Retro City Rampage 486 - A Review of a "New" MS-DOS Game

I knew about Retro City Rampage back when its developer, Brian Provinciano, was calling it Grand Theftendo and trying to port it to the NES.  However, he decided to continue development on the PC and eventually released it on Steam and several consoles.  In its released form, it may have had the feel of an NES or MS-DOS game, but under its hood it was all modern.  Thus it did not really grab my attention and games with no physical release do not either.  In fact, the only Steam games I have ever purchased were the Special Editions of Monkey Island 1 & 2 and I value them today only for their ability to build the Monkey Island 1 & 2 Ultimate Talkie Editions.

When it was announced that not only would RCR receive a true port to the MS-DOS platform as Retro City Rampage 486 but also come in a boxed version, my interest was piqued.  Having a physical release of a game with no need to run a Steam installer and no concern that upgrading to the latest Windows will break the game interested me a great deal.  I was suitably impressed that the game came on a floppy disk.  I had never purchased a physical retro "homebrew" style game before, but the price was $29.99 and it came with a Steam key for the extras, so I eventually decided to take the plunge.  The total came to $34.99 with shipping.

MS-DOS as a gaming platform began with the introduction of the IBM PC back in August of 1981.  The first developed PC game was Donkey.bas, which came on the PC-DOS 1.0 diskette.  It relied on IBM Personal Computer BASIC to run, but it came on a disk, so it required DOS as well.  While during the first few years of PC gaming many games did not need MS-DOS to run, eventually the convenience of using MS-DOS for disk access and the necessity of using it for hard drive access made it ubiquitous by the end of the 1980s.  Until Windows 95 became firmly established as the successor to MS-DOS as a PC gaming platform in 1996-1997, everybody used MS-DOS when they played games on their PC.

It is hard to tell what was the last commercial game released that ran on MS-DOS and came in a box. I am tempted to say Tyrian 2000 from 1999.  However, Tyrian 2000 is an updated release of the original Tyrian, released in 1995.  Perhaps WWII GI is a better example of a DOS game that was first released in stores in 1999 but received a critical drubbing at the time for using the out-of-date Build engine. The last DOS game to be released on floppy disk of any consequence was probably Hexen in 1995 .  It was clear that DOS was Dead by the end of the last century.

While hardly attracting the same attention as consoles, there has been some homebrew style activity for MS-DOS in the 21st Century.  SuperFighterTeam released translated versions of the Taiwanese games Sango Fighter (2009) and Sango Fighter 2 (2013) as free downloads that ran in DOSBox.  Jason Knight released Paku Paku, a Pac-Man clone which ran on a 8088 CPU with CGA using a tweaked 80 column text mode, in 2011.  A guy named mangis is working on a nice-looking CGA tweaked 80 column text game called MagicDuck and has been releasing working alpha builds for quite a while now.  Companies still released shovelware compilations of older DOS games in the early 2000s.  You could order floppy disks of many of Apogee's classics from their website.

Back to RCR 486 and non-free games.  When I received my copy of RCR yesterday, the first thing I did I put it on my shelf and fired up Steam!  Actually, that is what a collector or a reseller might do, but I wanted to do something more with my purchase than simply display it.  The box is a standard size for a NES cartridge, 5"x7"x1".  The Vblank Entertainment logo looks like it came from an Xbox 360 game, the title font looks like it came from a NES game, but the System Requirements label is something that would not look out of place on a Sierra game.  I sliced open the shrinkwrap, opened the top flap and looked at the contents :

I received the fully-boxed Retail Box version, which is limited to 1,000 numbered units.  I ordered my floppy disk with the boring "business beige" color because that is authentic to DOS games and see-through floppy disks are not.  Apparently they are running out of stock of that color.  The glasses have two red lenses rather than the red/blue lenses of regular 3-D glasses.  If you just want a floppy disk and a Steam code, you can get it for $14.99 plus shipping.  In fact, the price for the remaining collector's editions went up $10.00 since I ordered, and judging by my number, they will sell out.

The manual does not need to spend much time on the instructions, which are also located in the game.  The red/blue printing was occasionally used back in the DOS days for document-based copy protection.  More often it was used for hint guides.  In the manual, the cheat keys are hidden by the red/blue printing as is some other artwork, which is pretty cool.

Nor was the cloth map truly necessary as the game has an in-game map.  The material of the cloth map feels like the material found in those smartphone wipes and is about as thick.  The map is rather lacking in contrast, so it will probably stay in the box.  Packaging is nice, but if the game in it is bad, then the whole purpose behind the release is meaningless.

After examining the contents, I did what anyone else would have done back in the day.  I took the 1.44MB disk to my 486 and installed it on my computer.  The installation process went off without a hitch.  The game comes with a proper installation program, which decompresses the game and copies it to your hard drive. Because the game takes 3.7MB of free hard drive space, it cannot be run off a floppy disk.  The install took less than 5 minutes on my 486DX2/66.   The install program is aptly named INSTALL.EXE, the game directory is RCR and the executable is RCR.EXE.  After I installed the program, I made a disk image in case the physical floppy becomes corrupt.

According to the developer, the minimum specification for the game is a 386 with a 387 math coprocessor, but the game was meant for a 486.  It recommends a Pentium for maximum performance.  It also requires 4MB of RAM, DOS 3.3 or better and a VGA card.  It supports keyboard and a joystick or game pad.  I highly recommend using a Gravis Gamepad.  The game will let you map four gamepad buttons and calibrate the joystick or gamepad.  While there are a few more functions than buttons on a PC gamepad or joystick, the main ones map nicely to the most commonly used functions.

The game gives you four frame rate options, 15fps (3 frame skip), 20fps (2 frame skip), 30fps (1 frame skip) and 60fps (0 frame skip).  Real VGA monitors run at 70Hz and none of those options evenly divide into 70, but I did not notice a lot of ugly screen tearing.  For the main game you may want to use the higher fps option, but for the challenges the lower fps options give a faster paced game.

The other fun option in the settings is the ability to change the color scheme.  You can have CGA (both major palettes) or EGA-style graphics.  There is an MDA mode, but it displays more shades of color than real MDA.  You can have graphic schemes that take from the NES, C64, Atari 2600, ZX Spectrum, Genesis, Game Boy, and even the Virtual Boy.

One criticism of the DOS game is that its sound is limited to the PC Speaker.  The original PC release has chiptune music and you can change tunes when you drive the cars.  Unfortunately, the only music in this game appears to be when you are on the title screen.  While the instructions for RCR 486 indicate you can change music in the vehicles using the Tab or Page Up and Page Down keys, they do nothing.

The developer set himself a challenge to fit the game onto one floppy disk.  He had to cut down the game features to do it.  Considering 3.7MB was compressed down to 1.44MB, every byte was precious.  Plus he wanted to target the PC Speaker as a programming challenge.  I would not be displeased if he later released a patch to add music and features, but I will take the game as it is now.

RCR is based on Grand Theft Auto, namely the first two games which had a top down view.  The essential goal outside of story mode is to kill civilians and police.  There are many weapons you can use to wreak havoc and you can carjack any car and run pedestrians over.  There are challenges like the one that gives you a bazooka and requires you to cause as much damage as possible or the one that gives you a certain amount of time to run over 50 people.  Some of the vehicles have special features, you can turn the sirens on the cop cars, shoot a bazooka when you are in a tank and one the vehicles has a pair of machine guns, taken from a certain hard-as-nails NES game made by Konami.

RCR tries to parody pretty much every iconic video game of the 80s and 90s.  Super Mario Bros. 1 & 2, Mega Man 2 and other games are targeted.  The plot of the main game involves the main character who gets lost in time (via a TARDIS) and has to turn to a Doc Brown-type of scientist (from Back to the Future) to obtain the pieces to construct a machine to get him back to his own time.  The main character is a henchman for a psychotic Joker-like character who loves to kill off henchmen who aren't up to snuff.  Other icons of the time like Rambo and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles make appearances.

RCR has something like an open world, or as open as a game of its design can be.  You can enter shops to upgrade your weapons, buy health items and reduce your evil reputation so the police do not attack you every second.  You play through missions and each stage is comprised of multiple missions.  You have three save slots to save your progress in the main game.  Like seemingly all modern games there are achievements and unlockables.

Lazy Game Reviews made a fair criticism that the game tries to parody everything and resemble GTA so closely that it fails to have its own identity.  One or the other could be said about many independent and homebrew games.  Even though it is not a classic in its DOS form it still brought a smile to my face on occasion and the gameplay is easy to pick up and play.  The story mode adds some meat on what would otherwise have been a somewhat shallow offering.  However, I will take it because the developer took the time to bring the essence of his game to a large number of older machines.

A final criticism is that this game is not particularly representative of a retail game that runs well on a 486 but recommends a Pentium.  No game released earlier than 1995 would put something like that on its system requirements sticker.  In 1995, shareware was also dying and this game would hardly be seen as competitive compared with Descent or DOOM II or even Jazz Jackrabbit.  People of 1995 would have been puzzled why a game that looked like it should be on the NES should require system power orders of magnitude greater than the gray box.  However, the developer did not intend this port to be a completely accurate retro game with a presentation from 1990-1991 and system requirements from 1994-1995.  It was to him a fun programming exercise that was sufficiently successful for a limited edition release.

