don't put it any place close. to a magnetic field, you know, like all the magnets that are in your speakers and your computer and so forth. Keep it away from your computer when you're using it in your computer. It's just very limiting. But I guess at the time, they were kind of good, especially compared to cartridges. Well, for the density of what you could store on them versus the cost, they were incredible. You know, they're very cheap for the amount of storage you could fit in small

space. And they were rewritable. That's a hard word to say when you're in a panel. They were re-writable so you could save data. You could save your state in a game. You could save custom load runner levels. You could program your own games and save it and send it to your friends. You could copy someone else's game that they paid money for and share that with all your friends and make your favorite developers go out of business.

It was a really versatile sort of media. That's what I did. That's what I was all about. Retro gaming is about putting people out business. Is that true, Bob? No. Okay. So we have a difference of opinion.

here. So there are a lot of good things to diskettes. And they did become smaller physically over time, but gradually higher in capacity. And by the time Sony invented the 3.5 inch diskette, you get that little shutter slide window there. So you actually had to try to erase those disks. You had to actually like pull the little slide aside and say, ah! And at that point, like, you know what you're doing. That's like hitting a cartridge with a hammer. Just don't do that. A few consoles did see disk at add-ons. Most

notably, Nintendo in Japan, released the Famicom Disc System, an add-on for their equivalent of the NES, which actually expanded the capabilities of the console not with the disc itself, but it did add another sound channel. But the discs were higher capacity

than could be like the equivalent of cartridges when this was released. So this is where you got games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. Kitikere's. They appeared first on diskette, and then we had to wait in America until cartridges kind of caught up with the discettes to get big enough. You could save your progress on the disc, too, which is... Save your progress. We had to get batteries in our cartridges for that. And also, there was the disc kiosks, where you could

take one of the blue discs and take it to a convenience store, pay just a few dollars for the disc, plug it in, and for a few dollars, download a game to it. Then when you were sick of that game because it was like a square game by disc operating group, which was terrible, you could go back and you could replace it with something you'd like, like golf here, or an exciting basket, which is double dribble, or, I don't know, CluClooland, I don't know. Why would you want to do that? Cluegeland is great. Nintendo's first female protagonist. Don't forget it. But yeah, like the discettes for

Famicom disk system were also vulnerable. The standard storage discets did not have any kind of window to protect the media. The rewritable ones did. And they came with little signs, as you can see, embedded into them that said, do not touch. So they kind of learned that, hey, maybe kids aren't very smart when it comes to discats. Whoa. What is this thing? Oh, right. This is Deco. This is, we're moving along to tape cassettes. Tape cassettes were like the worst version of discets. The good thing about tape cassettes is that you could go to the store and you could buy a tape cassette. And then you could use that tape cassette. And instead of putting music on it, you could put game date on.

on it or program data of any sort. But the downside is that it was very, very, very, very slow. It was very, like, our friends in Europe mostly used disc- or tape cassettes on their computers. And you'll hear talk about them, like, spending five minutes to load a level of a game, and then, you know, 20 seconds later, they lose, and they have to spend another five minutes to load that game.

And that was just part of the experience. I think there's a little bit of a Stockholm syndrome there. I was going to say, I think they're like, 110 bod, which is about 110 bits per second or something, which is really slow. I did have a Colico Adam with a disc, a cassette drive, and so I know the pain of our British friends. I had a TRS 80 color computer, too. I think I vaguely remember my dad was loading a program on his Tandy 1,000, and I was just so fascinated by the noises it made, and, you know, that the lever was closed. I think it was like three years old, that I undid the floppy drive level, or lever,

it was going and it ruined whatever thing he was copying. So he was like, I'm going to get you your own computer. Don't touch mine again. So it was TRS-80 and it had a cartridge slot on the side but it also had a tape adapter and the tape adapter also doubled as a very terrible music player if you wanted to play your cassettes through it.

It was like one very awful speaker but yeah I have memories of just sitting there like click 30 minutes that was the pain of it we had a couple games on cassette for the Atari 800 and they happened to be pretty terrible games. So if it's been a few years since I played them, I'd load them up, and it takes like an hour to load it.

