Neverwinter Nights: The Original's Workings

Neverwinter Nights was released by SSI and America Online in March, 1991 and discontinued on July 19, 1997. This game was an adaptation of SSI's Gold Box engine to support online multiplayer. The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition ruleset were used as a basis for the engine. It is notable as the first graphical massively multiplayer online role playing game. The engine on which it was built was designed for a single player, so how did it work as a multiplayer game? This blog will attempt to answer that question and give all the information about how the game ran over time which is still available.

Observations on Early Versions of Wizardry

Wizardry is the first role playing game to make a substantial, widespread impact on video gaming. First released for the Apple II in 1981, it spawned many, many ports, sequels and spinoffs. Its origins tend to be obscured by later releases and re-releases, so in this blog article I will discuss what made the features of Wizardry as it was first released to the public so interesting.

The Uniqueness of Early (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons Color Cover Art

When Dungeons and Dragons was released in 1974, the presentation was very hobbyist-oriented. The box containing the three little brown books was serviceable enough but the woodgrain pattern and the less than professional artwork on the cover or inside the booklets, combined with the near-inscrutability of the early rules and limited distribution undoubtedly limited its appeal. Further products would have to stand out beyond what might be expected in a hobby shop or wargaming bookshelf in order to have broader appeal. Let's see how TSR accomplished this goal.

USPS Media Mail Rules are Arbitrary and Stupid

The United States Postal Service offers a shipping option called Media Mail. Media Mail is a popular way to ship certain types of goods through the mail because it is cheap and offers a tracking number. It is not the fasted form of shipping but many buyers are prepared to wait an extra day or two or three for their package to be delivered. Media Mail allows printed material, books, periodicals, literature, plays, audio and video recordings to be shipped at a reduced rate compared to Priority Mail. But it does not allow all things which might fall into these categories or like categories. The rules are riddled with contradictions and outdated approaches. We will look at two such applications, comic books and video games.

TMNT 1987: The Original Theme Song's English Versions

The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was a phenomenon which brought the TMNT from an important independent comic book to a much wider audience. The first  season of five episodes was produced and aired in December of that year. It was produced by Murakami/Wolf/Swenson and ran for 10 seasons, ending in 1996. The series ran for 193 episodes, and in most of them they opened with a very catchy theme song. But in later years this theme song has been altered or replaced. I will identify all distinct English versions of it and where they can be found.

Nintendo Gives you the Power of Flash - Nintendo Power Rewritable Cartridges

Courtesy of Wikipedia, Photo by Muband

Three times Nintendo released a product where you could write new games to existing media. The first was the Famicom Disk System, where users could bring in their disks to Disk Writer kiosks in stores and have new games rewritten to the floppy disks. This system began in 1986 and was modestly successful, newly written games were cheaper than buying either new cartridges or new disk games in boxes. The disk system's popularity waned by the 1990s, but Nintendo revived the concept with the Super Famicom Nintendo Power cartridge in 1997. A few years later they released the Game Boy Nintendo Power cartridge in 2000. They discontinued the service on February 28, 2007. In this article I will discuss how the service worked, how the flash cartridges worked, and how they can be flashed today.

An eBay PSA

eBay can suck to use. I have bought a bunch of comic books recently from many sellers. On August 13 I bought many books and all but one shipped within days. Then on August 26-31 I bought a fair number more and again all shipped within days.

About two weeks and receiving no shipping notifications about the one August 13 book, I initiated a request to cancel the order through the eBay system. The seller refused. An automated response said it was "too late" to cancel the order. Too late? the book has not even had a shipping label printed for it! I then sent a message to him in eBay Messages on August 28 asking when my book would be shipped, no response.

On his listing it says "ships within 5-30 business days." I did not look hard enough at the listing at the time I was buying. eBay lets sellers put a vacation notification on their listings but this seller did not have one. Even so, 30 business days to ship a single issue comic book is a ridiculous amount of time in this day and age but eBay permits it. Then on September 6 I sent him another message stating that the 30th business day would be September 24, I would hold him to his words and file a complaint with eBay on the 25th if he had not shipped it by then. He shipped it on September 9, via USPS media mail, 27 days after my order. (Shipped is when you put a package into the hands of the carrier, not when you print a shipping label).

After receiving the book on the 11th, today I left neutral feedback for this seller, (after debating whether to leave negative), writing that the book was well packaged and in good condition but the seller was uncommunicative and was absurdly slow in shipping. The seller does not live in a rural area and there is a post office within walking distance of his return address. I might observe that a single $9.00 purchase (including shipping) may not be terribly motivating to get a seller who runs a comic book selling business to the post office promptly. Within minutes of posting the feedback the seller contacted me for the first time on eBay messages to say he would be getting it removed. After a few minutes it was and he said as much and added me to the blocked list. I responded that I would never buy from him again anyway and it is sellers like him that makes eBay suck to use sometimes.

26 other eBay sellers managed to ship and deliver comic books to me before him since August 13. Most of them had them in the mail within 1-3 days after placing the order. Some of the other orders were for heavy trade paperbacks or from longer distances, this was for a single issue one state over. The longest to ship other than this seller was 7 days and I certainly did not ask to cancel that order.

How was the seller able to remove my neutral feedback so quickly? eBay has a feedback policy where it removes "neutral/negative feedback when we can see that: The buyer asked to cancel after placing their order". I think this is a bad policy to apply automatically when the seller refuses to cancel the order. I could not remember the last time I left negative feedback for a seller, I apparently have left only one since 1998. This seller still has 30 other neutral and 5 negative feedbacks that he cannot remove and will likely accumulate more if this is how he runs his business. He of course must know the eBay policies very well. Has he been able to stifle criticism of other buyers who have made the same mistake?

The moral of this story is to be patient and do not try to cancel items if you want to be able to leave honest feedback. Ask the seller through messages first if he is willing to cancel but it is better to steer clear of any seller which puts something like "ships within 5-30 business days" in their description. Fortunately I have had my fill of buying comic books for a while. Still, eBay has laid a trap for the unwary buyer by providing them with an automated system for buyers to request cancellation but not warning them that they give up their right to leave permanent neutral/negative feedback if the seller refuses to cancel. I do not recall seeing any such warning with the system. There are many bad reasons why buyers cancel but also some good ones. I believe my request was reasonable after waiting for two weeks for a seller to put the book in the mail or at least contact me to tell me why it would be delayed. The automatic ability to remove the feedback is my quarrel with the policy. A company which actually cares about customer service should at least have a human being consider the situation before removing the feedback.

Resurrecting the Most Useless Piece of Vintage Computing Technology - The Modem Part 1

For decades, if you wished to have two computers communicate over any length of distance, you often only had one option, a analog telephone-based modem. The modem allowed for communication over telephone lines, utilizing a technology that was over a century old by the time it became accessible in the 1980s. Over time speeds became faster from 300 baud to 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 14.4K, 28.8K, 33.6K and finally 56K(ish). However those speeds were simply not enough to keep up with the ever growing demands of internet bandwidth and traditional modems lost out to cable modems and DSL by the early 2000s. Now with broadband available for just about anything and plain old telephone system (POTS) landlines almost completely replaced by VoIP services, can you really still use a modem today? This blog post will demonstrate how you can.