The NES and the Powerpak - An Oldie but Goodie

Once upon a time, if you wanted to play a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System, you needed the cartridge of that game.  The idea of a flash, programmable or rewritable cartridge, either with a single game or a multi-cart, was something strictly in the domain of hackers and pirates.  Unlike other cartridge systems, where the internal hardware inside the cartridge rarely varied, there were enormous numbers of different cartridge hardware for the NES.  While the basic NES cartridge could support either 16KB or 32KB of game code (Program ROM) and 8KB of graphics tiles (Character ROM), anything beyond that required hardware to implement a bank switching scheme to allow the game to overcome those limits.

When a NES or Famicom cartridge uses extra hardware, that hardware is called a mapper.  With the Japanese Family Computer (Famicom), Nintendo created several methods, some using simple glue logic, others using custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) which it termed Multi-Memory Controllers (MMCs).  It allowed its initial partners, Namco, Konami, Sunsoft, Irem, Bandai, Jaleco and Taito to make cartridges and whatever hardware they could put on them.  Later partners had to use Nintendo's boards almost without exception.  Some Famicom mappers supported additional sound channels.  Many games used battery backed static RAM (S-RAM) in the cartridge to save games, and a few used EEPROM to save.

When the Famicom came to the USA and became the NES, Nintendo implemented stricter controls over cartridge manufacture.  Almost without exception, it manufactured all cartridges and its partners had to use the hardware Nintendo offered or their game would not be released.  The number and variety of different mapping schemes was greatly reduced compared with the Japanese cartridges.  This situation carried over into Europe.  However, all versions of the NES added a lockout chip, one region for the US and Canada, a region for the U.K., Italy and Australia (PAL-A), a region for the rest of Europe (PAL-B), and even a region for short lived Hong Kong version of the NES.

Still, when unlicensed third parties entered the scene, they quickly devised their own mapping schemes, although sometimes their schemes function identically with a Nintendo mapper.  Unlicensed manufacturers were Tengen (began as a licensed third party), Camerica/Codemasters, Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree/AGCI/Bunch Games, SEI/American Video Entertainment, Racermate, Inc., Panesian, Caltron/Myriad and Active Enterprises.  These cartridges contain various methods to defeat the lockout chip in the NES.

In Japan the Famicom had an add-on peripheral called the Famicom Disk System.  This allowed the users to load games off special, 3" floppy disks into a special adapter cartridge containing 32KB and 8KB of RAM and an ASIC containing the logic and code necessary to control the disk drive and provide an extra sound channel.  Disks were much, much easier to manufacture than ROM cartridges and far cheaper to make. Nintendo considered releasing it in the west, but the disks did not have a great profit margin, were easy to pirate, not very reliable and the peripheral was not a smash success in Japan.  Because of all those issues it was never released overseas.  Still, several of Nintendo's classics like The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Doki Doki Panic and Konami classics like the first two Castlevania games were released first for the Disk System.

The NES hardware found its way into the arcades.  The Playchoice-10 was an arcade machine that allowed people to play NES games for as long as they had quarters to buy time in the machine.  The games themselves were on PCBs that inserted into special slots on the arcade PCB, but the code was little changed from the consumer cartridge and can easily be run with the appropriate NES cartridge.  This was the only exposure The Goonies had in the West.  The Vs. System was an arcade machine dedicated to playing an adapted NES or Famicom game like Duck Hunt or Super Mario Bros.  The game would usually be more challenging for the arcades and often have some additional graphics.  The NES hardware would still be the basis for the game, however the games started via coin slots and multiple, incompatible PPU chips were used with the games.

