Nintendo, Sega and the World Outside Japan and North America - Accommodating Non-English Speakers

Early on, most video games did not need to be translated because the amount of text used in these games was very limited.  Some games, like RPGs, were an exception but by and large most games from the pre-crash era used English when they needed to convey information in the written form.  Even games made by Japanese companies, unless the game was for a Japanese game like Go, Mahjong or Shogi, English was the norm for the simple text messages.  

When console games were large enough to hold a significant amount of text and able totell a story, then for the games that were developed in Japan most or all of the game would tend to use Japanese text.  When these games were released in North America the Japanese text would be translated into English, generally with some simplification for 8-bit and 16-bit console titles.  But when tongues other than English had to be accommodated, things got interesting.

Family BASIC - Putting the "Computer" into the Family Computer

Courtesy of Wikipedia (taken by Evan Amos)

When Nintendo released its first console, the Famicom, the full name of the system was the Nintendo Family Computer.  In the early 1980s the line between video game consoles and home computers was a fuzzy one.  Some consoles, like the Odyssey^2 had a full (membrane) keyboard but were more like video game consoles.  Some computers like the Commodore 64 had a full-travel keyboard and a disk drive but could also play games via its Expansion Port.  At the Famicom's launch in 1983, the only software available for the machine were arcade game ports.  By the next year (1984) Nintendo had released a new product for the Family Computer which was intended to do more than just play another video game.  This product was released as Family BASIC on July 21, 1984, but was only released in Japan.  Did it succeed in turning the Famicom into a Family Computer?  

The Taiwanese Connection - The Source for Many Unlicensed NES/Famicom Games

Joy Van - Twin Eagle

AVE - Double Strike

Taiwan was called one of the four Asian Tigers (with Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong), small countries which had developed economically very rapidly after from the 1960s to the present to compete with much larger countries.  Taiwan embraced technology, creating chip fabrication plants and becoming indispensable to the PC revolution.  Video game consoles were hardly overlooked by the island, and Nintendo was the largest publisher of console video games in Asia.  There was no protection system in place for the Nintendo Famicom, so Taiwan programming firms began developing unlicensed games for that console around 1986.

At the same time, Nintendo was becoming the largest publisher of video games in North America thanks to the success of the NES.  Third parties were naturally attracted to the increasingly successful system, but Nintendo was a hard business partner.  Nintendo required companies to buy cartridges manufactured by Nintendo, required cartridge orders in large unit quantities, limited the number of cartridges a company could release in a year and scrutinized the content of the games to be published.  After Tengen showed that it was possible to develop and release cartridges without Nintendo's sanction, other companies like AVE and Color Dreams entered the market as unlicensed publishers.  But they needed games to sell and the number of programmers who could handle Nintendo's console were limited, so sometimes they turned to Taiwan.

Nintendo's 8-bit Obsession with Golf

Golf is popular in most parts of the world with any concentration of wealth.  It is rather popular in Japan, at least for those who can afford to play it.  Green fees and club memberships are extremely pricey in Japan, so it may not be any surprise that many people who enjoy the game may have to turn to less expensive alternatives to get 18 holes in.  Most video game systems have a golf game, or something intended to resemble golf, released for them.  When Nintendo was releasing early titles for its Famicom, a golf game was a natural addition to its sports library.  But Nintendo kept revisiting the sport with its 8-bit systems, so let's explore how its implementation of golf evolved throughout the 8-bit lifespan.

Early Video Game Content Advisories - Who Needs Ratings Systems?

Prior to the formation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board in 1994 there was no comprehensive content ratings systems for computer and video games in the U.S.  However, that did not mean that video games never provided warnings to potential purchasers and their parents or spouses.  Here let us explore the attempts to advise the public of adult-oriented content prior to and outside the eventual dominance of the ESRB.

The Evolution of King's Quest (I AGI)

The original King's Quest had a long history of releases for the IBM PC and compatible platforms. The game was originally developed for the enhanced graphics and sound of the IBM PCjr.  The PCjr. was hyped to the max and many media publications were predicting that IBM's consumer-focused machine would quickly dominate the home market when it was announced in November of 1983.  Sierra Online was facing a troubling future and made good on a deal to publish an ambitious and revolutionary game for IBM's machine.

IBM bankrolled much of King's Quest's development, but the game would not be available at launch.
However, by the time King's Quest was released in May of 1984, the market had shown that it was not about to become IBM's playground.  The PCjr. was overpriced cost twice as much as the Commodore 64 with a disk drive and did not offer much to the consumer that the C64 could not.  The Apple IIe and //c computers were also strong competitors at the same price, offering a huge library of software.  The PCjr struggled with compatibility with several popular IBM PC programs and included a keyboard that was laughable for trying to get real work done with it.