There is no software in this box that I could not have acquired from Steam for $20 less.  $5 extra gets you a floppy disk with an installer and a label, and the extra $15 (now $25) on top of that gets you the other physical feelies.  The developer cannot be making much off this, especially considering all the additional headaches and time it takes to put together a 1,000 copies of a physical software product.  If you just want to try it out, grab it from the Steam.  If you want the total experience of placing an order, waiting for it to ship, opening the box and enjoying the physical items inside, then act fast!  LGR would probably say something like "Mmm, feelies..."

Prince of Persia DOS 1.0 Sound Card Autodetection Weirdness

When Prince of Persia was originally released for DOS, alongside the Apple II version, it supported several sound cards.  The sound cards the original 1.0 version supported were Adlib, Game Blaster, Sound Blaster, Covox Sound Master.  It also supported the IBM PS/1 Audio/Joystick upgrade, the Tandy PSSJ DAC and the Tandy 3-voice PSG, and of course the PC Speaker.

For sound effects, the original version only supports either digitized sound effects or the PC Speaker sound effects.  To hear digitized sound effects, you must have a Sound Blaster, Tandy DAC, Covox Sound Master or IBM PS/1 Audio/Joystick card.  Otherwise, you will hear PC speaker sound effects.

You can hear music with any of these cards.  Music will sound identical with an Adlib or Sound Blaster or any compatible.  The music will sound similar whether played on a Tandy 3-voice PSG, the 3-voice PSG of the Covox Sound Master or the 12-voice PSG of the Game Blaster.  There is also PC Speaker music. Note that of all the music choices, only the Game Blaster will output in stereo.

The game's executable recognizes several command line parameters related to sound.  The sound card command line parameters in 1.0 are adlib, covox, gblast, ibmg, sblast, tandy & stdsnd.  All should be self explanatory.  They are intended to allow you to override the autodetect function, but do not always work as intended.

When you put a sound card inside a Tandy 1000 with a DAC, things get interesting :

Adlib MSC :
No parameter – Adlib music, Tandy DAC sound effects
Adlib – Adlib music, PC Speaker sound effects
Tandy - Adlib music, Tandy DAC sound effects
Stdsnd – PC Speaker music, PC Speaker sound effects

Game Blaster :
No parameter – Game Blaster music, PC Speaker sound effects
Gblast – Game Blaster music, PC Speaker sound effects
Tandy – Tandy music, Tandy DAC sound effects
Stdsnd – PC Speaker music, PC Speaker sound effects

No Sound Card :
No parameter - Tandy music, Tandy DAC sound effects
Tandy – Tandy music, Tandy DAC sound effects
Stdsnd – PC Speaker music, PC Speaker sound effects

I underlined the unusual options.  You cannot use the Tandy DAC with a joystick, so the Adlib parameter with the Adlib always gives you PC Speaker sound effects and restores joystick support.  However, while the game will use the Adlib with Tandy DAC if present, the same is not true with a Game Blaster in a Tandy DAC system.  You always get PC Speaker sound effects with a Game Blaster.

If you have a Tandy 1000 without a DAC, you have additional options :

No Sound Card :
No parameter – Tandy music, PC Speaker sound effects
Tandy – Tandy music, PC Speaker sound effects
Stdsnd – PC Speaker music, PC Speaker sound effects

Generic PCs behave as you would expect with sound cards, except for the following :

Sound Blaster w/CMS Upgrade :
No parameter – Adlib music (or Game Blaster music if YM-3812 is removed), Sound Blaster DAC sound effects
Sblast - Adlib music, Sound Blaster DAC sound effects
Adlib - Adlib music, PC Speaker sound effects
Gblast - Adlib music, PC Speaker sound effects (if the YM-3812 is removed from a Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0, Game Blaster music will play)
Tandy - Adlib music, PC Speaker sound effects
Stdsnd – PC Speaker music, PC Speaker sound effects

I do know that a Sound Blaster will not work reliably with a Tandy 1000 with a DAC.  Both will use DMA1 and neither device can be truly disabled.  While a Sound Blaster Pro will work in a Tandy 1000 with a DAC, you need to set it to non-standard IRQ/DMA settings to avoid freezes.  While Prince of Persia 1.0 will use IRQs other than 7, it will only use DMA1.  There were no other DMA choices available to the pre-Pro Sound Blasters other than 1.

As far as whether a Sound Blaster will work reliably in an IBM PS/1 with an Audio/Joystick card, I am uncertain.  The IBM device is mounted on a special header inside the PS/1 Model 2011 or 2121.  These machines require external adapter upgrades to support ISA cards, and they are very rare.  Both sound devices use IRQ7, but the IBM card does not use DMA.  Because Prince of Persia uses Sound Blaster IRQs like 5, it won't matter for this game but it could matter for a game like King's Quest I SCI, which only supports a Sound Blaster at IRQ7.  I think it likely that an Adlib would override the IBM music.

Although the Tandy 3-voice and IBM Audio are both based off the same PSG, IBM's card used a slightly higher base frequency than the Tandy PSG.  IBM's card will have higher pitched sound (because of a 11.7% difference in base frequencies) than the Tandy.

Finally, I am uncertain whether an Adlib card will override a Covox card for music.  Since an Adlib card always overrides a Game Blaster even if you use the gblast parameter, it is likely that it will override the Covox for music.  It is also probable that the Covox will still produce digitized sound effects like the Tandy DAC.  Covox cards are extremely rare, only recently has a user made recordings of Prince of Persia's opening with the Covox.  While the Covox has advanced musical capabilities, most companies only used the basic musical capabilities which were only slightly more advanced than the Tandy chip.  Thus the Covox sounds like a Tandy.

If you want to disable the Adlib override for the Game Blaster and Tandy 3-voice music, you have to edit the PRINCE.EXE executable.  At offset 13875h change 75h to EBh, this will make the game respect the command line parameter for sound.  This will allow you to hear Game Blaster music if an Adlib card is installed or on an upgraded Sound Blaster 2.0 or below.  The credit for this patch goes to ripsaw8080 on the VOGONS forum.

Game Blaster support is a bit buggy in version 1.0.  You can hear dropped or hanging notes in the introduction, and it gets worse as the system speed increases.  I have had nearly flawless playback in an 8MHz Tandy 1000 TX or TL.  Ripsaw8080 wrote a program that will dramatically improve note playback in faster systems, find it here : http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=41129&hilit=prince+persia+game+blaster&start=20#p386191  Note that it requires extended keyboard BIOS functions, so it won't work properly in an IBM PC, IBM PC XT or Portable with 1st BIOS, or any Tandy 1000 before the TL and SL.  Its generally not necessary with systems that slow anyway.    The buggy Game Blaster support is probably why they removed it in version 1.3, plus it was obsolete along with the Covox Sound Master, another casualty of the version upgrade.

The First Sound Card

The Ad Lib Music Synthesizer Card may not have been the first add-on expansion board for a PC compatible computer that could generate sound, but it was undoubtedly the most important sound card ever made.  In this blog entry, I will give an overview of the hardware and software that made Ad Lib synonymous with good PC sound.

Hardware

The Ad Lib came in two revisions, the 1987 version and the 1990 version.  The 1987 version has a 6.35mm or 1/4" phono jack connector and the 1990 version has a 3.5mm mini-jack.  The 1990 version also has two extra decoupling capacitors to reduce the effects of noise.  The audio out can drive passive speakers and lower-impedance headphones.

The card itself was made entirely from off the shelf parts and a pair of specialized sound integrated circuits. All of the 1987 cards and some of the 1990 cards have he part numbers scratched off the Yamaha chips, but some 1990 cards have the part numbers on them.  The larger chip is the Yamaha YM-3812 FM Operator Type-L II (OPL2).  It is responsible for all audio generation.  In FM Synthesis, sound is produced when one sine wave, the modulator wave, modulates another sine wave, the carrier wave.  Each sine wave is called an operator and there are eighteen operators in a YM-3812.  In the default mode, each pair of operators is assigned a channel, so you have 9 channels available.  Each operator can have various settings assigned like Vibrato, Tremolo, ASDR and output level.  The settings for each operator pair can be called an instrument.  In the alternative mode, twelve pairs of operators are assigned to 6 channels and the rest are used to produce 5 percussion instruments.  The smaller chip is the Yamaha YM-3014 Serial Input Floating D/A Converter (DAC-SS).  It turns the digital audio output from the YM-3812 into an analog signal suitable for amplification.

Ad Lib's attempt at secrecy was short-lived.  By the end of 1989, its competitor Creative Technologies was already advertising its "Killer Card" (which would become the Sound Blaster), which included full Ad Lib compatibility.  Ad Lib clones appeared fairly quickly because the card was easy to clone once you figured out what the mystery chips were.  Ad Lib released programming information giving the abilities and register specifications for the chips.  Because the chips were not custom components (otherwise why scratch the part numbers off?), and it used FM Synthesis, it had almost certainly to come from Yamaha.  The price point and chip packaging must have narrowed down Yamaha's IC line considerably.  It was only a matter of time before the secret was out, and Ad Lib, a small French-Canadian company at the time, was in no position to obtain exclusive rights to use the chips from Yamaha.

When you look at either genuine board, you instantly notice the Ad Lib company logo.  I do not recall seeing an earlier PC expansion card printed circuit board with so striking a design.  Most PC expansion boards just have the name of the product labeled in ordinary text somewhere on the card, and many do not even have that, leaving someone to have to deduce the card's identity and function.  It would be a long time until we saw something as equally stylish (even though you would only see it when you opened the computer.)

