Scrame

As a child, my only real computers growing up were amigas, this was mostly my choice, and getting a second hand amiga with a shoebox full of floppies was probably the best thing I could have come across. I was in the middle of nowhere, and didn’t have much access to technology or technical specs, getting a hacker computer, was probably the best thing for me. For my friend that I recommended it to, maybe not so much. Like today, most people don’t want to explore the ins and outs of their hardware, but mostly want to play games or type papers, so the extra eccentricity that the amiga had to offer was lost on most of them.

For me, it was a different story, there was a background, and a whole scene of hackers who had managed to push the hardware to its limits, and write speciifc routines that could deal with the machine that it was run on.

The difference between the amiga and a comparable dos/windows box was that the amiga had dedicated hardware, not unlike a macintosh, so all the applications had to be specifically written for it. This was its advantage at the time, and its ultimate demise, as ms-dos and windows based pc’s worked on commodity hardware and just made you deal with driver hell, but for what they offered, you could run the same thing faster with better hardware, where as each amiga (and the atari ST fit in here as well), was a specific set of hardware. This model fell to the wayside, and while it never attracted the commercial ecosystem that finally won microsoft the marketshare, it bred a group of serious hackers in europe that grew out of the undercurrent of pirate and cracking groups, into the demo scene.

The demo scene, started just with the basic intro and trainer screens for hacked pieces of software that were distributed through IRC and BBS’s, but quickly grew in to demonstations of technical skill, and with the amiga having the best dedicated hardware platform (getting advanced graphical features on dos at the time was similar to trying to get ATI cards to run on Linux these days), this combined with the burgeoning party/rave scene drove consumer visual technology in a way that is now simply commodified by software plug-ins and consumer stereo components.

The good news is, that the legacy of these hackers live on, and the demo scene has thrived and come to encompass many platforms. One of the most remarkable of these was a breakthrough demo called “The Produkt” by farbrausch. It is a 15 minute long 3d demo with music that was written in 64k. Obviously there was a lot of tooling and compression that led to that low footprint, but as a comparison, notepad on windows is 68k, and doesnt have any 3D graphics.

This was just intended to be a short introduction, since I don’t have the time or wherewithal to actually dig up a history of interesting demos, but I figured I would make a note, since the same group recently released a large demo of around 8 megs, you can find it here

The demo scene has been hugely influential in graphics and game development, and the people developing them are often people working in the industry. In Will Wrights initial announcement of spore, he gives a quick overview of the demo scene as his inspiration for procedurally generated gamespaces, unfortunately spore was bogged down in simplicity and marketing, but the technology behind any “wow” factor found there was a direct result of the technical achievements of farbrausch and the rest of the demo community. If you have any spare time, you can check out an extensive demo site here:

http://www.pouet.net

So, I saw this cool demo:

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

And have just spent the last hour or so trying to download it, I followed to the project home page, but the source had been removed, and the files directory was open, but mostly had presentations. And a chinese version of flash. If you care I’m sure you can find it without much trouble.

Anyway, I was disappointed, I had a lot of good ideas that could be done with that, but now I think I have to do it the old fashioned way.

Anyway, until such things cut short the barrier to creating great new mockups, it hust has to be done the old fashioned way.

With that, I give you reagan on mars shaking hands with a giant dildo:

I can dream, can’t I?

One thing I have heard addressed, in nostalgia, is that in the realm of nintendo logic, one thing that never made sense was the fact the you could only have 255 coins in the original “legend of zelda”. Naturally in subsequent games, they had limits, but it was usually something that made more sense to us like ’999′ or ’9999′, or set by the limit of some item.

Anyway, there are actually two different reasons why the coin count is set at 255, but they both have a common explanation: battery life. Nintendo cartridges needed to have full circuit boards printed and placed in a manufacturable case. This was long before CD’s were a viable concept, or even a common audio format. In addition to this, it was the prototype cartridge that held a battery that could store a game for 5 years.

Five Years! That was the optimistic lifespan for the system. The damn things still work, too, but you still need to blow on the cartridges.

There was also a design mistake in there. Nintendo changed the old top-loading console design to seem more like a VCR so americans would feel more comfortable with it, unfortunately it spawned a generation of adults who chuckle about blowing into cartridges, and a few serious ones who have cleaning kits that do a better job.

So along with the requirements of being a breakthrough adventure game, and also the breakthrough first party title (before there was even such a concept) that let you save your game, Nintendo had to make some design decisions. Long-term batteries that could save all of your statistics meant needing economizing space. Additionally, they needed to make space for three different players (this was for the “family computer” after all).

In order to be a breakthrough cartridge and make the most of the hardware, as well as accruing the new per-byte battery cost, the data that was actually saved had to be packed as efficiently as possible. A quick dig through of the save memory state should be illuminating.

First a quick overview of bytes. A byte is 8 bits, a bit is a 1 or a 0. I’m sure you have heard of this before. There are actually 2′s in binary, they just take more than one bit, but with binary counting (just think of a digit counting from 0 to 10 for each digit — actually, dont do that).

Regardless, the bit counting system proceeds on base 2, the way that the decimal counting system proceeds on base 10. Base 10 numbers are written much more compactly, just compare:
BIN DEC
00 00
01 01
10 02
11 03

…and so on. To represent 4, you would need an extra digit. A 5 year battery (think of how long your remote control lasts), is really just persisting a bunch of ones and zeros. In this case, not too many.

Since the base is 2, the numbers that can be represented with a single digit progress by a power of 2. The same principal works for the more common digits: each new digit is a power of 10. 1 10 100 1000, etc. This can be hard to wrap your head around, but since these devices all work on electrons, they can only be charged, or grounded. On or off. When dealing with computers they work with a base level width, in most operating systems it is called a word, and the length that the cpu can see as an instruction or data. For NES, a word was 8 bits, and the battery was based on it. 8 Bits marks 256 different combinations, ranging from 0-255 if you are just counting them.

So the battery costs more per bit, and each bit doubles your data store. When do you stop paying for extra rupees? What does it take to cram the rest of the games data into a minimal space? I’m going to try to count the pieces stored (since I can’t find an actual tech doc).

The pieces stored, per game, in bits, follows:

Rupees: 8 bits
Triforce pieces: 8 bits
Dungeon Maps: 9 bits
Dungeon Compass: 9 bits

Locations:
Warps: 4 bits
Bomb Locations: Approximately 10 bits (too lazy to count).

Items:
Heart Containers: 15 bits
Quest Items: Approximately 16 bits.

Dungeon Maps: 9 dungeons x 8 width x 8 height: 576 (unoptimized)

That last one I am not so sure about, since I don’t think they are physically represented by the dimensions of the largest map, but again I don’t know how they are put together.

For the battery, each of those bits is tripled (3 save games). Each one of those bits added a research and manufacturing cost to the cartridge, the reason it was cut off at 8 bits is that there was no need to give the player more, there were probably other more practical optimizations, but I would need to actually take the save apart to do that.

Whatevs.