Old Coleco or New Coleco : Nostalgia or Nothing

ColecoVision Video Game System (courtesy of wikipedia)

The Connecticut Leather Company, popularly known by its moniker Coleco, certainly had an interesting role in the history of video games.  It started by making dedicated game consoles in the Pong-era which were marketed as the Telstar series.  They also made a line of well-received hand-held conversions of arcade games, the mini-Arcades.  Finally, they turned their hands to marketing a game console, the ColecoVision, and a home computer, the Adam.  But when the video game crash wiped out all the consoles of the 2nd generation of video games, they were left to selling Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and other toys to survive for a time.  The costly failures of their video game ventures brought them to liquidation by the end of the 1980s.

In 2005, the Coleco brand was reintroduced to the general public by West River Holdings (WRH), a company that revitalizes older trademarks.  Companies like WRH look for trademarks which have been dormant for some time but had been previously been associated by the public with a successful product or service.  These trademarks could simply discontinued by the user of the mark or abandoned when the owner went out of business.  WRH typically forms an LLC to manage and promote each trademark it acquires.  In Coleco's case, it was Coleco Holdings, LLC.  In 2016, WRH and its brands were purchased by Dormitus Brands, another trademark holding company.

For the remainder of this article, where it is necessary to distinguish the two, I will refer to the original Coleco, the company that was sold in the late 1980s as the "old Coleco".  The WRH incarnation will be referred to as the "new Coleco".  Let's discuss the legacy of the old Coleco vs. the new Coleco.

Early PC Game Miscellaneous Notablility

IBM's First PC Game Releases

IBM released games for the PC and PCjr. from 1981 to 1985.  However, IBM did not always develop the games.  These games came in a gray plastic over cardboard folder or folio without artwork on the covers.  The game and manual would fit into plastic sleeves on the inside of the folder. The disk label was originally gray, but turned to red for Casino Games.

These were the among the first commercially sold games released for the PC.

Adventure in Serenia - Sierra
Casino Games - IBM
Microsoft Adventure - Microsoft
Microsoft Decathalon - Microsoft
Arithemitic Games Set 1 - Science Research Associates, Inc.
Arithemitic Games Set 2 - Science Research Associates, Inc.
One Hundred and One Monochrome Mazes - IBM
Strategy Games - IBM

Microsoft Adventure was the first commercial PC game ever released, it was available at the PC's launch, August 12, 1981.  The first actual PC game was the Donkey game included with PC-DOS 1.0 and run in BASIC.

One Hundred and One Monochrome Mazes is the first non-text game released exclusively for the Monochrome and Printer Display Adapter, and only works with that display hardware or compatible hardware.  It does not work with the PCjr.  It also uses a black folio instead of a gray folio.

Microsoft Decathalon does not work with the PCjr.  Adventure in Serenia relies on CGA Composite Color and will show incorrect colors with the PCjr.  You can run Microsoft Adventure on the PCjr. but cannot set the foreground and background colors.  Adventure in Serenia will not show correct composite colors with a PCjr.

A Brief History of PC Plug and Play

Plug and Play, In the Beginning

Early PC expansion cards either came with no user selectable options, like most IBM's cards, or came with banks of jumpers and dipswitches.  Early motherboards also often came only with jumpers to control settings on them.  I love these early devices because, if you have the documentation, you always can change the settings and get them to work.  IBM's PC, XT, Portable, PCjr and all the Tandy 1000s up to and including the Tandy 1000 TX (but excluding the HX) were all configured in this way.  All the major graphics cards and all of Creative Labs sound cards, up to and including the first generation of the Sound Blaster 16, were also configured in this way.

Jumpers or dipswitches typically allow you to select I/O addresses, IRQ and DMA usage, among other things.  If you think you have a conflict, you shut off the computer, check your cards and make changes to fix the conflict.  Turn it back on and if the conflict is solved, it will remain solved so long as the hardware does not change.  Occasionally during this period, there were some cards which could be unofficially modded with a soldering iron to give you extra options.

Conflicts in the early ISA period were often tricky to diagnose.  In the early days, not many people knew what an Interrupt Request was or why their card would not work if another card used the same Interrupt Request.  IRQs were the worst areas of conflict because many devices used an IRQ and there were not many which did not have a specified use.  Some peripheral cards and software programs would only use the lower eight IRQs.  Of those eight, three (System Timer, Keyboard Controller, Floppy Disk Controller) are almost always in use and two more (parallel and serial) are frequently used as well.  ISA IRQs are generally not shareable (except for the parallel IRQ when assigned to a printer).  DMA usage, even with only four or seven DMA channels, was not usually as bad because so few devices used DMA.  I/O port usage was not always given, so if a new card caused your system to crash, it could be due to an I/O conflict.  IBM originally only designated 768 valid I/O addresses in the PC design, but eventually the full number of 8086 I/O addresses (65,536) was being used (including by IBM).  Finally, there are memory addressing conflicts. If a peripheral card uses the Upper Memory Area for ROM or RAM, it may conflict with some other card which also has ROM or RAM.  Some cards, like my ADP-50L use memory addressing to speed up hard disk transfers, even though the card has no RAM, but fail to note which area of memory it is using.