Most licensed NES games use only a few mappers.  0, 1, 2, 3, 4 & 7 are the most popular.  5, 9, 13, 34 & 66, 69, 105, 118, 119 & 206 are also used by NES games, although often only one to five games may use a mapper.  Unlicensed NES games use several more mappers, including 11, 34, 41, 64, 68, 71, 79, 113, 144, 158, 168, 228 & 232

As anyone might observe, this dizzying array of hardware would have made anyone wary of trying to make a cartridge that could play multiple games as a multi-cart.  Early copiers are very obscure nowadays and never covered a complete variety of hardware.  Emulators began to be able to play a large number of games and the ability to dump games was focused on in the mid-to-late 90s.  Not until 2007 was a cartridge released that allowed people to play a wide variety of games on a real NES or Famicom.  That cartridge is called the NES PowerPak, and it revolutionized the way multi-carts were made for retro-systems.  It was released by RetroZone, which had previously offered USB converter kits and adapters for NES, SNES and Genesis controllers.

There had been multi-carts before, but they used odd methods to transmit games (the Atari 2600 Cuttle Cart required the game to be converted into an audio signal) or only had a fixed and relatively small amount of memory (Tototek) to hold games.  The PowerPak's chief innovation was to allow removable storage in the form of easily available Compact Flash cards to hold games.  Thus the number of games that the cartridge could access at any one time was only limited by the size of the card and the file system.  The result was that the whole NES library could easily be fit within a 1GB Compact Flash card.

The PowerPak required a second innovation to work particularly with the NES.  Since the NES contained so many mappers, few of which could co-exist with each other, each had to be emulated by the cartridge. Bunnyboy, the inventor of the cartridge, used a large Field Programmable Grid Array (FPGA) chip that would be programmed to emulate each game's mapper as they game loaded.  The FPGA is RAM based, so it can be reprogrammed long after you and I are dead, in theory.  Other programmable logic chips may be flash memory based and have a finite number of rewrite cycles.

I was a very early adopter of the NES PowerPak, and there were some growing pains with the device. Early cartridges required a resistor pack soldered to the data pins of the video bus to avoid graphical tile corruption. I had to send my cartridge back for the modification.  The mod instructions are here for anyone who has not had their early device modded : http://www.nespowerpak.com/powerpakmod.html  In the beginning some NES games did not read the joystick properly loaded from the PowerPak, and a BIOS update, which had to be done with a Flash Programmer, was needed to fix these games.

For Famicom users, the PowerPak will require a 72-to-60 pin connector, and they are hard to find.  You will also need to make sure that the converter does not tie pins 48 and 49 on the Famicom connector.  Many, many games do tie these pins together, but some games do not and the PowerPak needs them separated to work properly.  Also, you need to consider a housing for the converter to add stability to the setup.  The PowerPak must face the rear of the Famicom when inserted into the adapter.

The PowerPak can support the expansion audio of games that use VRC6, N163, Sunsoft-5B chips and the Famicom Disk System.  If using the cartridge on the Famicom with an adapter, a 10K resistor will need to be run from pin 54 on the NES side of the connector to pin 45 of the Famicom connector, and another 10K resistor needs to be run from pins 45 to 46 on the Famicom connector.  The resistor values may need to be changed for a Famicom AV, because those resistors make the system audio virtually inaudible on the AV unit.

To obtain expansion sound on a Front Loader NES, you will need to solder a 47K resistor from pin 3 to pin 9 of the expansion connector.  To obtain expansion sound on a Top Loader, you will need to solder a wire connecting pins 51 and 54 in the PowerPak.  Next you will need to solder a 1.2K resistor between pin 51 and the audio out pin on the NES PCB.  See here for details : http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=7880&hilit=top+loader+expansion+audio

The PowerPak can have a bit of trouble with some Compact Flash cards.  I would use genuine Sandisk CF cards and they should not be especially fast.  There are fakes floating around, see here for more details : http://www.ebay.com/gds/FAKE-SanDisk-Extreme-Compact-Flash-Cards-Exposed-/10000000001456539/g.html

The card requires a set of files to be put in a PowerPak directory to instruct the cartridge how to program the FPGA for each mapper or feature.  Mapper support was a bit weak at first, but it eventually improved. Also, programmers other than Bunnyboy began making their own mappers to add features beyond the intended scope of the NES PowerPak like Famicom Disk System support.  This is how the PowerPak supports mapper 5 games, which use the most complex Nintendo MMC, MMC5 at all.