However, you will also notice two sets of solder pads.  The first, with the "3 5 2" numbers above it, was to assign an IRQ to the card.  The card would fire off an IRQ when after one of the timers had reached zero.  None of these three pads are connected and no software would ever expect them to be connected, so this functionality was in practice never used.  The timers were typically used polled to auto-detect the card.

The second set of pads, "A B C D", allowed the user to change the I/O address from 388/389H.  This allowed the user to put four cards in a single system.  The other addresses were 218/219H, 288/289H and 318/319H.  Very little software ever supported the Ad Lib at an address other than the default.  The days when hardware hackers would routinely modify their hardware with a soldering iron was rapidly coming to a close during Ad Lib's early days.

The Path to Success

When the Ad Lib was first released in 1987, it did not instantly set the PC world alight and inspire software developers with new visions of affordable music.  The Ad Lib was marketed first as a music creation device using a program called Visual Composer to put notes on sheet music.  It appears to have only come bundled with the Visual Composer software and cost $245.00.  Music creation software was nothing new to the PC industry, Electronic Arts Music Construction Set and Mindscape's Bank Street Music Writer were already on the market and had done well.  The former worked with a PC Speaker in 1-voice or 4-voice mode, the PCjr. or Tandy 3-voice chip and the latter came with a 6-voice sound board based off the Apple II Mockingboard design.  IBM also had a MIDI interface based music card called the IBM Music Feature, but it was very expensive, and other companies like Roland produced MIDI interfaces to control their expensive synthesizers with computer software.  Parents were far more likely to buy the cheapest Casio or Yamaha keyboard on sale at Radio Shack for their kids.

In 1988, the card and company's fortunes changed when Sierra Online was looking for good hardware to support in their latest adventure games, which were planned to support full musical scores.  The Ad Lib was seen as more capable than the PSG-based solutions then available like the C64's SID chip, which simply did not sound impressive to U.S. composers. Sierra selected the Ad Lib card as its entry-level music solution and other companies followed.  The first PC game to support the Ad Lib or any other external sound device (Roland MT-32 & IBM Music Feature) was Sierra's King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella.  In fact, if you compare the boxes for the 1987 and 1990 versions, you can see that gaming had taken preference over music creation.

Once the Ad Lib became useful for games, a version of the card was released for $195.00 without the Visual Composer software.  The price for the Ad Lib was now much more attractive and competitive.  Often games would come with a $20 coupon for the card.  The next nearest competitor was the Creative Music System/Game Blaster, which at $129.00 competed well in price but poorly in features.  The Game Blaster may have had more voices (12 vs. 9 or 6/5) and stereo support, but its PSG-style music generation was not deemed by the press or the public as anywhere near the quality of the Ad Lib's FM Synthesis.

While the PSGs in the Game Blaster and the Tandy could output the same notes on the scale as the Ad Lib, the Ad Lib had sufficient capabilities to advertise to users that they could create something approximating actual instruments.  It also sounded somewhat close to the music in most arcade games of the late 80s and early 90s, giving it an edge over devices that sounded like a C64 or a NES.  If the Ad Lib had not gained popularity, perhaps it would have been the Game Blaster that fulfilled the PC gaming music niche, but the Ad Lib was supported in thousands of games while the Game Blaster never pushed above 100 games.

The Ad Lib had quite the appeal for people looking for a no-hassles upgrade.  The Ad Lib did not require any setting up, there were no user-accessible jumpers or dipswitches on the card.  It fit inside any system with a free 8-bit expansion slot.  It rarely required you to load a driver before running an application or a game.  PGA Tour Golf is one of the few examples I could find of a popular game that requires loading SOUND.COM before beginning the game.  Even Ad Lib soon embedded its driver into its application programs.  The most interaction people usually had with the card physically was with the volume control.

The Ad Lib was not designed to handle digitized sounds, but some companies were able to get around that by some careful timing writes to set up a level waveform, then feeding 6-bit values to the volume control registers.  This in essence allowed the Ad Lib to function like a 6-bit DAC.  Activision used it in Battle Tech : The Crescent Hawks' Revenge, Gametek in Super Jeopardy and Interplay in Out of this World.  Because sending audio samples directly to the "DAC" required a lot of CPU time, it was seldom used.  The rise of the Ad Lib compatible Sound Blaster, with its 8-bit DMA-assisted DAC, soon made this effectively obsolete.

From a programmer's standpoint, the Ad Lib was relatively simple to program for.  Programs could automatically detect the card because it had a pair of readable timers on it.  For 8088 systems, they could simply just send data to it, but faster systems required software delay loops of increasing length in order to have the card respond appropriately to address and data writes.  Unfortunately, the basic Ad Lib and its clones tend to fail when older games are being run in fast 386 and 486 machines, requiring the use of slowdown utilities, cache disabling programs or turning off the turbo button.  Eventually, virtually all audio would be handled by middleware drivers from companies like Miles Sound Design which would provide solid if unremarkable Ad Lib support for any system.

An Ad Lib could work with just about any PC or XT with 256KB of RAM and a CGA or better card.  However, in late 1988 that combination just was not doing it anymore for the latest games.  While the Ad Lib can work with most early games on an 8088 or V20 machine, the results are often unplayably slow. The Ad Lib works much better with a 286 @ 8MHz or better, an EGA graphics card and 640KB of RAM.  There were exceptions like Origin's Windwalker, which was programmed before the need to add software delays for faster systems was generally known.  That game is best run on an 8088 or V20 machine.

The Ad Lib had something of a love-hate relationship with musicians.  Computer musicians in the U.S. in the late 80s were usually thoroughly steeped using MIDI instruments.  You could compose a song on a synthesizer keyboard a lot more naturally than in a computer program of the time.  The Roland MT-32 and later the Roland Sound Canvas lines of PC MIDI devices were the preeminent external audio devices for PC gaming until digitized audio took over entirely.  Most composers at big-box developers like Sierra and Electronic Arts composed with MIDI devices and then transported their music to the MT-32, SC-55 and Ad Lib, but the translation was far easier from MIDI to MIDI devices with built-in samples than MIDI to Ad Lib.  So too often Ad Lib music playback paled in comparison to MT-32 and SCC-1 playback.

The Ad Lib did find early advocates at the shareware development houses.  The guys at ID Software and Epic MegaGames were often technologically more innovative and more willing to explore the features of their hardware than the larger publishers.  Shareware titles supported Ad Lib exclusively at first, then migrated to the Ultrasound and the Sound Canvas.  The music in Commander Keen 4-6 and Jill of the Jungle 1-3 (which requires a Sound Blaster) is often very good and hard to imagine being as good on an MT-32.  European programmers also were able to coax good music from the Ad Lib. They already had years of experience hacking away at the SID on the C64 and Paula on the Amiga, so this came easy to them.  The music for Dune by Cyro Interactive does not loose its essential character on an OPL2 even though it was composed for an OPL3.  The songs in Lemmings are very impressive, even compared to the Amiga original.

From a gamer's perspective, purchasing an Ad Lib in the first years following its release was a wise purchase because virtually every game that supported an expansion sound device supported the card.  Companies like Sierra, Origin, LucasArts, Microprose, Spectrum Holobyte, Interplay, and Epyx soon followed suit and began supporting the card in more and more of their products.  (Airball was a very rare example of a game that supported Innovation SID and Game Blaster but not Ad Lib.)  If you look at an early story such as the one published in Computer Gaming World #63 (September, 1989) you can see that every company that was considering sound cards at the time of contact was considering the Ad Lib.  When the Sound Blaster came with digitized sound support in 1990, digitized sound was slower to be adopted because the samples took up so much space on floppy disks.  It had other features, such as the built-in game port, and a price that was very competitive with the less-featured Ad Lib card.  Ad Lib's response to the coming of the Sound Blaster was to reduce its headphone jack to use a mini-jack connector.

Even when the Ad Lib Gold released the OPL3 chip, which has support for stereo output and double the number of FM operators and 4-operator FM Synthesis, game companies rarely supported the advanced features of the newer chip.  Even though the OPL3 chip quickly replaced the OPL2 chip in 1992, most music was still designed for the basic OPL2 features.

The Ad Lib was the entry level music device for an astonishing seven years, from 1988 through 1994.  Until CD-ROM drives and sample-based MIDI hardware became affordable, Ad Lib FM Synthesis was still the king of PC game music.  Early CD-ROM music was far superior musically but extremely inflexible.  Ad Lib music occupied little space and could be adjusted instantly to suit the needs of the program.  CD-ROM music changing required sending track change or track repeat commands.  There would be a pause while the new song was found or the old song was being repeated.  CD-ROM also did not do well with short snippets of music.  The iMUSE system from LucasArts, which dynamically changed the music according to room and scenes, was feasible with the Ad Lib but impossible with CD-ROM audio.  Only with the arrival of Windows 95 was the hardware sufficiently powerful to manage multiple digital streams of voice and music that made the Ad Lib totally obsolete.

Disappointing Use of Licenses in NES Games

Often, when a video game relied on a licensed character or movie, the results often were terrible.  It is as if so much of the budget was taken up by the licensing fees that there was nothing left over to make a good game or hire good programmers.  Most games based off movies are garbage on the NES, no one particularly enjoys having to play through Total Recall, Predator or Hudson Hawk.  Many of those games were released by LJN or Acclaim, but picking on them is rather like picking the low hanging fruit.