An initialization driver was not common in the early days.  The BIOS, DOS or the program had all the tools it needed to utilize the hardware.  If the BIOS did not have hard drive support, support was added through a ROM extension on a card.  EMS memory boards were an early exception, a driver needed to be loaded so a program could address the memory in a standardized way.  CD-ROM drivers would eventually follow in this way.

Plug and Play, Software Configuration

Knowing that many people were afraid to take a screwdriver and tweezers to their computers, eventually companies began using software configuration.  For systems, this was originally a bootable floppy with a system setup program.  This allowed the user to indicate what he had installed in the system and to change system parameters.  The IBM PC AT was the first system to allow this, and AT clones thereafter took from IBM's lead.  Eventually the IBM PS/2 MCA computers would have peripheral setup disks.  You would load the disk and the disk would tell the system that a new peripheral was installed and configure the card entirely in software.  The only problem with this is that if you lost the setup disk, you were SOOL.  Also, it really stunk if your CMOS battery expired.  The system would store its configuration in the CMOS and when the CMOS died, you would start getting dreaded "161" or "163" errors.  At worst, the system would fail to get past the boot screen at all.  Some other systems, like the later Tandy 1000s store their settings in a small EEPROM.

Eventually, this software configuration concept made its way to ISA cards.  The Gravis Ultrasound was partially software configurable.  While you selected the card's I/O address via jumpers, you set its IRQ and DMA selections by an initialization program (ULTRINIT.EXE) that loaded every time you booted the system.  The second generation Sound Blaster 16s and first generation Sound Blaster AWE32s also used a similar program (SBCONFIG.EXE or DIAGNOSE.EXE).  The Gravis and Creative programs would be loaded in AUTOEXEC.BAT and take the settings from the SET BLASTER or SET ULTRASND lines in AUTOEXEC.BAT.  The Mediavision Pro Audio Spectrum series used a device driver called MVSOUND.SYS, loaded in CONFIG.SYS with parameters, to initialize the card.

Plug and Play : Standardization

Ever desiring to make hardware more friendly to users, especially when PCI cards rarely if ever had jumpers or dipswitches, the ISA Plug-N-Play standard emerged.  This standard mandated that virtually everything be configured by software in a standardized manner.  If you had a Plug and Play OS like Windows 95, you would configure your cards in System Properties.  If you were still using DOS, you had to run a program that gave you the functional equivalent.  Sound Blaster cards had a program called CTCU.EXE which could configure any ISA PNP card, not just a Sound Blaster card.

Popular Sound Cards with PNP support include third generation Sound Blaster 16s, second generation Sound Blaster AWE32s, all Sound Blaster 32s and AWE64s.  The Gravis Ultrasound PNP, the various Yamaha, Crystal and ESS ISA chipsets all seem to be PNP.  They all require drivers to initialize the card and to change settings.  Loading these drivers in DOS can add quite a bit to the boot time.  Even if the card's drivers are properly loaded in Windows, you will still need to load the card's DOS drivers.

ISA Plug and Play would gives you resource configurations.  Some of these configurations would allow you to manually assign resources to the card and sometimes they would not.  Sometimes they would delete resources or assign resources in a very odd way.  Often it was quite a struggle to get some cards working at the resources you wanted as opposed to what the driver assumes everybody wants.

With PCI cards came the end of much of the hassle of assigning resources and managing resource conflicts, whether on the card or in software.  Windows 3.1 had begun the requirement of drivers for various hardware, but Windows 95 took it to a whole new level.  While there would occasionally be a resource conflict, PCI cards were typically well-behaved and focused on configuring options instead of resources.

Remnant of the Golden Age of Arcades : Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga 20 Year Anniversary

Recently I conducted a survey of all establishments, arcades and restaurants within a thirty minute radius of my house or within my county to find some classic arcade machines.  I used this ancient site, http://www.arcadelocations.net/ and my memories of seeing classic machines in my travels.  I live in the sticks but there are several major population centers within that distance and well over half a million people live within it.