In my experience, the PowerPak requires mapper files from a few sources to ensure that almost every non-Famicom game will play correctly on it.  Here is my mapper mix :

Start with the lastrelease of the official PowerPak mappers, found here : http://www.retrousb.com/downloads/POWERPAK135b2.zip.  Place those mappers into a directory labeled POWERPAK in the root of your CF card.

Next download loopy's latest PowerPak mappers, found here : http://3dscapture.com/NES/powerpak_loopy.zip.  You will also need to download his mapper 5 file separately.  They will overwrite the older mapper files (also from loopy) from the official set.

The most frequent issue with games is that they have wrong or missing headers.  All NES ROMs require a 16-byte header (iNES) for emulators to make them work.  The actual ROM in a GoodSet or No-Intro set may be perfectly dumped, but information in the header may be wrong.  Pay close attention to the mapper number, the mirroring and the battery backed flag.  I used to see a warped racetrack for Mach Rider for years in emulators and I erroneously believed it to be due to poor emulation when it was due to the wrong mirroring being set in the header.  Super Cars has a similar issue.  The NES Cart Database will give the proper mapper, mirroring and battery backed memory settings for every US/European game.  Alien Syndrome and all the Mapper 206 games should be set to Mapper 4 for the PowerPak.

At this point, you may be able to enjoy fully glitch free NES games and many Famicom and Famicom Disk System games.  Some games, like Gimmick! and Akumajou Densetsu, (the original version of Castlevania III) use expansion sound that their NES ports cannot.  Famicom Disk System games need the 16-byte header before the disk code, the crucial byte informs the PowerPak how many sides the disk is supposed to have.  FDS image = 65,500 bytes, one sided disk; FDS image = 131,000 bytes, two sided disk.  (The mapper could have determined this easily enough by the file size alone).  The PowerPak does not support two disk games.

More information about the mappers the PowerPak supports can be found here : http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PowerPak

Fixable Issues with Games

I had some issues with certain NES games after the PowerPak folder had been setup in this way.  Here are my solutions :

Mapper 4 Games (used by many, many games, best candidates are ) :

Crystalis
Mega Man 3
Kirby's Adventure
Startropics 1-2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Mickey's Adventures in Numberland

Issue : Portion of Screen Shakes uncontrollably

Solution : These games use the MMC3's IRQ Scanline Counter to change tilesets.  On real hardware you may notice one scanline flicker a bit before a status bar, this is normal.  However, the portion of the screen after the line should not shake (with the exception of some games like Zombie Nation).  On the robot master screen of Mega Man 3, the scanline counter should cause the top line of Shadow Man's box to flicker back and forth.  I found that the save state mappers from thefox, available here : http://kkfos.aspekt.fi/projects/nes/powerpak/save-state-mappers/  make the scanline counter behave in every game.  Thefox has save state mappers for Mappers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 69 (except for Japanese Gimmick!), which encompass 95% of all Licensed NES games.  Use v1.6 and turn off the save state support.  His later NES PowerMappers are not as accurate with the MMC3 scanline counter.

Four-Screen Mirroring Games :

Gauntlet
Rad Racer II

Issue : Tile Corruption or Wrong Tiles

Solution : The use of the save state mapper breaks these games.  Use MAP04.MAP from loopy's latest PowerPak mappers and rename the file to MAP06.MAP.  Set the mapper from 4 to 6 for both games in the ROM header.  I would recommend the Nintendulator emulator to change the mapper number in the ROM header, which can be found here : http://www.qmtpro.com/~nes/nintendulator/, ROMs must have four screen mirroring set in the header for these games to work correctly.

Nintendo World Championships :

Issue : While the PowerPak supports this game, the official mapper does not support the dipswitches to change the time allowed for the game, and acts like no dipswitches are set, giving the player just over five minutes.  The official competition time was six minutes and twenty-one seconds.