Instead, I am going to focus on games from developers or publishers with a proven record of good games.  My criteria for this blog entry is that the license has to come from another type of media, whether a film, a TV series, a cartoon, a toy line, a comic book or a novel

Konami :

Monster in My Pocket
This is a decent game, but when dealing with Konami, decent just doesn't cut it.  While you have two characters you can play as, they aren't really all that different.  This side scroller does not have any substantial flaws, but there is nothing especially memorable about it.

Star Trek 25th Anniversary
When I play this game, I get the feeling like it so wants to be the PC game of the same name.  This is not surprising because Interplay was responsible for both.  The NES game takes some elements of the classic PC adventure game like having crew members on the away team with different strengths and each officer on the bridge having his or her own position.  However, the top down exploration stages with constantly respawning hidden enemies and maze-like environments does not feel very Star Trek 25th-Anniversary like to me.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Where do I begin?  TMNT may have sold well but only because the Turtles craze was just beginning to establish itself.  This game does have a certain Konami polish to the graphics and music, but the game is way too unfair.  Enemies constantly respawn, there is laughable recovery time after being hit, the turtles have a huge hit area and except for Donatello their weapons do pathetic damage to their enemies.  There are tricky jumps and the play control is a tad too loose.  Flicker is all over the place.

The next two TMNT games for the NES are much better than this.  I always get the feeling that with this first game, Konami really did not "get" the Turtles.  While most of the elements that had been established by 1987 were there, the resulting game did not feel like an adaptation of the cartoon series, which was the catalyst and the focus of the phenomenon for the next several years.  The moody music and outlandish enemy designs feel like they came more from the original comic than the cartoon.

I understand that the developers had little to work with, only elements from the comic book and season one of the animated cartoon were available as reference materials.  However, the arcade game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was also released in 1989 and does not feature any material beyond season one, yet that game was able to capture the spirit of the franchise admirably.  Looks like Konami gave the NES game to the "B Team".

Top Gun I & II
Most NES flying games are not especially memorable, and these are no exception.  One of the main problems are the endless hordes of indistinguishable enemies.  The NES simply did not have the horsepower for anything more than rail-shooters, so these games don't offer you any real freedom.  The first game has some of the most annoying landing sequences ever found in a video game and you cannot seem to turn fast enough to attack enemies.  The second game overcompensates by having too sensitive controls and enemies that fly by too fast to hit.

Sunsoft :

Fester's Quest
While Sunsoft appeared to adapt the overhead view of Blaster Master for this game, that was about the only smart thing they did with the title.  The Addams' Family is little seen and the Addams Family Mansion is reached only far into the game.  The enemies constantly respawn and your gun and whip do little damage.  A turbo controller is required to really play.  Instead of losing gun or whip power when you get like Blaster Master, you lose it by touching gun and whip downgrades, which become more common as you power them up and are surprisingly easy to touch.  Fester moves slowly, and if he gets hit by the flies, his movement rate gets far worse until he finds some shocks.  You have a tiny lifebar and the bosses take a long time to beat.  You find bosses in these buildings with featureless 3-D Mazes, something I always hated on the NES.  There is almost nothing of the quirky macabre humor which the Addams Family was known for.

Platoon
This was a port of a Commodore 64 game, and while its not as bad as the port of Myth to Conan, the original game just isn't that good.  The game is essentially a collection of mini-games, and usually in 8-bit land the sum is not the greater of its parts when it comes to different gameplay styles being combined in a cartridge.  The first stage is a maze of finding objects, but most of the time you are simply trying to avoid dead ends.  You are easy to hit, there are hard to see traps and bullets, and enemies can be unavoidable.  The music is appropriately moody, but the backgrounds just appear to be shades of brown.  The second stage is something like a 3-D maze, but at least it has something like a map.  I never bothered to get past the second stage.

Capcom :

Disney's Adventures in the Magic Kingdom
As with Platoon, noted above, this is another collection of mini-games.  The platforming in the Haunted Mansion is passable, but Space Mountain feels like Dragon's Lair with the "press the right button at the right time mechanic."

TaleSpin
Capcom made six games based off Disney TV franchises, and five of them (Ducktales 1 & 2, Chip 'N Dale 1 & 2, Darkwing Duck) were great.  This one, while a decent game, is not great.  Its a shump and has a certain amount of distinctiveness in that there are horizontal and vertical scrolling portions in the same level and that you can fly forwards and backwards.  However, the chief issue is that the scale is wrong, the characters and enemies are too small to be really distinctive.  Also, your character moves too slowly and his default gun is hard to aim diagonally, does little damage and upgrades are not plentiful.

Pony Canon/FCI :

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons : Heroes of the Lance
Pony Canon/FCI could usually be counted on for reliable, if not spectacular ports of PC games, but this one is where they utterly failed to release a playable game.  Heroes of the Lance is based off the Dragonlance Saga series of novels and AD&D campaign setting from TSR  The object of the game is to take a party of eight heroes into a dungeon to recover a magic item.  It was released first for PCs and then got a NES port.  Whatever virtues the underlying game had, and they seem pretty sparse, were totally lost in translation.

This game has virtually no redeeming features.  The in-game graphics suffer from being too small in relation to the background.  The status menu takes up half the screen.  The character sprites have so little detail and the backgrounds are just drab gray and black.  The music is the same monotonous piece that seems to play throughout the game.  There are only three types of enemies when you first start, a fighter, a dwarf and a lizard-creature.  The latter two are both unfair, the dwarf attacks lower than you normally do, making him hard to hit.  The lizard creature shoots projectiles at chest height and impossible to dodge.  By the time you close in to melee with him, one of your characters may be dead.  The control scheme and hit detection must have been devised in Hell, the very act of attacking is a chore.  When you close into attack range, you can hold down the B button to attack, but it rarely registers a hit on a monster regardless of how close you are.  Your characters move and attack so slowly.  You can run by holding down a directional.  Jumping across chasms is pretty much accomplished by luck.

This game has battery backed memory for saving games, but considering how awful this game is, it is a waste.  There were far many better games more deserving of a battery save than this piece of garbage.

Kemco :

The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
This originally was a Roger Rabbit game when it first appeared on the Famicom Disk System, but Kemco only held the license in Japan so it did a graphics makeover using Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes characters when it was released.  This game is very monotonous, with the same music playing over and over and very few environment changes.  Weirdly, most of the enemies are differently colored Sylvesters with occasional appearances of Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote.  However, in the original game, the Sylvesters were the Weasels, of which there were four in the movie.   You cannot really stop yourself going in and out of doors and down an incline or scroll the screen to see what is just outside your view, leading to many cheap deaths.

The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
This game is more ambitious than Kemco's previous offering, but its far easier than you would expect.

Superman
Superman never had a great reputation for spawning great video games, and this one is almost as bad as the N64 title.  Super-deformed characters and pastel graphics remind me of the Atari 2600 title, which was no classic.  The music is nothing you will be humming in the shower either.  Superman in this game can use several powers, but for only a very limited number of times unless you find a way to replenish each special power bar.  He default attack is a punch, but the punch has no animation that tells the player the range of the attack.  How close do you have to be to an enemy?  It is hard to say.  Of course, the enemies you first encounter shoot at you, and as either Clark Kent or Superman you are quite vulnerable to bullets.  You jump almost to the top of the screen as either Clark or Superman. It does not take too much punishment to kill Superman, enemies can damage you even by touching and when they die they will often release an item that will reduce your life.  The game gives you virtually no guidance on what you need to do.

Data East :

Captain America and the Avengers
As far as superhero games go on the NES, this may be the best of the bunch that is not part of the Batman franchise.  You can play as Captain America or Hawkeye, but the two are not really that different.  Captain America has a more limited range than Hawkeye shield comes flying back and he jump higher, but otherwise there is little else to distinguish the two.  The main issue is that the play control is stiff.  Graphics are okay, but the music is bland.  Compared to X-Men, Silver Surfer and Spider-Man, this is probably the high water mark for Marvel Comics-based NES games, but that is damning with faint praise.

Taito :

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Weirdly, both Taito and Ubisoft released games based off the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  They could not be more completely different.  Ubisoft's version was atrocious and looks like a port from the ZX Spectrum.  However, Ubisoft doesn't have a reputation for NES classics, Taito does, but not judging by this game.  The graphics are small and hard to distinghuish.  The game is very monochromatic with brown and gray hues throughout.  Trying to digitize real life photographic images never works on the NES, the palette color restrictions make it almost impossible to do well.  The music, after a passable rendition of John Williams' music from the film, but otherwise it is pretty nondescript.

The gameplay reminds me of the PC game Bruce Lee, where you run back and forth trying to avoid bad guys, but having to fight them if you cannot.  In fact, the Cross of Coronado level requires you to beat a certain number of them before you can acquire the cross.  Fighting bad guys is just a button mash and many of them take lots of hits and inflict lots of hits on you.  There are also overhead racing sequences like Spy Hunter and a timed puzzle with the move the blocks with one empty block.  You are quickly given choices of what you can do, but in order to complete the game, you have to beat all stages.