Any video game made during the Golden Age of Arcade Video Games, the 1970s or the first half of the 1980s was to be included.  After having visited every place that had been reported to possess a classic arcade machine or was likely to possess a classic arcade machine (i.e. malls), I technically came up empty for finding machines built and released during that time period

However, this did not mean that a classic experience was impossible to find within a reasonable distance from my house.  In 2001, Namco released a machine called Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga Class of 1981 / 20 Year Reunion.  As its name suggested, this was a 2-in-1 arcade machine that allowed you to play Ms. Pac-Man or Galaga.  The machine was hugely successful and mush have sold at least 10,000 units.  Considering the huge decline in arcade machines sold after the Golden Age, this was an impressive achievement.  As is well-known, there is a special code you can input to play Pac-Man instead of Ms. Pac-Man.

In my area, I found two Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machines, one of which was a cocktail unit.  I also know of that two other machines were available until recently, but I believe one of the units belonged to an establishment that may have gone out of business.  I found nothing else of note, although I did note a few arcade machines from the 90s in one or two locations.

Namco would later follow the machine with a Pac-Man 25th Anniversary Edition in 2005 (allows you to select Pac-Man without a code) and Pac-Man's Arcade Party in 2010 (adds more games but Ms. Pac-Man is lost for the arcade versions).  However, these machines have not been nearly as successful as Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga.  I have been pretty sharp about spotting classic machines but I am not sure if I have ever seen one of the later machines.

If a classic arcade game is running in a machine has an LCD screen or looks like it is running MAME, I would not have considered it.  I did not find any such machines, but I know they exist in more tourist-pandering areas along the coast.  LCDs and classic arcade machines go together like oil and water.  The lag generated by an LCD (especially the cheap ones they use) is absolutely hostile to improving your skills on an arcade machine.

There are several differences between the original Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga and the original machines.  The standalone 1981 games were sold in three styles, a large vertical "Upright" unit with a 19" monitor, a smaller vertical "Mini" unit with a 13" monitor, and a horizontal "Cocktail" unit with a 19" monitor.  In 2001, there were only two versions, an Upright and a Cocktail, and both had a 24" monitor.  This made the resulting graphics look a lot sharper if blockier.  I have also read complaints that the monitor size is so large that it is harder to keep track of everything going on on the screen.

The original Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man used a large PCB with two (Pac-Man) or three (Ms. Pac-Man) daughterboards.  These boards were populated entirely of discrete components and a Z-80 CPU.  Galaga had two large boards sandwiched together and used three Z-80s.  The Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga uses one small board with a Z-180 CPU and two custom circuits to handle most of the gameplay.  While the original games used lots of small ROMs and PROMs for game code, video and color data and waveform sample storage, the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga only uses two large ROMs.

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man had 4-way joysticks, but Galaga only needed a 2-way joystick.  For obvious reasons, the joystick on the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine is a 4-way stick.  The sticks for the original games were all leaf sticks where contact was made by pressing one metal strip against another.  The stick on the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine uses micro-switches.  Micro-switches pretty much work on the same principle, but have a click to their activation.  I believe true aficionados of these games prefer the smoother action of the leaf joysticks.

The other obvious difference between the original and Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine is the addition of continues to the games in Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga.  The original games did not allow you continue once you used up all your lives.  You had one credit and that was it.  A second credit meant starting over.  All three games contained in the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine allow you to continue from exactly where you left off, even during the middle of a level.  If your ship is captured in Galaga, you will be able to rescue once you continue your game, essentially giving you an extra life of sorts.  Your score is not reset, so you can feel good about obtaining a high score after spending $10 in quarters at each game, but no one else will be impressed.

The title screens for Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga have a website address www.namcoarcade.com.  When the originals were released in 1981, only the academic community and the military had access to ARPANET, but by 2001 everyone was able to access the Internet.  Unfortunately you cannot buy these machines from Namco anymore.  Arcade dealers do have them, but the going rate for a full, working cabinet is at least $1,000.

The original games used dipswitches to change settings like how many coins it would cost to play a game and how many lives you were given with each coin.  Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga uses a test switch and an in-game menu.  The options for Ms. Pac-Man also apply to Pac-Man.  Except for the number of credits per coin, the options for the standalone games and the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga versions are the same except as noted below.

Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga Galaga's options include Attract Sounds On/Off.  Stand-alone Galaga had sound when it was playing automatically in the "Attract Mode".  The bonus lives for Galaga follow the Midway version released in the US.  Galaga also features a Rapid Fire option as well as a Fast Shot option.  Rapid Fire allows you to hold down the Fire button to shoot multiple shots.  Original Galaga always required a button press for each shot.