Solution : Join Nintendoage.com, download the file MAP695.MAP attached to this thread http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=8&threadid=97798, rename it to MAP69.MAP and overwrite the official MAP69.MAP.  This mapper file will give you the official competition competition time of six minutes and twenty-one seconds.

Broken, Buggy, Incomplete or Non-working Games :

Incomplete MMC5 Emulation : 

Bandit Kings of Ancient China - Severe Graphical Glitches due to incomplete MMC5 emulation
Uncharted Waters - Severe Graphical Glitches due to incomplete MMC5 emulation

No Mapper Support :

Racermate Challenge II
Super Mario Bros./Tetris/World Class Track Meet (PAL only)

Game Size :

Action 52 - PowerPak not big enough to fit a 1.5 Megabyte PRG-ROM, so most games will not work

CHR-ROM/CHR-RAM Conflicts:

All games are still playable :

Noah's Ark (Konami PAL only) - Background tiles corrupted
Addams Family, The - Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt - Extraneous lines on text and menu screens
Baseball Stars II - Extraneous lines and moderate graphical glitches on menu screens, game is playable
Bigfoot - Extraneous lines on title screen
Krusty's Fun House - Extraneous lines on text screens
Fisher Price - Perfect Fit - Garbled Graphics at times

Acclaim MMC3 Clone :

Mickey's Safari in Letterland (shaking status bar)

MMC3B/C Behavior :

Star Trek 25th Anniversary (glitches when character text boxes appear on screen)
Kid Klown in Night Mayor World/Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen (glitches in warping effect when beginning first level)

PowerPak Menu and ROM Naming :

The PowerPak does not sort files alphabetically, it displays them as they were copied to the card.  A program called DriveSort, available here : http://www.anerty.net/software/file/DriveSort.php can be used to sort the files in a directory or subdirectory.  It does not sort files in subdirectories automatically, you have to enter each subdirectory and click on Sort.  The resulting sort may not be ideal for games that start with the same word like Super.  Due to the way long file names in FAT works, each title will be truncated to an 8.3 filename, and after the tenth game with the same first seven characters, the names start to get weird.  The result is that the sort will not work properly unless you rename the 8.3 names into something sortable.

The PowerPak menu uses an 8x8 pixel fixed width font within a 256x240 resolution.  30 lines of characters can be seen on the screen, but the TV bezel may totally or partially obscure the first and last line.  For cosmetic purposes, I place a dummy directory named ! so it gets obscured.  The menu will display 26 characters in a file name.  For a clean looking menu, I recommend shortening names whenever possible.  You can use abbreviations like Adv for Adventure and eliminate unnecessary portions of titles.  For sports games I usually shorten the title to the name of the athlete or organization and the type of game (basketball, baseball, etc.).  Arabic numerals should replace roman numerals.

The PowerPak does support battery backed S-RAM games which use the RAM for saving games.  There has to be a file with the exact same name as the ROM, with the extension .sav instead of .nes, in the SAVES subfolder of the POWERPAK folder.  The PowerPak has the capability to save to the appropriate file automatically.  However, the user cannot simply turn off the NES, he must hold the reset button down until the PowerPak menu reappears.  Later multicartridges from Krikzz will automatically create save files and keep the save if the user turns the console off.  All NES games use an 8KB S-RAM except for Romance of the Three Kingdoms II, which requires 32KB.  If using the save state mappers, the .sav file must be 32KB to save the game's state.

Competitors :

While the PowerPak is currently available for sale, there is a similar device for the NES and the Famicom made by Krikzz called the Everdrive N8.  It comes in a 60-pin version for the Famicom and a 72-pin version for the NES.  Its support for Famicom games is may be better than the PowerPak's,  It uses SD cards, which are more common nowadays than CF cards.  It has a save battery socket on the PCB, so you don't have to press reset to save a game.  Firmware updates do not require a reprogrammer, and more mappers have support for save states.  It even has enough MMC5 support to play Castlevania III, but not enough for other MMC5 games like the Koei games, Just Breed or Laser Invasion.  Among the few other NES ROMs it does not support is Nintendo World Championships, Action 52 and Cheetamen II and Maxi-15.  However, it is somewhat cheaper than the PowerPak.