Rare :

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Rare is known for some good NES games, although all its games during this period were published by third parties.  Unfortunately, Roger Rabbit's official NES game is no better than what was done with Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle.  Roger Rabbit is an adventure game where you collect items to overcome obstacles and there are lots of items to collect.  The most important objects are the four pieces of Marvin Acme's Will, scattered across four areas of Los Angeles.  Most items unfortunately only have a limited number of uses and replacements are hard to come by.  That is because almost all the items in the game are completely randomized when you start a new game.  You can go around the four areas of the game world and talk to people, but most are unhelpful.  You have to protect Roger, who is otherwise useless, from the Weasels.

Some items allow you bypass obstacles, rattles get you past rattlesnakes, a rose lets you talk to Jessica Rabbit, and TNT and a Detonator lets you break the barrier to the Toontown tunnel.  Others like the gun and exploding cigars, are more useful as weapons.  You shouldn't go into caves without a flashlight, rattles and spring boots.  You can find and ride Benny the Cab, which is far faster than walking across L.A. If you encounter weasels, you have a limited amount of time to select the punchline to a joke or they capture Roger and you lose a life.  You also lose a life if you get run over, fall into a pit or get bumped too many times and lose your sense of humor.

The graphics and music for the game is pretty appropriate.  Unfortunately, you will have a hard time from keeping from bumping into things like cats and dogs.  They can bump you while you are searching drawers and desks for items or talking to people and you cannot move to avoid them while you search or talk  Also, defeating Judge Doom at the end of the game will have you throwing your controller at the screen.

Mostly, this game is about constant searching, everywhere, for everything.  There is little sense of progression, just doing the same thing over and over and over again.  It takes seemingly forever to search desks and cabinets, and the game has lots and lots of them. The people can sometimes tell you if the building has items in it. The maps reuse the same tiles over and over, making it easy to get lost.  The items are mostly randomized, which may have worked in Atari's Adventure when there were only six, but not when you need to collect almost two dozen.  Finally, the game gives you three lives and two continues, but when you lose those continues, you have to start over from the beginning.   The game has a 22 digit password, but as a final kick in the teeth, you have ONLY 45 SECONDS to write it down.

IBM Character Fonts

IBM used several fonts during the life of the IBM PC line and soon thereafter.  Eventually the font support would be finalized into the standard VGA font, but there was quite an evolution to get there.

The first font set is  found in the IBM PC BIOS, starting at address FFA6E.  In PC BIOSes, whether from IBM or from another publisher like Phoenix, Award or AMI, you will always find a font beginning at this address.  This address contains the dot patterns, or glyphs, for the first, basic 128 ASCII characters. The font is always in an 8x8 pattern and essentially acts like a fallback for programs using graphics modes. You could only find the glyphs for the second, extended 128 ASCII characters on the display adapters themselves.

Note the extra pixel in the diamond character in the first row.  This is unique to the first IBM PC Model 5150 BIOS revision.  That pixel will be gone in the PC BIOS dated 10-19-81 and every other BIOS thereafter.  Note that the second 128 characters do not exist in the PC BIOS's ROM.

MDA & Hercules

MDA and Hercules-brand graphics cards share the same glyph patterns.  Their text mode uses a 9x14 text cell and you were strictly limited to the 256 characters contained in the Character Generator ROM on the display adapter.  If you wanted to use non-IBM characters with a basic Hercules Graphics Card, you would use the graphics mode.  A Hercules Graphics Card Plus or Hercules InColor Card can redefine the characters in text mode.  Here is what the demo screen looks like on an MDA or Hercules :

Interestingly, the MDA's Character Generator is an 8KB ROM chip, even though its font only takes 4KB.  The other 4KB contain the two CGA fonts described in the next section.  Apparently it was easier to use one ROM for both cards.  The IBM Part number on the chip is 6359300 or 5788005 and the ROM is a 9264 type, so it cannot be dumped or replaced by an EPROM without a pin adapter.  The Character Generator ROMs cannot be read by the system, so the glyph patterns are obtained via a ROM dump.

CGA & PCjr.

CGA text modes always use an 8x8 text cell and typically uses a thick, double-dot font.  A true IBM CGA card also has a thin, single-dot font.  This can be selected by bridging two solder pads just below the MC6845, but IBM did not provide a pair of pins to make this easy for end users.  The thick font was suitable in 40-column mode for TVs, but the thin font shows a lot of color fringing, a.k.a. artifacts.  IBM probably thought that the thin font was not such an important feature that it should be made accessible to end users.  Otherwise, many users would have probably complained that the text was too difficult to read on their TVs.

This is what the standard thick font looks like :

Note that there are four characters with minor differences between the Character Generator ROM font and the BIOS font.  They are listed as "8x8 different between card and BIOS" in the screenshot.

Here is the thin font, which may have been IBM's first attempt at ISO compliance :

The PCjr. fonts should be identical to the CGA fonts, but the thin font is not available.

Tandy 1000

The Tandy 1000 contains a Character Generator ROM that is mostly similar to IBM's CGA double-dot font, but there are some differences :

In the original 1000, the Character ROM is embedded in the Video Gate Array chip.  After the original 1000s, the Tandy integrated the Video Gate Array and MC6845s into a large VLSI chip.  This applies to the EX, SX, HX and TX.  Internal to these chips is a 2K Character Generator ROM.  In the above screenshot, the first 128 characters are correct because they are duplicated in the Tandy BIOS at address FFA6E.  It is very difficult to extract the patterns for the second 128 characters because they are not in an accessible or dumpable ROM.  Here is what the characters truly look like :

By the time of the TL and SL, Tandy was using the Tandy Video II chip and an external 16KB Character ROM with the 8x8 font and a 9x14 font that may or may not be identical to IBM and Hercules.  The Video Controller in the TL and SL and their successors could emulate MDA and Hercules text and graphics.

The Tandy default text mode uses a 8x9 text cell, but usually an 8x8 text cell can be used.  For most characters, the extra row is blank, but for some the ninth pixel row is a repeat of the eighth pixel row.

EGA

With the EGA, MCGA and VGA adapters, the Character Generator ROM would no longer be found on a separate ROM chip accessible only to the CRT Controller.  Instead, multiple character sets would be contained in the BIOS Extension ROM (for EGA and VGA) or within the BIOS (for MCGA).  As these adapters supported redefinable character sets in text mode, DOS could upload its own character set for display.

The EGA BIOS supports an 8x8 text font when displayed on 200 line monitors, an 8x14 text font when displayed on 350 line color monitors and a 9x14 text font when displayed on a monochrome 350 line monitor.  The 9x14 characters are identical to the MDA characters, but many are shifted a pixel one direction or another to produce a more pleasing spacing (kerning) than MDA.  The 8x14 characters are mostly identical to the 9x14 characters, but there are differences.  The first 128 8x8 characters are identical to the PC BIOS and the second 128 8x8 characters are identical to the CGA thick text font.  All these fonts are stored, uncompressed, in the EGA 16KB BIOS extension.

This is the EGA and VGA and (for the first 128 characters) the standard PC BIOS 8x8 text font :

Here is the EGA and VGA 8x14 text font :

And the EGA and VGA 9x14 text font :

MCGA

MCGA includes a 8x8 and an 8x16 text font.  Actually, the MCGA, in addition to the standard 8x16 font, also contains four more 8x16 fonts, none of which ever obtained popularity.  These may have been IBM's attempt to be ISO compliant.

This is the standard 8x16 font for MCGA and VGA :

In addition, PS/2 Model 30s with a revision 0 BIOS contained an earlier version of the 8x16 font.  In this font, the zero character has a slash instead of a dot.

VGA

VGA supports the EGA 8x8, 8x14, 9x14 fonts and 8x16 and 9x16 fonts.  These are all found in the VGA BIOS ROM extension, which can be 24KB-32KB.  With 8x14 and 9x14 or 8x16 and 9x16, with EGA and VGA the glyphs are mostly the same and only one set is stored in the ROM unless there is a substitution for a particular glyph.  The BIOS adjusts for the ninth pixel column, for most characters the column will be blank; for others, the ninth column will repeat whatever is in the eighth.

Here is the final, standard 9x16 VGA font :

DOS Code Pages

The PC was originally designed by and intended for English speaking countries.  Support for other languages was a cumbersome exercise in the early days of MDA and CGA.  Eventually, DOS 3.3 introduced Code Pages, which when combined with an EGA or VGA card, allowed the user to set his PC to his country's symbols.  English language users would generally be content with the default DOS code page, 437, or the alternate English code page, 850.  Code Page 850 is more friendly to Western European languages than 437 but loses some of the drawing characters.  DOS's .CPI files would contain character sets for several code pages, each of which had character sets for 8x8, 8x14 and 8x16.  EGA.CPI contains 437, 850, 852, 860, 863, 865.  Here are 437 and 850 :

While the Tandy Video II chip found in the TL and SL does not support software redefinable fonts, it has support for 512 characters instead of just 256.  (EGA can also support 512 characters).  The first 256 are the characters in Code Page 437, the second 256 characters are those of Code Page 850.  However, as Tandy 1000s after the original can be upgraded to EGA or VGA, Tandy MS-DOS 3.3 supports Code Pages in 8x8, 8x9 and 8x14 text cell sizes.

ISO.CPI contains an English-language character sets suitable for ISO-compliant fonts :

Special thanks to NewRisingSun for all his help with this blog entry.