Each game has a default fast/slow setting.  When the fast Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man option is selected, you move extremely quickly relative to the ghosts in the earlier levels.  When the fast shot is selected in Galaga, you can spam the fire button to fire many shots instead of the two shots on screen the game typically allows.  These options are throwbacks to the speedup modifications and hacks often done on the original machines.


















The Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine has two well-known secret codes entered with the joystick and fire buttons.  The first code allows you to play Pac-Man.  The second code allows you to toggle the fast  Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man and fast shot option on and off.  If the machine has been set to fast mode, you can input the code to use the slow mode, and vice versa.

Codes are entered only when you are on the game select screen.  The code for Pac-Man is Up, Up, Up, Down, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Left.  If you are successful, you will hear the sound in Pac-Man indicating you earned an extra life and Blinky will turn into Pinky.  The code to toggle the fast Pac-Man/fast Shot is Left, Right, Left, Right, Up, Up, Up, Fire.  If you enter it correctly, you will hear the sound of Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man eating a fruit.  You should take your time when entering these codes, unlike the Konami code, slower is better.  Each code only lasts until game over (including continues).

You will have to input the code again on the game select screen to play Pac-Man or toggle the game speed.  Even if you see the Pac-Man attract screens giving the ghost names, you must still input the code.  You will not see the following screen, you will only see the Ms. Pac-Man or Galaga select screen.

Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga Galaga has an error in the Galaga attract mode compared to original Galaga.  The enemies in Galaga fire shots that white and red, with the red end going toward you.  In the Attract Mode for Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga Galaga, the shots are reversed.  The in-game shots look correct.



















Tricks in the original games work as they should in the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine.  Thus, for example, you can hide Pac-Man in the upper left corner of the "T" junction where he starts and the ghosts will never catch him.  You can control the ship in the Galaga Attract Mode by using the controls when the enemy comes to capture the ship and cause the machine to reset itself (allowing you to view the version of the ROM it uses).

Metroid II - Return of the Sidescrolling Action/Adventure Exploration Game

Original Game Boy Palette

Metroid II was released during a relative drought of quality first party titles from Nintendo for the Game Boy.  Nintendo had released all the launch games for the system in July of 1989, Alleyway, Super Mario Land, Tennis and Tetris, but after that its releases had dropped substantially while its third party licensees like Konami and Capcom picked up the slack.  While Nintendo released other games like Golf, Solar Striker, Qix, Radar Mission and F-1 Race during 1990 and 1991, it was not until Metroid II was released in November of 1991 that one was really reassured that Nintendo was going to give its handheld system its best.  More classics, like Super Mario Land 2, Wario Land, Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Donkey Kong would follow about once a year thereafter.

Original Game Boy Palette

Metroid II helped cement the fact that certain premium games would have battery backed RAM.  Almost every classic game Nintendo developed for its cartridge systems thereafter would also have the extra battery backed RAM. The extra RAM allows for a more forgiving saving system than passwords.  The original Metroid, whether played on cartridge or disk, did not save your current health and did not save your location except at an elevator (Famicom Disk System Metroid always restarts you at Brinstar.)  There are save points liberally scattered throughout Metroid II's SR388.

Original Game Boy Palette

Graphically, the smaller screen resolution (160x144 vs. 256x240) and limited number of colors available (4 vs. 52), when compared to the NES, required certain compromises.  The graphics artists could scale down Samus compared to her NES sprites, or keep the NES scale and show a smaller screen area.  Nintendo had scaled down the graphics for Super Mario Land, but the result looked rather simplistic and lacked detail.

Original Game Boy Palette

The designers made the right choice in keeping the scale the same.  With a larger scale, they could show more detailed backgrounds and enemies.  This is important in a large game that is limited to a four color monochrome palette.  As a result, while most parts of SR388 look natural, other parts look like they were designed by intelligent beings.  Samus' armor is much more detailed, especially after she acquires the Varia suit.  Also, her left/right facing sprites are not totally mirror images of each other, now her arm cannon is always on her right arm.

Super  Game Boy Default Palette

The enemies too take on a greater variety.  Most look like the planet's indigenous life, but some enemies look and act like constructs or robots gone haywire.  The same enigmatic power statutes appear in both Metroid and Metroid II, but their connection to each other, the Metroids and the Space Pirates is not detailed until later games in the series.

Super  Game Boy Default Palette

The sound and music in Metroid II is often underrated.  The music starts out fairly jaunty and adventurous, not unlike the Brinstar music of the original.  When dealing with the Chozo-inspired structures, the music is rather clinical not unlike the music for the Chozo rooms in the original game.  Metroid encounter music sounds appropriately frantic.