Doctor Who on DVD for North America

I can say without a doubt that the classic Doctor Who is the most expensive series to buy today.  Twenty-six seasons (or portions thereof) are sold not in season/series box set like every other TV program released in the past decade, but by story.  Nor are complete seasons available for download.  Of the 157 stories produced before the year 2000 (including Shada and the TV Movie but not The Curse of the Fatal Death which had been released on VHS), 18 do not have a sufficient number of existing episodes to release separately, two stories with half their episodes can be released (The Underwater Menace & The Crusades), but only Underwater Menace will be released.  That leaves 137 stories that have been released on DVD since 1999.

As of October, 2015 all Classic Doctor Who stories will have been released with the exceptions noted above. Now is the best time to begin purchasing DVDs if you haven't already.  Unlike the VHS releases, which were released over a span of 21 years, the DVD releases were never released as movie editions which eliminated the cliffhangers (The Seeds of Death, Spearhead from Space, Day of the Daleks, The Time Warrior, Death to the Daleks, The Ark in Space, Revenge of the Cybermen, Terror of the Zygons, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang).  Other stories were noticeably edited (The Web Planet, Carnival of Monsters, Pyramids of Mars (also movie), The Brain of Morbius (also movie)).  Thus with DVDs you can have an almost totally consistent release of the series, (with the obnoxious release of The Chase in the US and Australia)  More importantly, for the First and Second Doctors, almost all of their episodes have been subject to the VidFIRE treatment to restore the video look to the film telecines that exist today (exceptions include The Time Meddler and Episode 1 of the Crusade. The Moonbase DVD in the U.S. should have had the process applied byt did not)  The Third Doctor's stories that are only available as B&W film telecine and poor quality NTSC tapes have also been colorized with the best technology available.  The Restoration Team that has supervised the releases of Doctor Who has done an extraordinary job with the existing library to produce the best quality releases.

The U.K., (Region 2/Region B) the U.S. (Region 1/Region A) and Australia (Region 4/Region B) are the three major markets for releases of Doctor Who (including the current series, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures).  Everything is available (except for Seasons 4 & 5 of Sarah Jane Blu-ray) in some form or another in each region.  Nonetheless, if you wish to purchase a uniform collection, you should really purchase the Region 2 U.K. releases.

First, new Doctor Who releases in the U.K. begin expensive, but within a few months the prices almost always fall sharply.  New Doctor Who releases in the U.S. begin expensive and seemingly remain expensive to purchase new, seemingly no matter how old.  Older titles (by DVD release date) in the U.K. are often extremely inexpensive (£5-6).

Second, every story is still in print and can be purchased new, today, in the U.K.  In the U.S., there are several stories that have gone out of print, and the prices for them can rise dramatically.  The stories that are out of print in the U.S., with no planned Special Edition to replace them, are :

The Sensorites
The Rescue / The Romans
The Web Planet
The Time Meddler
The Gunfighters
The Invasion
The Krotons
The War Games
Terror of the Autons
Colony in Space
The Time Monster
Planet of the Spiders
City of Death
Black Orchid
Earthshock (included in a barebones edition for The Doctors Revisited Volume Two)
Time-Flight
The Awakening
Frontios
Planet of Fire
Attack of the Cybermen
The Mark of the Rani
The Two Doctors
Happiness Patrol
Dragonfire

Battlefield

Ghost Light
The Curse of Fenric

2003 is the first year where prior DVD releases have not been superceded.  Here are the stories were originally released and have been later replaced with Special Editions :