The Forgotten Switch : The Atari 2600's B&W/Color Switch

The original Atari 2600 VCS had six switches to control the various game functions, Power On/Off, B&W/Color, Left Difficulty, Right Difficulty, Game Select and Game Reset.   In the early models of the console, there were six aluminum switches, symmetrically spaced on either side of the cartridge slot, three on the left, three on the right.  Later, Atari redesigned the console to reduce costs and put the left and right difficulty switches on the back of the console and used standard plastic switches instead of aluminum.  Even with this change, there were still two switches to the left of the cartridge slot and two to the right.  This continued into the Atari 2600jr, except that all the chrome switches had been replaced with plastic.  Nonetheless, the symmetry of the Atari 2600 is an aesthetic that has been seldom been so rigorously pursued in a console's design throughout its lifespan.

Atari 2600 Light Six Switch

The standard Atari joystick only had one button and the cartridges were too small at first for title screens, menus and logos.  Changing settings were done by these switches and the program reading the appropriate port.  Only the Power On/Off switch had a fixed function, it was connected directly to the electrical path that powered the console.  The other five switches were each connected to a bit on an I/O port.  The game could do whatever it wanted with them, but by convention the Game Select and Game Reset switches usually did just as they indicated.  While Left and Right difficulty were originally intended to set a handicap for one or both players, human or computer, they could just as easily be used to adjust game characteristics.

Atari 2600 Woodgrain Four Switch

The Black and White switch is the focus on this blog entry.  It is just as important as the other switches, yet too frequently overlooked and left off modern products.  The original intent of this switch was to alter the game to switch its colors when the switch was set to the B&W position.  The player should set it if playing on a B&W TV to improve contrast between the player/missile/ball graphics and the playfield/background.  The Atari 2600 had sixteen choices of colors or hues and eight levels of brightness or luminances.  Typically, when the B&W side of the switch was activated, the program would switch to using the eight monochrome shades offered by the 2600.  Sometimes, it would use more muted colors.  On a Color TV, the B&W choices would come very close to simulating what the image would like on a true B&W TV.  Here are two examples to show when this would be useful :

Combat - Color Switch

Combat - Color Switch on Simulated B&W TV

Combat - B&W Switch

Air-Sea Battle - Color Switch

Air-Sea Battle - Color Switch on Simulated B&W TV

Air-Sea Battle - B&W Switch

However, it is very important to remember that a B&W TV was often the second TV in American households in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  If the parents did not want the kids to hog the main TV with video games, they would hook the system up to a second TV.  Few U.S. TVs had two color TVs during this time frame.  Many kids grew up playing video games on B&W TVs, it is a very important part of retro gaming that too often overlooked.

From 1977 until 1982, most Atari and then Activision (made up of ex-Atari programmers) games used the B&W/Color Switch as originally intended.  In fact, until Atari's silver label cartridges and Activision's special label cartridges, it is easier to compile a list of games that did not use the B&W/Color switch as originally intended.  They are as follows :

Atari/Activision Games that Do Not Support B&W

Atari

3-D Tic-Tac-Toe

Asteroids

Superman

Backgammon

Demons to Diamonds

Super Breakout

Yar's Revenge

Activision

Activision Decathlon

Crackpots

Dolphin

Enduro

Frostbite

Keystone Capers

Oink

Plaque Attack

Pressure Cooker

Robot Tank

Spider Fighter

When it comes to Atari Silver, Children's or Red labels or Activision's Special labels, unless the game was previously released as a text or picture label, it will almost certainly not use the B&W/Color switch as intended.  In addition, relatively few third party games released during the 2600's official lifespan use it.  There are some exceptions, and this is not intended to be a complete list but for illustrative purposes :

Other Companies that Support B&W as Originally Intended

Alien

Star Wars ESB

Bank Heist

Dragonstomper

Frogger

Music Machine

Star Voyager

Seamonster

Space Tunnel

Realsports Volleyball

M.A.S.H.

Malagai

Mega Force

Worm War I

Crash Dive

Revenge of the Beeksteak Tomatoes

Joust

Finally, there are several games that use the B&W switch for a special function unrelated to its original intent. Often it could be used to pause the game, but other games assigned a unique function to it.  Here is a list of games that I have verified :

B&W Switch used for Something Else

Space Shuttle (engine controls)

Cosmic Ark (turn on/off star field on some cartridges)

Fantastic Voyage (pause)

Solaris (inverts planet horizons)

Mouse Trap (removes playfield)

Starmaster (brings up Galactic Chart)

Beany Bopper (pause)

Flash Gordon (pause)

Spacemaster X-7 (pause)
Secret Quest (brings up Status Screen and password)

There are undoubtedly more games than on this list, but it serves as an illustrative example of why the B&W/Color switch should not be utterly ignored.  Devices like the Atari Flashbacks which do not include the B&W/Color switch will not function as originally intended with these games.  

Activision Logo

On a totally unrelated Atari 2600 subject, it is interesting to note how consistent Activision was with its in-game logo.  Activision always displayed its logo "Activision" on the game screen for every game.  In its early games like Fishing Derby, the logo would simply be present somewhere on the bottom of the screen.  For the later games, like Pitfall, the text Copyright 198x would appear, then the Copyright text would scroll up and Activision would appear. On games released near the crash, there would be a rainbow leading into the A in Activision.  The A itself was redesigned, otherwise the logo pixel pattern seems identical :

Scrolling Logo 1982-1983

Scrolling Rainbow Logo 1983-1984

Beamrider is the only game where the Activision logo is not always seen during gameplay from the pre-crash era.   Beamrider was the first game to use the (c) character instead of the word Copyright.  It is also the last time the rainbow version of the Activision logo would be used.  Ghostbusters is unique in that it does not have the word Activision is not using the standard appearance.   After Ghostbusters, the (c) and year would be instantly replaced with the non-rainbow Activision logo, no scrolling.  Also, if the game was licensed from another company, that company's name would appear after Activision's.  

The Japanese Invasion : Japanese PC games on Western PCs

Japan has a fine tradition of its own home-grown computers.  In the United States, Apple, Atari, Commodore, Tandy and Texas Instruments all produced computers for the mass-market that were incompatible with each other and with the emerging IBM PC standard.  The United Kingdom had its own computer industry with Sinclair and Commodore and Amstrad churning out budget machines that were not going to replace serious IBM PCs.  In Japan, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp were the big PC players in the 1980s and the MSX machines also had some popularity.

The first three companies produced machines more targeted to the business market.  Their machines emphasized resolution over graphics capability.  Because Japan used Kanji characters in written communication, high resolution support was necessary for business machines.  Kanji characters are difficult to decipher in less than 16x16 pixels, whereas the regular Latin alphabet and Katakana and Hiragana scripts can work with 8x8 pixels.  Typically, a Japanese computer had graphics modes that went to 640x400 at 8 or 16 colors.  They achieved this resolution at a cost of features and color depth.  Any machine that did not support high resolutions, like the MSX machines, were viewed mainly as game consoles like the Famicom and PC Engine.

If the MSX machines were like the Commodore 64 of the Japanese home computer market, then the NEC PC-8801 was the Apple II of that market.  Most computer game developers seemed to cut their teeth on this machine, of which there were many iterations.  In the beginning it used a Z-80A CPU running at 4MHz, but it was easy to port games from it to its more expensive brother, the 8086 based NEC-9801, and the similar Sharp X1 and Fujitsu FM-7 machines.

Each of these machines supported a 640x200 graphics mode with 8 colors and this is what games primarily used for most of the 1980s.  Those colors were often, but not always, the standard eight colors : black, white, red, green, blue, yellow, cyan and magenta.  However, the games described here could choose from a palette of 512 colors on the NEC PC-8801.  This was more impressive than CGA, PCjr. or Tandy machines using high resolution graphics modes, but EGA and VGA cards could do 640x200x16.  In the 640x200x16 mode, the PC ports usually look almost identical to the PC-8801 games, albeit with a somewhat darker color palette.  Eventually as the color depths and resolutions improved, they would still use the high resolution, lower color modes compared to imported western games that used lower resolution, higher color 320x200x256 VGA graphics.

However, when it came to sound support, these machines had the IBM PCs beat for most of the decade.  The Sharp X1, Fujitsu FM-7s and MSX machines had AY-3-8910s or YM-2149s which were slightly better than the TI SN 76496 used in the IBM PCjr. and Tandy 1000s.  By 1985, the PC-8801mkII SR had an internal Yamaha YM-2203 FM and PSG sound chip and the PC-9801s were using more advanced YM-2608s.  (The PC-8801s would get the YM-2608 with the PC-8801 FA).  Even with fewer sound channels, the YM-2203 had better capabilities than the Adlib YM-3812 and the people who composed for the PC-8801 like Yuzo Kojiro were far more skilled at FM synthesis composition than the Adlib composers.

While Japanese consoles were at the vanguard of the Japanese video game invasion, Japanese computer games also had a smaller, less celebrated role to play.  Western games like Ultima and especially Wizardry were extremely popular in Japan for a while, and other genres like adventure games had a niche.  Ken Williams of Sierra On-line went to Japan and was so impressed that he established a branch of Sierra over there and secured rights to port several popular Japanese PC titles to IBM PCs and some other Western home computers.  From 1987-1990, Sierra released Thexder, Silpheed, Fire Hawk : Thexder II - The Second Contact, Zeliard and Sorcerian.  The first four of these games were developed by Game Arts, and the last by Falcom.  Sierra was not the only company to get into the act, as Broderbund released Ys The Vanished Omens (also by Falcom),  Wibarm (by Arsys Software) and Cosmic Soldier : Psychic War (by Kogado).  All these games were originally developed for the NEC PC-8801, so the rest of this blog entry will discuss how the PC releases held up to the Japanese originals.