Super  Game Boy Default Palette

After that, the games sharply diverge.  Metroid has a distinct musical theme for each area.  Metroid II does not.  In many areas, you will only hear something akin to ambient noise.  The noise tends to become more ominous as you descend deeper into the planet.  Finally, toward the end of the game, you get new music, but it evokes an undercurrent of dread and foreboding.  The final areas are almost completely devoid of non-Metroid lifeforms.

Super  Game Boy Default Palette

Gameplay wise, the smaller screen gives a more claustrophobic feel to the game compared to the vast, empty spaces of Metroid.  Control has improved in many ways. Samus can now duck and shoot and shoot downwards from the air.  These additions eliminate much of the frustration of the original Metroid.  There are no longer cheap hits when you pass through doorways.  The new items are the space jump, spider ball and jump ball.  All prove very useful.

Game Boy Color Built-in Custom Palette

The space jump allows you to keep jumping after you jump in a somersault.  Controlling the space jump is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. If you wait until you start to dip from the maximum height of your somersault, you will nail the next jump every time.  It is much easier to space jump against a straight wall.  You can also do something like a space jump if you touch an enemy in mid air and press jump.

Game Boy Color Built-in Custom Palette

The spider ball is a bit tricky to maneuver.  If you let go of the directional you are pressing, you may have to press more than one directional to get going in the right direction again.  Although it allows you to climb on any wall, you will get knocked off if you hit an enemy, spikes or are too close to a bomb blast.

Game Boy Color Built-in Custom Palette

There are two new weapons in addition to the ice and wave beam, the spazer and plasma beams.  Each beam cannot be used with another beam, but the beams are easy to find (the wave beam is not easy to find in Metroid).  Each have their strengths and weaknesses, and when you need the ice beam at the end, you can find another one in the final area without having to backtrack.

Game Boy Color Built-in Custom Palette

Enemies are very similar to Metroid, with the exception of the Metroids themselves.  The Metroids act like a string of mini-bosses.  Six forms of the Metroid are present in the game.  The Alpha Metroids have no attack and are easy to kill.  The Gamma Metroids are annoying, have a lightning bolt barrier and always seem to be found in inconvenient places.  Zeta and Omega Metroids are hard to hit, breathe fireballs and take lots of missiles to kill.  You have to remember how to kill the non-mutated Metroids from the first game.  The Queen Metroid takes up most of the screen, attacks with her jaws and fireballs and has a long neck.  Killing her takes a lot of missiles, but there is another way to do it.  Ironically, non-mutated Metroids are more dangerous than Alpha Metroids.  In a nice touch, the game will often warn you if there is a Metroid nearby with a Metroid shell husk.  You also can see Metroids molt into their final forms.

One criticism that can be leveled at the original Metroid is "where are the Space Pirates?"  The Space Pirates, other than their bosses Kraid and Ridley, are not introduced until Super Metroid.  Many of the enemies in Metroid, although they appear natural, are aggressive toward you.  Most of the enemies in Metroid II seem more indifferent to your presence, especially the robotic enemies.  There is no need to explain away the lack of Space Pirates on SR388.  Between the spartan graphics, minimalist music and naturalistic enemy designs and behavior, this game gives a rare sense, for the era, of being totally alone as you explore the caverns and ruins of SR388.

Metroid II allows you to have 5 energy tanks and 250 missiles (compared to the 5 and 255 of Metroid).  You start with 30 missiles and the ball and the long beam, so you are not totally unpowered when you start the game.  While most enemies give energy balls, some only give missiles.  If you know which enemies give missiles, you can replenish your supply more quickly.  Also, there are rechargeable energy and missile spots throughout the planet.  Missiles dropped from enemies in Metroid II give you 5 missiles instead of 2 as in the original Metroid.  This means you will waste less time replenishing your missile supply.

One criticism of Metroid II is that it sacrifices the non-linear gameplay of the original.  The game is controlled by earthquakes that affect the lava present throughout the planet.  Each time you clear a certain number of Metroids, the lava level will change.  The Metroid counter is useful to tell you how many Metroids you need to kill in each area and how far you have progressed in the game.  There are four main areas where you can acquire items, missile and energy tanks.  When you open a new area, all the previous areas remain open to you.  So you are given as much exploration as the original Metroid, just not all at once.  Moreover, even in the original Metroid many areas are sealed off unless you find the appropriate items or defeat the mini-Bosses first.  Even so, you can do everything you need to do in each area without having to backtrack to an earlier area.

The Metroid series is notable for being more popular in the US than in Japan, even though most games in the series were made by Japanese teams.  Metroid II was released two months earlier in the US than in Japan, which was almost unheard of at the time.  The game contains no substantial English text, making it unnecessary to make any changes to localize it.  The ROM is the same for every region the game was released in.  Future Metroid games would always be released first in the US with the exception of Super Metroid.  Super Metroid was released in Japan only a month earlier than the US, which was practically a simultaneous release in those days.  Both cartridges contain the same ROM, and English speakers have the unusual option of choosing to have Japanese text for the menus and subtitles for the opening.