The Aztecs
The Tomb of the Cybermen
The Seeds of Death
Spearhead from Space
Inferno
The Claws of Axos
The Three Doctors
Carnival of Monsters
The Green Death
The Ark in Space
The Robots of Death
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
The Ribos Operation	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Pirate Planet	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Stones of Blood	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Androids of Tara	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Power of Kroll	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Armageddon Factor	US Only Key to Time Box Set
The Visitation
The Five Doctors
Resurrection of the Daleks
The Caves of Androzani
Vengeance on Varos
Remembrance of the Daleks
Doctor Who – The Movie	UK Only

Special Editions are more expensive than the earlier releases, but contain more extras (usually an extra disc) and improved picture and sound quality.  Most Special Editions today have dropped in price so much as to make them not any more expensive than buying now-OOP original DVD releases.

Third, copyright clearances are easiest in the U.K., which makes export versions for the U.S. and Australia comparatively more expensive.  Moreover, sometimes music cannot be cleared and must be replaced.  In one instance in the first episode of The Chase, two minutes had to be excised from the U.S. and Australian DVD releases because the Doctor and his companions were watching a concert of The Beatles.  The footage is available on the VHS version of these stories for each country.  Similarly, The Beatles can be heard on the soundtrack of Remembrance of the Daleks on all VHS copies, but that had to be replaced for the U.S. DVD releases.

Fourth, since 2006 the BBC has been releasing story collections of the classic serials in Region 2.  These collections can follow a particular monster like Beneath the Surface, which collects the Silurian and Sea Devil stories, a series of related stories, New Beginnings, which presents the stories surrounding the Fourth Doctor's regeneration, or a looser collection of weaker selling titles like Earthstory, which includes the First Doctor story The Gunfighters and the Fifth Doctor story The Awakening.  In the U.K., virtually none of these box sets had the stories released separately.  Most of the box sets that made it to the U.S. also allowed the stories to be purchased separately.  There are at least nine box sets that never saw a U.S. release, and while the prices may have been high in the beginning, the prices on them have so decreased as to make them very good bargains.  In the U.S. you would have to purchase these stories separately at increased cost.

	US Release	UK Release	Stories Available Separately in US?	Stories Available Separately in UK?
Earthstory	No	Yes	Yes	No
Bred for War	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mara Tales	No	Yes	Yes	No
Revisitations 1-3	No	Yes	Yes	No
Peladon Tales	No	Yes	Yes	No
Mannequin Mania	No	Yes	Yes	No
Time-Flight & Arc of Infinity	No	Yes	Yes	No
Beneath the Surface	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
New Beginnings	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
The Beginning	Yes	Yes	No	No
E-Space Trilogy	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Key to Time	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Lost in Time	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
The Invisible Enemy with K-9 and Company	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Black Guardian Trilogy	Yes	Yes	No	No
Dalek War	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Space Museum & The Chase	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Key to Time (Original Edition)	Yes	No	Yes	N/A
The Doctors Revisited 1-4	Yes	No	Yes	N/A
The Doctors Revisited 5-8	Yes	No	Yes	N/A

Finally, the packaging of the U.K. releases is superior to the U.S. releases.  Each U.K. release came with a booklet discussing the story and giving a listing and description of all the special features on the disc.  These booklets are not available as a paper copy on the U.S. releases.  Also, some U.S. box sets like The Beginning, The Invisible Enemy with K-9 and Company and The Space Museum & The Chase did not have separate cases for each story.

There are, however, a pair of hurdles if you wish to buy Region 2 DVDs outside of the U.K.  First, you must find a seller willing to ship to your country and be prepared to pay for shipping.  Amazon.co.uk. will ship Region 2 U.K. DVDs or Region B U.K. Blu-rays to the U.S., and their shipping charges are very reasonable.  There is a delivery charge of £0.99 per CD, DVD or Blu-ray and a £2.09 combined delivery charge.  This delivery charge does not increase on the number of items in the order.  The delivery time is 5-7 business days.  No VAT or U.S. state sales tax is collected unless perhaps you live in a state where Amazon.com collects the tax.