And then you play it for 10 minutes, like, this is terrible? And you just wasted an hour. Did it really take an hour, or is that just like childhood memory? It felt like an hour, probably. It was probably literally 15 minutes or more. But I will say that in the defense of tape cassettes, they were very cheap. And also, they had really high storage capacity. Like, you could store a lot on there.

I mentioned the Calico Adam earlier. Calico Vision's kind of their killer app when the system launched was Donkey Kong on cartridge. But like pretty much every other cartridge version of Donkey Kong, it was not the complete game. It was missing levels. But the Calico Adam version, which came on a cassette, did have all the stages and the proper order and everything. So you could get the real Donkey Kong experience, which is something you can't even get on Nintendo's own systems until that one really limited hack that they sent out that not everyone has been able to play at Donkey Kong. So, you know, you take the good with the bad, mostly bad, but there was a little good to it.

In this case, this device is called Deco. It's the Data East cassette something, operation. I can't remember exactly, but basically it was an arcade system designed in 1979, 1980, and the arcade system had this big frame inside of it, and at the top of it there was a little cassette port, and they would distribute their games on tape cassettes. And so arcade operators could very easily swap out the cassette and have basically a new game. They'd put new labels, new stickers on the side of the cabinet, and, you know, games like lock and chase, and a few other kind of famous games came from the Deco system.

And it was a very inexpensive alternative to buying an entirely new arcade machine, because at the time you didn't have the JAMA system that is kind of the standard of arcades starting in like 1987 or so. So it was a good improvement for, you know, for arcade owners. And unlike computer tape cassettes, they didn't have to wait for the game to load every time they played. The game would load entirely into memory at the start of the day or whenever you turned on the machine. And then once it loaded, it was in the RAM, and so it just worked like a normal video game cabinet. You guys ever played any Deco games? No.

No. There you go. I don't know that I've ever actually used a Deco machine myself. I can't imagine that they held up very well over time. but they were a good innovation back in the early 80s. Yeah, there's the Calico Adam. You can see someone putting a discette into the discrette tray while there is a cartridge of rock and rope next to it.

Yeah, cassette. It had a high-speed cassette drive that could load a lot faster than other machines. It still took a while, though. But they had a bug where if you left the cassette in when you turned it on it, it would like wipe the tape. Yeah, like put a sticker on it. I think the computer, like, sent out an electronic, electromagnetic pulse.

Like, you get with a nuclear bomb every time it turned on. So, you know, like, how they say if there's a nuke, then airplanes will crash because their computers will die. Well, this was, this basically, like, was a tiny nuke in your living room, and the airplane was your copy of Donkey Kong. So the next time an airplane crashes, it's because somebody turned on a Colico Adam. Yes, don't ever, ever turn one of these on. This is how Lost started, thank you.

every 108 minutes you have to turn off the machine. There's another one. Nintendo had one of these two, the Famicom Data Recorder, and if you ever played the game Excite Bike and were wondering, hey, how come it's saying like load or save?

I can't do that. Well, that's because it was designed to go with this cassette player that was only available in Japan along with an entire keyboard and a basic cartridge with extra RAM in it that turned your Famicom

into a, like it was the family computer. Well, this actually made, made it literal. And there were a few games including ExciteBike and I think Mock Rider and wrecking crew that worked for it. And they didn't bother to take out that code in the U.S. versions because they weren't sure if they were going to release the cassette player here. So don't try to load data into ExciteBike because it'll just cause your N.S. to hang. I wonder if it would work if you wired it up to the port on the bottom. Spence report. Yeah. I tried that, but I don't think I had the full setup, so it just

You really tried that? I did really try it. On an Aeneas? Wow. It's cool. Yeah. I actually, you sold me, you're one of those things. I did.

I thought it was really, really neat. And then I got it and it was like, I can't do anything. Don't actually need this. This is not useful to me. So as much as I love the maroon cassette player, it's now at Vinges Home. Yep. Ah, cards. Ah, cards.

but they're smaller, you can hold them in your hand as Sega's beautiful hand model did many times over. I just want to admire this packaging for a minute. It's so good. It's so good. It's so Cartesian. Grid-based. It just like, it folds into itself.