Although Nintendo may have been working on a colorized version of Metroid II for the Game Boy Color, it was never released.  The Game Boy Color has a custom palette built into the unit for Metroid II, and it looks pretty nice.  The blue backgrounds look distinct against the red and yellow of the sprites.  At times, some sprites use green instead of red.  The Game Boy Color supports up to 10 colors for certain Game Boy games, including Metroid II.  Nintendo's choice of default palette for the Super Game Boy is not bad, but is a bit cartoony and needs a bit of tweaking to look best in my opinion.  Some of the alternate palette options given in the Super Game Boy Player's Guide are decent.  Even turning the green to black makes a big difference.  The Super Game Boy only supports 4 colors for non-Super Game Boy enhanced Game Boy games.

Super Metroid picks up where Metroid II left off, and Metroid Fusion has something of a "virtual" return to SR388.  Metroid games were AWOL after Super Metroid's release in 1994.  Eight years would pass before another Metroid game would grace either a home or portable Nintendo console.  The success of Metroid II meant that future quality games in the series would be made for the portable consoles.

The NES Garage Cart - The Father of NES Homebrew Cartridges

In June of 2005, Memblers (Joey Parsell), the webmaster of NesDev.com, offered for sale a cartridge he called the NES Garage Cart.  The NES Garage Cart is significant because it is the first known homebrew NES cartridge ever published.  Approximately 24 were hand-made and individually numbered.  The last Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge that had been officially released was the unlicensed game Sunday Funday in 1995.  In 1998 there was a cache of 1,500 Cheetamen II cartridges found and sold, but no new cartridges thereafter was made available for sale in any kind of quantity, however modest, until Memblers came along.

The NES Garage Cart is a multi-cart containing three games.  The first two, Munchie Attack and Hot Seat Harry, are games from Memblers himself.  The third game is Solar Wars from Chris Covell.  Solar Wars probably has the distinction of being the first homebrew game ever released for the NES.  None of these games were officially released in standalone cartridge form.  The games individually are free to distribute and can be found here : http://www.nesworld.com/index.php in the "Homebrew" section.  They all play well in a NES PowerPak or EverDrive N8.

There are NTSC and PAL versions of the Garage Cart, more of the former exist.  He printed up some rough labels and hand numbered the carts and sold them to NesDev forum members like me who were willing to pay.  No box and no manual were included, it would be years before you could expect such amenities with homebrew cartridges.

Hot Seat Harry is a simple button mashing game that only takes up 1KB of ROM space.  You have to get the dot in the center to touch the CPU player before he gets the got to your player.

Munchie Attack is a simple eat food, avoid non-food game that only uses the D-Pad and takes up 4KB of ROM space.

Both games were made for mini-game competitions held in 2002 and 2003, respectively.  They would easily fit inside the smallest 16KB/8KB NES NROM board, but will require replacing CHR-ROM with CHR-RAM.  Munchie Attack uses horizontal mirroring, Hot Seat Harry uses vertical mirroring.

Solar Wars is a tank aiming game in the vein of Scorched Earth where you set the velocity and angle of your tank's shots.  You have to deal with terrain, gravity (each planet has different gravity) and the position of the other tank, which can be moved on a player's turn.  Solar Wars was originally developed in 1999, but was burnt to EPROMs and tested with a real NES.  Many NES  projects in the early days used inaccurate emulators like Nesticle and would fail on real hardware and later emulators which were more accurate.  Solar Wars is much larger than Munchie Attack and Hot Seat Harry combined.  It uses a 32KB PRG-ROM and a 32KB CHR-ROM and requires a CNROM bankswitching board set to vertical mirroring.

All these games were made long before custom development boards were available.  Homebrew games were tested and made in the early days by cannibalizing cheaper NES boards and cartridge shells.  While they still are to some extent, there are now development boards available in sufficient quantities and from a few vendors (Memblers being one of them).  While they may not rival Nintendo's MMC5 or Konami's VRC VII, they can do a lot more than just simple PRG/CHR bankswitching these days.  They even use replacement CIC lockout chips.

NES Garage Cart Rear - Look Familiar?

While Chris Covell put up instructions on his site for Solar Wars to make your own cartridge copy, he never sold it in cartridge format himself.  Memblers decided to release a series of homebrew cartridges with the label of "Garage Cart".  He has not yet released a successor to the original Garage Cart, but he is still working on it.  For the Garage Cart, he used the most common NES game in existence for his board, Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt.  This game often comes with the Mask ROMs contained within bonded epoxy blobs, but some cartridges use a board with DIP-style packaged Mask ROMs.  The board with real chips is the NES-MHROM board, which supports PRG and CHR bankswitching.  Mirroring is hardwired to vertical mirroring on this PCB, which was only used for SMB/DH.