Thexder

Thexder PC-8801 Title

Thexder was Sierra's first release in 1987 and probably its best seller of all the Japanese games it released.  However, as far as conversions went, you could tell they were still finding their feet.  Thexder is not a very varied game, so the little things count.  The beam in NEC Thexder is thin, multi-colored, uses circles to indicate hits and explosions, and uses the sound chip for its sound effects.  The title screen has scrolling sky.

The PC version uses the Tandy/PCjr. sound chip for the background music and the PC speaker for the laser beam sound effect.  However, when played on a non-Tandy or PCjr., the PC speaker is used for background music, or if the music is turned off, for the beam sound effects.  The beam is a thick white line, and there are no contact explosions.  Undoubtedly, the PC Speaker does justice to neither the music nor the sound effects.  This game was too early for sound card support.

Thexder PC-8801 Game

However, one good thing Sierra did was to use the EGA 640x200x16 mode.  This allows the PC graphics to appear similar or identical to the Japanese graphics.   They would continue to support high resolution modes.for all their future releases.  There are also CGA and Tandy and even MCGA graphics, the last of which draws from an expanded range of colors.  These graphics were drawn in the lower resolution, 320x200, than any contemporary Japanese version outside the NES or MSX.  This made the graphics easy to port, but conversion work was required for players without a VGA or EGA card.  Oddly enough but only one of Sierra's releases supports Hercules Graphics (Zeliard), despite the high resolution mode of that card.

It does not appear that Thexder supports a joystick on the PC-8801, but the other games do.  The PC-8801 supports a standard Atari-style digital joystick port with two buttons using the MSX pinout.  Thexder, like all other PC-8801 games featured in this post, requires a PC-8801 with the V2 graphics mode.  This was first introduced with the PC-8801mkII SR in 1985, and all subsequent machines support this.  The 8801mkII SR and the later machines also support the joystick, which leads me to believe the lack of joystick support was intentional to make the game harder.  However, if that was not sufficiently challenging, the gameplay speed is much faster than Sierra's ports.  It plays at Warp Speed by comparison.  Even the other Japanese versions are more sedate.  Sierra's joystick support and sane speeds makes its version arguably more playable than the original.

Thexder - CGA

Thexder - Tandy

Thexder - MCGA

Thexder - EGA

In later games, using a digital gamepad is definitely the way to go, whether on a IBM PC compatible or a PC-8801. Of course, on a PC these games only support the standard analog gameport, but these games have simple joystick reading routines where above and below a certain threshold response equals movement on an axis and a reading in between those responses means no movement.  A Gravis Gamepad works perfectly with a three state axis reading routines, and is the best way to play these games on real hardware.  This stinks if you have a Tandy TX or earlier machine, which has a joystick port that does not function identically to a standard PC port and does not work with Gravis Gamepads, even with an adapter.  A Tandy TL can disable its built-in gameports in software, so you can use a standard gameport on an ISA card.

Silpheed

Silpheed PC-8801 Title

When Silpheed was released in 1988, there was nothing quite like it for western computers.  There were shmup like games on the home computers of the time, but they were mainly ports of arcade games and small independent works.  Silpheed used a very unusual perspective for its time and since.  It plays close to a top-down shooter, but the perspective was angled like a pinball machine.  Objects were given the appearance of depth and the original game developers used polygon ship designs.  Silpheed is very challenging.  The enemies came fast and furious and the difficulty in dodging constant attacks and the difficulty of keeping your ship's lifebar up could get very unforgiving.  The overall polish of the product cannot be denied.

Silpheed PC-8801 Game

Sierra had been transitioning from autodetecting graphical capabilities and supporting Tandy sound if run on a Tandy to fully selectable graphics support and support for popular sound cards.  It also introduced document-based copy protection to the Japanese games.  This was one of the initial games for which Sierra had included support for sound cards.  It supported the Tandy 3-voice sound chip, the Ad Lib Music Feature Card, the Roland MT-32 and the IBM Music Feature.  Game Blaster support could be added via a patch and version 2.x supported it out of the box and the Yamaha FB-01 (identical music to the IBM Music Feature).  Sierra did the music justice on the MT-32.

However, the rest of the sound presentation left something to be desired.  Sierra attempted to recreate Xacalite's speech at the beginning of the game, but failed so miserably that they added subtitles in version 2.0.  Sierra used PWM PC Speaker for the effect, but the sound chips could have done better.  The original PC-8801 version uses Composite Sine Mode to loosely approximate human speech.  Other speech samples, such as when the Silpheed fighter docks with the ship, were not included.  The sound effects for the laser gun only use the PC speaker, and there are no sounds when enemy ships are hit.  Although the sound effects were not particularly impressive on the original, it is better than silence and PC speaker warble.

Silpheed - CGA

Silpheed - Tandy & MCGA

Silpheed - EGA

However, in version 3.0, Sierra supported the IBM PS/1 Audio/Game Card, which had a DAC.  Now Xacalite's speech was clear, the voices when you dock the ship are restored, and the sound effects sound comparatively great.  IBM was so impressed with the game that they bundled it with the card.  Unfortunately, this version was apparently not released outside IBM's offering, came well after the game's original release in 1991, did not support a wide variety of hardware and was obscure for many years.

Fire Hawk : Thexder II The Second Contact

Fire Hawk PC-8801 Title

Fire Hawk continued the improvements to Sierra's releases.  One of the best features of Sierra's Japanese releases was that the box art showed some awesome mecha for Thexder and Silpheed, and Thexder's sequel was the best of all.  Fire Hawk improved on the original by having power ups in addition to the blaster, more varied enemies and environments and a full music track instead of the two tracks that Thexder used. There was also a substantial back-story and there were some attempts to develop the story during the game. While Fire Hawk could be cheap, it was not quite as unforgiving as Thexder.  This was the only other game in this Sierra series to support manual-based copy protection.

Fire Hawk PC-8801 Game 4MHz

Fire Hawk PC-8801 Game 8MHz

Fire Hawk PC-8801 Cinematic Sample & Heroine

Fire Hawk pushed the limit of the PC-8801 series.  With a 4MHz machine, there would be no backgrounds, just black space.  With an 8MHz machine, the game would draw the backgrounds and the gameplay would be significantly less choppy.  Sierra had an install option to instruct the game not to draw these backgrounds on slower systems, but gave the user the choice. Also, the game would take advantage of the more advanced YM-2608 chip found in the later machines to enhance the existing music.  The music is not radically different compared to the machines with the YM-2203.

Fire Hawk - Tandy & MCGA

Fire Hawk - EGA

Sierra was beginning to slide a bit by this time.  The music compositions are a bit hit and miss if you do not have an MT-32.  The MT-32 has its own unique sound which competes heavily with the YM-2608 original tunes.  In addition, the Japanese versions had the opening story told in game via Ninja Gaiden-like cinematics, but Sierra relegated it to a comic in the manual.  Also, the MCGA graphics option does not take any advantage of the larger color palette (unlike the same option in its predecessor) and looks identical to the Tandy graphics option.  There is no CGA option, so owners with that level of graphics capability were out of luck.

With Fire Hawk, Sierra finally allowed sound effects to be played through something other than the PC Speaker.  Fire Hawk supports both Tandy and Sound Blaster DACs for the sound effects, and they sound great.  Unfortunately, the drivers pair these DACs with their respective sound chips, so you will only be able to officially hear Tandy music with the Tandy DAC option and Ad Lib music with the Sound Blaster option.

Zeliard

Zeliard PC-8801 Title

Zeliard was the last Game Arts' game Sierra released.  The port of the game is excellent, the graphics are nearly identical to the original, the MCGA option is more colorful than the EGA or Tandy or CGA options.  The music is spot on, this time, with the Tandy 3-voice music a particuar highlight.  (Yes Sierra, you can use the noise channel for percussion!)

The game itself is a side-scrolling action adventure similar to Ys III : Wanderers from Ys.  The controls are rather loose, even with a game pad, and hit detection is very generous from the monster's perspective.  There are some enemies, like bats, that cannot be hit very easily because the overhead attack is tricky to pull off.  The environments are very maze like and virtually mandate the use of maps.  Fortunately Sierra included some in the box.  Caution is the rule of the day in these games.

Zeliard PC-8801 Game

Unfortunately, Sierra's marketing for the game seems to be virtually nil.  The box art is pretty bad, the manual is slim and only accompanied by a map poster.  Music support is limited to PC Speaker, Tandy, Ad Lib and MT-32.  However, there is support for CGA and unique among Sierra's ports, Hercules monochrome graphics.  Additionally, there is no copy protection in this game or Sorcerian (but the manual is kind of required for the latter).  Zeliard uses Composite Sine Mode to loosely approximate voices during the introduction.  The PC version does not support this, although the hardware of the YM-3812 in the Ad Lib did support Composite Sine Mode.  Instead it uses high to low pitched notes to give some aural expression to the text.