It's just like staring into the future. A few of my friends have full, complete sets of games for different consoles, and I always joked, like, where's your SMS sec? I want to see the beautiful artwork on your wall. Is it just that? Some dude's hand. Just hands and stripes. I'm not joking, the one thing I bought this year at Pax was Ghost House,

because they had it complete in box, and I was like, I got to own this guy's hand. It's so good. Yeah. But Sega wasn't the only company that did that. I think Hudson and NAC had much greater success with the TurboGraphic 16 PC engine, which had these devices called Hugh Cards, or Huck cards, or Who cards, whatever. they were huds and cards

and they didn't have as much data capacity as a big cartridge, but they had some pretty good games on them, like R-type and some other stuff. Name some other games. What's that? Keith Courage. No, some good games, I said. Yeah.

Anyway, yeah, the cards were less expensive and they had less capacity and they were easier to lose, but I don't know, there's just something appealing about them. And the turbographic, I don't know if you've ever seen the Japanese version, the PC engine. it's about the size of like three CD cases stacked up. It's so tiny.

So it makes sense that this cartridge would plug into it. In the American version, they like said, oh, Americans don't like small things, so let's just add a bunch of empty space to it. And now the cards look kind of silly, but what can you do? Plus, you can put one of these in your wallet and pull it out to confuse bartenders when they card you.

Just put it on my card. My name is Bonk. The name's Courage. Keith Courage. You can be Keith Courage. You'll be Bonk, okay. I'm fine with that. People think I'm really naughty in England.

Oh, optical media. We're finally there. So, Benj made an interesting comment before this panel. You said that, or was it you, Bob? Probably. Oh, I think it was Bob. Never mind. Benj, I'm giving you credit you don't deserve.

Terrible. I don't deserve it. Sorry, Bob. I wasn't trying to diminish you. It's okay. You said CDs are interesting because they're the first medium that was a step backward. In processing power.

So, of course, CDs were a cheap way to get a lot more storage. into one spot. And at the time, of course, they were also advertised as how durable they were, which is kind of hilarious in hindsight. But yeah, if you take games that are released on the N64 and the PlayStation, everybody knows what PlayStation loading time is like. So, you know, you don't get the CD quality music because it would cost too much to put all those extra chips in the cartridge. But, yeah, in my opinion, that was the first time that it was a step down in performance at least. But, you know, you have a lot more for your buck, I guess. So you are our team N64.

versus Team PlayStation. I know, I'm about to get beat up after this, but I actually don't like the N64. Oh, okay. So you think it has a better storage capacity or storage medium, but you don't like this? I'm a fan of the cartridges over CDs where possible, so. What would you think of the PlayStation had used cartridges?

I think for the time, I don't think it would have worked as well because you wouldn't have been able to get the CD quality audio and those amazing full-motion video games that aged so well. But at the time, it was. I think it would have probably hurt Sony over other places. And also at the time, too.

Anybody that remembers reading the magazines back then, it was always the new and exciting CD technology. The Sega CD is going to have something that you've never seen before. The Nintendo CD is going to be better than the Sega CD. And it just, it was such a thing that was important to everybody back then because it seemed so futuristic. It was. It was futuristic.

I mean, it was crazy because I did a piece about CD technology. I mean, you're talking about 650 megabytes on a disk in 1985, when that, you know, 1982 is when they first came out, but like when the first CD-ROM drive came out in 85, I mean, most floppy drives held 128K or something, you know, compared to, it's like a technology from the future. You couldn't help but feel like it was out of place. I don't think, yeah, I don't think it's on here.

Okay, so the Sega cards don't do it, but the master system games would always say, like, the one mega cartridge, and that meant megabit. So that was one-eighth of one megabyte, whereas a CD-ROM held 650 megabytes. So you can see there's a huge disparity in terms of capabilities, in terms of storage capacity. And as a result, that opened up

all kinds of new horizons for game design. All of a sudden, you know, as Bob mentioned, people were able to create bigger games. I mean, we're about to get a Final Fantasy 7 remake, but the original Final Fantasy 7, its entire marketing campaign in America revolved around the fact that it was on CD-ROM and it couldn't have been on CD-ROM if it had been

a Nintendo 64 game. They were like, hey, go get the guys at Nintendo blindfold because we're going to shoot them. Blindfold a cigarette, that's right. Like, they deserve to die for using cartridges. That's kind of mean-spirited, but also that was just like the sort of hype that surrounded CD-ROM because you had

games that just could be bigger, more beautiful, more impressive than was possible on cartridges. And yes, you had loading times, but But, you know, developers found ways to mitigate that in a lot of ways. Some of the best games had very little loading time back in the PlayStation and, you know, GameCube, Dreamcast era. Like, people got pretty good at kind of working around those limitations. Of course, you didn't get the add-ons to CD-ROMs you could have to cartridges, so no real-time clock inside of your CD-ROM.