Garage Cart PCB Front

SMB/DK uses 64KB of PRG-ROM and 16KB of CHR-ROM.  The board itself can accept up to a 32KB CHR-ROM without modification.  The Garage Cart uses a 64KB One Time Programmable EPROM (no quartz UV erasure window) for the PRG-ROM.  However, what makes the cartridge unique, functionally, is that it does not use CHR-ROM, in its place it has 32KB of CHR-RAM (a.k.a. V-RAM).  Only a few cartridges use bankswitched CHR-RAM, such as Videomation.

In order to implement the RAM, a wire has to connect the RAM chip's write enable pin to the CHR-RAM enable pin on the cartridge connector.  It is a very simple modification and no other rewiring is required because the pinouts for the ROM chips Nintendo used and the S-RAM and EPROM chips Memblers used are identical save for the one exception noted above  The game could be dumped with a CopyNES using Mapper 66 parameters and does run in an emulator properly supporting the iNES 2.0 standard.  The ROM is not publicly available but it can be emulated if your emulator or your flash cart supports the proper iNES 2.0 parameters.

Garage Cart PCB Back

When I received my cart, I only had my Famicom A/V and a 72-to-60 pin converter.  It worked just fine except that the title screen in Solar Wars would show some jumpiness.  I sent it back to Memblers who opined that it could have been due to Solar Wars using color palette entry $0D, the "blacker than black" entry.  $0D is so close to a TV's blanking signal that some TVs may show visual anomalies or glitches if it is used.  I have a CRT that will show anomalies when that color finds its way into games.  Memblers patched my copy to use the regular $0F instead of $0D for black, but the problem still persisted when I received the cartridge back.  I solved the problem by using a Game Genie and then later a front-loading NES (it does occur seldomly on the latter).  According to Memblers, no one else complained of the issue, so I would have been the only person to receive a hardware revision of the NTSC version.

When you turn the power on your NES with the cartridge inserted, you are treated to a menu selection screen and given a choice for each game.  Specially-composed music plays in the background and there is animation and a pattern being drawn on the screen until you select the game.  The menu has three pieces of music, the game starts with the piece that will play if you reset the console after selecting Solar Wars.  The other two games will allow you to hear another piece of music if you reset after playing each one.

I bought Garage Cart #5 for approximately $42.00 plus shipping in 2004.  However, other than the menu, there was nothing unique about the software.  The games were all freely available and playable.  I noticed that the Garage Cart had steadily climbed in value over the years.  When the value had increased from $100-200 to $700-800, I knew the day would come when I would have to part with mine.

I decided on using NintendoAge instead of eBay to auction off my cartridge.  I did not want to pay eBay's final value fee on top of the PayPal transaction fee.  Moreover, I believed that any collector who would be interested in the Garage Cart would be on the NintendoAge forum.   I let the auction go for seven days.  I would not use any of that cheap nonsense about extending the auction by 2 minutes past the end time each time another bid came in.  QuiBids this is not!  The final bid came in at $1,870.00 on at 9:22PM on January 29, 2016, eight minutes before the auction end.  The winner paid the next day and made no complaint about the shipping or insurance cost.  I made sure to offer the buyer the opportunity to purchase insurance, the risk of loss would squarely be on the buyer if he did not.  I even offered to deliver the cartridge to the buyer personally, since we both lived in the same state, but he demurred.

As part of my auction I made high resolution, 600dpi scans of the cartridge label, as shown above.  I also made a video showing the cartridge's condition and it working in my front loader NES.  When you have to point a camera at a CRT TV screen, I suggest decreasing the brightness and contrast quite a bit.  I also found that I obtained a better picture by eliminating all ambient light sources in the room, hence I shot it at night.  I shot it using the camera's "60fps" capabilities, but the resulting frame rate of the video is 59.49227fps while the NES's frame rate is 60.098815fps.  So there will be some retrace bar shown as a black line going up the screen, which can be seen when I am playing Solar Wars.  However, it won't be nearly as bad as those thick, slow moving bars you get at the standard "30fps".  Here is a video showing the Garage Cart's menu :



Having parted with this unique piece of history, I am glad that a collector will be able to enjoy it.  Even though the game would be easy enough to recreate, there will never be a replacement for those 24 cartridges sold during the summer of 2005.  Today NES Homebrew is quite the business with many new cartridge games being released each year, but here is where it started and I had the privilege of being there for its birth.