Zeliard - CGA

Zeliard - Hercules

Zeliard - Tandy

Zeliard - MCGA

Zeliard - EGA

Getting Zeliard to run in a PC-8801 is not obvious, unlike these other games.  You need to boot Disk 3 and let it format a user disk (use a copy of Disk 3 with an emulator or a blank formatted disk).  Despite what TOSEC says, there are only three game disks. Then start the game with Disk 1 and Disk 2 in drive 1 and 2, respectively, let it get past the intro and then insert the user disk you created.

Sorcerian

Sorcerian PC-8801 Title

Sorcerian was the last direct port from Japanese PC games Sierra released.  Sorcerian was originally released by Nihon Falcom in Japan, and is the fifth canonical game in its Dragon Slayer series.  Unlike the earlier games, this one only supports 640x200x16 graphics, requiring an EGA or VGA card.  It also appears to require a 286-class system, based on the box sticker that says "IBM AT VERSION".

Sorcerian PC-8801 Menu

Even though Sorcerian was a side-scrolling adventure like Zeliard and its predecessor, Dragon Slayer IV : Drasle Family (better known as Legacy of the Wizard on the NES), it was very ambitious.  It has a character select system like Ultima III that allowed you to create multiple characters and form parties with them.  Your characters had classes, occupations and could change as they aged.  Each character went into shops to buy his own equipment like Wizardry.  You don't control one character but four, which move and jump in unison.  The game gave you fifteen quests instead of a singular goal.  In Japan Falcom and other companies released expansion scenario disks to add new quests to the game, but Sierra only released Sorcerian with the basic 15 quests.

Sorcerian PC-8801 Game

Sorcerian's music support is limited to the Ad Lib, Game Blaster, MT-32 and the Yamaha FB-01. Unfortunately, Yamaha FB-01 music tends to crash in the gameplay screens, only in the option screens and the music guild.  The music guild option is not readily available in the PC-8801 version, but there are more sound effects in the PC-8801.  Unfortunately, Sierra went back to its lazy ways of using only the PC speaker for sound effects, regardless of music device chosen.

Sorcerian - EGA

Unfortunately, Zeliard and Sorcerian were not huge sellers, and Sierra turned from its partnership with Japanese companies.  Its next partnership was with the developer it bought, Dynamix.

Here is a list of the graphics and sound support for each of Sierra's releases :

	Thexder	Silpheed	Fire Hawk	Zeliard	Sorcerian
CGA	Y	Y$	N	Y	N
Hercules	N	N	N	Y	N
Tandy	Y%	Y%$	Y	Y	N
EGA	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
MCGA	Y	Y (16-Color)$	Y (16-Color)	Y	N
PC Speaker	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Tandy 3-Voice	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
Tandy DAC	N	N	Y	N	N
Ad Lib MSC	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Sound Blaster DAC	N	N	Y	N	N
Game Blaster	N	Y^	Y	N	Y
Roland MT-32	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
IBM Music Feature	N	Y	N	N	NW*
Yamaha FB-01	N	Y^	N	N	NW
IBM PS/1 Audio Game	N	Y&	N	N	N
Roland D-110	N	Y	N	N	Y*
Casio MT-540	N	N	N	N	Y*
Casio CT-460/CSM-1	N	N	N	N	Y*
	^ - Version 1.x requires patch		$ - Not available in Version 3.x
	& - Version 3.x only		% - PCjr Graphics Support (Version 2.x for Silpheed)

Ys the Vanished Omens, a.k.a. Ys : Ancient Ys Vanished (Omen), Ancient Land of Ys

Ancient Ys Vanished PC-8801 Title

This is the first Japanese PC game published by Broderbund.  This is unfortunate because Ys 1 is a very good game but Broderbund did it no favors.  The only graphics options are CGA, Tandy and EGA 320x200 graphics.  Hercules graphics are supported, but don't convey the original high resolution graphics of the original Japanese version.  As bad as the graphics are, and they make the main character look like a walking turd, this is nothing compared to the laziness of the sound engine.  Only PC speaker is supported, and there was no excuse for this in 1989.  The port was done by Unlimited Software, Inc., the porting arm of Distinctive Software, Inc.  While the company did have some experience with sound chips, their ports generally are rather middling in quality (TMNT U.S. version was impossible to finish, Castlevania with anything but the PC Speaker slows the game to a crawl on 286s), and Ys is no exception.

Ancient Ys Vanished Omen PC-8801 Game

On the plus side, the game plays like the Japanese original, even down to the keys used to bring up the menu screens.  One benefit to having the translated PC versions is that the menu options and other text in English are usually in the same places as in the PC-8801 versions, making games like Ys and Sorcerian much easier to play. But the glorious music, composed in part by the legendary Yuzo Koshiro, is done no justice here. It appears as though the PC speaker was assigned to one instrument, which would have given Tandy music a fuller sound had it been supported.  Broderbund also released an Apple IIgs port, and while the graphics are no better than the PC port, the music is done some justice due to the IIgs's synthesizer.  The PC port uses disk-based copy protection, which was already considered passe' by the time.

Ancient Land of Ys - CGA

Ancient Land of Ys - Hercules

Ancient Land of Ys - Tandy & EGA

Ys was also ported to the Sega Master System (which uses the same sound chip as the Tandy) and later to the Turbo Grafx 16 CD with its sequel, but these are the only forms which the West ever officially received until the release of Legacy of Ys: Books I and II for the Nintendo DS in 2009.  In the PC and Apple IIgs ports, names are changed.  Adol Christin becomes Arick andDark Fact becomes Malificus.

Wibarm

Wibarm PC-8801 Title

Broderbund's second Japanese PC game did improve slightly in the presentation from the first.  Wibarm was originally developed by Arsys Software.  While the graphics options and resolutions have not changed, this port at least supports Tandy 3-voice music.  Fortunately the music is rather good, with nice use of noise channel percussion.  It is not the same music as in the PC-8801 version.  There is not a lot of music in Wibarm, so what is there becomes repetitive.  Document based copy protection is used.

Wibarm - Game Overworld

Wibarm - Game Building

Wibarm - Game Battle

Unfortunately, Wibarm is an unfairly obscure game.  I do not believe there is a FAQ or even a full English copy of the manual available.  The similarities to Thexder are obvious, but the game uses a hub-like world, first person perspectives inside building, and an odd battle screen that you might fight any enemy you touch.  Unfortunately figuring out which enemies you can defeat and whether you can spare the energy is a trial and error process.

Wibarm - CGA

Wibarm - Hercules

Wibarm - Tandy & EGA

It obviously was and not a great seller for Broderbund, who obviously put little marketing behind the title. Considering how close it is to Thexder, which was a big seller, this is surprising.  Wibarm is also a small nightmare to get running on a PC without the original install disks and manual or reference card.  It does not like being installed on a hard drive other than C: or with more than 50-60 subdirectories in the root of the drive.  It needs both WIBARM and WIBARM.DAT as subdirectories in the root directory of the drive.

Cosmic Soldier : Psychic War

Cosmic Soldier 2: Psychic War PC-8801 Title

This game was known as Cosmic Soldier 2: Psychic War in Japan, and as its name implies, it is a sequel to Cosmic Soldier, both originally developed by Kogado.  The game, like Ys, was brought over from Japan by Kyodai Software Marketing, Inc., a joint venture of Japanese computer game developers created to introduce their games to the West.  Broderbund handled the distribution.

This game supports CGA, Hercules and Tandy/EGA, PC Speaker, Tandy and Ad Lib sound.  One can see the gradual improvement in sound support from Broderbund distributed products, but no high resolution support.  Nothing in terms of sound effects, but the original game was rather sparse.  The Tandy and Ad Lib music is surprisingly decent.

Cosmic Soldier 2: Psychic War PC-8801 Game

Cosmic Soldier 2: Psychic War PC-8801 Game Over

This is an futuristic RPG with a first person perspective like Wizardry and the Gold Box games.  You start as a single character with a female cyborg that acts like a guide.  Along the way, you can encounter enemies and sometimes you can bring them to the point of defeat, where they will offer to join your party.  You can have a maximum of four party members.  Attacking is done by a mental beam, and it like you and your opponent push beams against each other and whoever's beam touches will cause damage.

Cosmic War: Psychic Soldier - CGA

Cosmic War: Psychic Soldier - Hercules

Cosmic War: Psychic Soldier - EGA/Tandy

Koei

Koei released innumerable historical strategy games in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition series, as well as other strategy games detailing other time periods like Napoleon and Liberty or Death as well as fantasy settings in Gemfire.  While Koei is must better known for Dynasty Warriors today, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was solely known for its strategy games.  They were among the most detailed for their time and more than just simple wargames. You had to manage provinces, supply armies, recruit generals, employ spies and assassins, conduct diplomacy, set tax rates as well as wage war in Koei's turn-based strategy games.

Koei released English-language versions of many of their games for the NES, SNES and Genesis.  One might suppose that the slow pacing, intimidating interface and overwhelming number of options of most of their games would deter most people, but Koei kept on releasing games for consoles.  They also released sixteen of their games for DOS with full English translations.  Apparently people kept buying them, so they kept porting them.  Unfortunately, they have generally not aged well.

Koei games are pretty bare-bones hardware-wise.  All their earlier games support only 640x200x16 EGA graphics, although the earliest also support 640x200 CGA monochrome graphics (black and white).  Its final releases use 640x480x16 VGA graphics and look very nice due to the large number of colors available for the palette.  Sound support is usually just the PC speaker, although Adlib and Sound Blaster began to be supported in the 1990s.  Mobygames has screenshots for all these games.