That just wasn't physically possible. But there were, let's see, there we go. Yeah, there we go. People did come up with some cluges and figured out ways to expand the capability. of the consoles with memory cards. Sony had the pocket station, and Dreamcast had the VMU, which were, like, tiny computers that were also memory cards.

They could play games, and they could kind of expand the features of the games that they shipped with. And you only have to change the battery once a week. You'd know, because it would beep very loudly at you. Yeah, I'd beep at you. I hate that. I know that the Dreamcast has a very relaxing startup sound,

but the real sound of the Dreamcast startup is, beep. Beep. So we were kind of running along on time, but I did want to talk about a few other little forms of memory. This is the, it's a cartridge, but it's not a typical, you know, like solid-state ROM cartridge. This is a flash cartridge for NeoGeo Pocket Color. And this is pretty much what we use now. This was, to my knowledge, the first mass-produced system, mass-market system, to use flash-based technology as its primary storage medium.

Yeah. And flash is great because it's durable. It's not magnetic. You can't erase it easily, but you can rewrite it. Yeah, I thought that was an interesting choice. I still don't know why they did that other than probably easy to manufacture. They can make blank cartridges and just program and flash them, I guess, and put a label on them and send them out.

Yeah, and when Aruz, the gambling company, bought S&K, they were able to repurpose NeoGeo Pocket systems to turn them into Pachinko machines and rewrite all those NeoGeo Pocket Color games to be Pachinko games. So it worked out great for everyone. There's also the zip drive, sorry. Benj, I know you're a big fan of this zip drive. That's not a zip drive. That's a 64D drive.

Yeah, that's based on zip technology. Really? It was. I don't know. Is that true, anybody? I don't think so. It was based on zip technology, yes. Okay.

I'll take your word for it. Dreamcast was also going to have a zip-based storage ad-on technology, but didn't happen. I know that. Yeah, they had a real zip drive for that. Crazy. This was based on zip technology. I swear to God.

Okay. I'm just saying, I mean... It wasn't a floppy drive. There was a prototype Dreamcast zip drive that never came out. That's what I'm talking about. Yes. Yeah, so it was actually branded as Zip. Whereas 64D just used that technology.

But Zip drive was like a high capacity diskette. Yeah. And in addition to being vulnerable to magnetism, it was also vulnerable to itself. itself, and would just eventually die, and I was saving a lot of college art projects on these zip drives, and I always had to keep two of them on hand because one of them would start clicking at me, and that meant you could never use it again. Yeah. Great tech.

There's GD.ROM, which is CD-ROM, but bigger, and DVD-ROM, which is like GD-ROM, but bigger. And then there's cloud-based storage. So this is kind of where our story ends, because there's not really a whole lot of new innovation happening in terms of game storage, game technology, games media. We've kind of, I think, hit sort of a plateau where we're going to see maybe something in the future, but for now I think everything works pretty well the way it should. Although, Ben, I don't think you're a big fan of cloud-based storage. Based on the comments you made on our notes, they were all very...

I did? Yeah, I think you did. I don't know. You made some comments that seemed very critical. Were you just in a bad mood? I've always criticized cloud stuff just because you're putting control of the pure data in someone else's hands and I'd rather... I mean, the whole idea of the personal

computer was empowering the individual to have their own computer that do what they want without oversight or supervision or anything. And so it's sort of the opposite trend is going on right now. That's my beef with cloud computing. But it's cool that you can download games now to hard drives. I think that's awesome.

I'd rather do that than have shuffle a bunch of cartridges or CDs all the time. Bob, any final thoughts? You know, I'm both leery of and a giant fan of cloud-based storage. Like all my Google docs and stuff are saved there, which, of course, I backup to a hard drive every time I remember because I don't trust anybody else with my data. And that's the other side of it, is you're trusting other people with your data. I remember a few friends said, I don't even need my backup drivers anymore.

I'm going to pay for Amazon's cloud storage. That'll be available forever. And would they kill that project after a year or something like that? So yeah, your data is your own. So make sure that, you know, I have 20 years of IT, two backstop. cups of everything or else, you know, two is one and one is none. So cloud storage. Yeah, I mean, in addition to cloud storage, there were also, there have been attempts at cloud-based distributed gaming. I put the cloud joke up here, one, because ha-ha, but also

because Square Nix really made an effort to create their own, like, cloud-based game service, which they very foolishly called Shinra. That's just, like, don't name it after the villain. That's, that's just feeding into everyone's paranoia. But that, it didn't work out for them. I don't think anyone's really figured it out. I mean, Google just launched Stadia a few months ago. Yeah, sorry, what's that? Stadia.

Stadia. Stadia. Yeah, that's what I said, yeah. Yeah, I'm just repeating you. I'm your parrot, man. But even Google, like, this giant megalithic company that owns everything in the world now, like even they haven't figured it out. So there's still some kinks in the system to be worked out.

But anyway, guys, just as we wrap, what is your favorite form of video games media storage and why is it cartridges? Besides cartridges? It is, yes. And why is it cartridges? Why is it cartridges? Okay, because cartridges are great. They're durable, instant.

But really, like, if you could like just make a game and put it on any storage media, it doesn't matter, like, the technology running the system, what would it be? I don't know. CDs are pretty good because you can fit a lot of data on them. If you had a fast enough drive to load it up real quick, like a 53X, whatever, you know,

it would be good. What do you love so much about CDs? A lot of capacity. Versus a DVD-ROM or a Blue-Rae-ROM? Yeah, you can burn them real quick. Oh, okay. There you go. I'm not talking about like Glass Master in the 80s or something where you have to pay $100,000 to make a master.

For me, it's definitely cartridges because of speed and durability. I think you see, you know, these consoles that are in the 70s are still working as long as you don't, like, you know, as long as nobody spilled soda on them or tried to clean them with metal polish or anything like that. And, you know, they're still going to work, and they're probably going to outlast, or they at least have the potential to outlast all of their media for the short term, at least, meaning like 50 years plus because of how they're built. I'm interested to see what will last the longest, though,

because CDs are about 100 years, they think, for, you know, laser disks are already starting to rot out. So I'm kind of curious what's going to be the longest, longest. I would say I think ROM chips, because they're etched and silicon, like if you don't consider all the pins and other components in the cartridge, I mean, the piece of silicon inside the ROM chip is going to last eons, you know, I think. Yeah, I don't know if the speaker and Robupon is still working, but, you know, like, AirC Attack for Atari's 2,600, that still works.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, everyone, I think that's all we have, so we're going to let you go and you can go to other panels or go to bed if you're old like us. It's up to you. But thanks for coming out and taking time out of your Saturday evening. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

You could have been playing Steel Battalion, but instead you came here, and we really appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Yeah, thank you. See you next time. Welcome to Casual Magic, the show where we explore the fun side of Magic The Other. I'm your host of Magic the fun side of Magic the other. I'm your host. shivamput and each week we delve into everything from casual format to explorations of creatures

and card types to interviews with designers of the game. At casual magic, we believe that it just isn't magic without the gathering. Come along and play! Hunter, Hunter, Yu-Hakashow, literary analysis, comparative localization, jojo references. The works of Yoshihiro Togashi hold a specific kind of magic and the people who seek to examine their roots and spiritual descendants are known as the spirit hunters available on the greenlit podcast network hello my name is jonathan dun and i'm inviting you to listen to hour three cents a weekly podcast where myself and two of my very best gaming chums are counting down our top 100 favorite video games of all time for all the episodes and information check out our website

www. Our3cense.com. Video deathloop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on loop until we just can't take it anymore. Along the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guy. You can jump in on any episode, no need to worry about continuity. Check out Video Deathloop on the Greenlit Podcast Network with new episodes every Friday.