Second, you will need a region 2 or region free DVD player to play these discs.  I think that the vast majority of people who play Region 2 DVDs in a Region 1 country these days use VLC Player.  VLC will work fine with Doctor Who Region 2 DVDs, so long as the drive does not have a region code (RPC-1) is hard-coded to Region 2.  I now recommend using MakeMKV to backup your Doctor Who episodes.  MakeMKV is a modern program that is trialware, but you can always get a new trial period when it upgrades to a new version.  MakeMKV will easily rip all video and audio tracks losslessly from a disc.

Ripping four episodes of Doctor Who takes about 15 minutes on my PC.  To figure out what to rip, I use VLC or PowerDVD to select each individual episode and mark down the Title number when that episode plays.  Having a list of the episode times helps, which are provided at the excellent and venerable Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Travel site : http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/

Even though the PS3 will not play PAL content from a DVD, even if the DVD is a region free copy, it has no problems playing the extracted, uncompressed content via a media server.  My flat screen LCD and my CRTs have no trouble displaying the resulting streamed video.  With the latter, presumably the PS3 is outputing an NTSC-compatible video signal (NTSC color encoding, 525 lines/59.94i), and it does it very well.  While the PS3 does not natively play MKV files, with PS3 Media Server, that is not a problem.

Last month, I began ordering all available DVDs from Amazon.co.uk, buying the regularly released boxsets (not limited editions) to save money. On Amazon.co.uk, you can only order 50 items at a time, so for a complete classic Doctor Who set you will need at least two orders.  I was able to get my first batch of purchases into two orders, but the site can get error prone when trying to order so many things at one time.  Prices fluctuate frequently on Doctor Who DVDs, so you may get a better or worse price depending on when you put an item in your shopping basket versus when you actually complete an order.

Fortunately, the value between the British Pound Sterling and the U.S. Dollar has been fairly favorable for the past three years, generally hovering around $1 USD equaling between £1.50-1.70.  However, your credit card will charge a fee to perform the conversion.  My card charged me approximately 3% of the total cost of the order, including shipping.

If you place a large order, Amazon will ship out DVDs several at a time.  You will not get one big box, but maybe eight smaller shipments.  Each time a shipment is sent from the factory, your card will get charged.  I have not encountered a damaged disc, but three cases have had some minor issues with damage.  Also, for one story, the DVD insert booklet was not present, but I understand that the issue does occasionally rear itself.

Having purchased all the Region 2 Doctor Who DVDs, I can definitely say that now is the time to buy.  The BBC apparently is not keen about producing new Special Editions of previously released stories.  The last was back in August, 2013.  Additionally, there are no classic episodes left to be released, save for The Underwater Menace Episode 2.  That story may receive a release with animation or telesnap reconstruction, probably the latter.  Buy before stories go out of print.

Apple II Gaming and Hardware

Gaming on the Apple II and useful hardware is mostly straightforward.  In this post I intend to identify hardware upgrades and their usefulness to Apple II games.  We start with the original Apple II of 1977 :

Paddles and Joystick - Apple II and II+ machines included a pair of paddle controllers.  They are black in color and each has a pushbutton and a knob.  The cable is plugged into the 16-pin Game I/O socket on the motherboard.  Apple did not release a joystick until the Apple IIe and //c machines.  Apple II Joysticks operated like a pair of paddles, but usually supported two buttons.  Rival machines from Commodore and Atari only supported one button on their controllers.  Apple IIe and //c did not come with paddle controllers when bought from Apple, one had to purchase the Apple II Hand Controllers.

RAM - The Apple II and Apple II+ can support up to 48KB on the motherboard.  The Apple II has three rows of RAM sockets and can support 4KB or 16KB in each row.  Except on the last Apple II+ machines, there were configuration blocks which the user would use to inform the system whether he had 4KB or 16KB in each bank.  While some commercial games could work with 16KB or 32KB, most required 48KB.

Revision 1 and later Motherboards - Adds the blue and orange colors to the High Resolution Graphics (HGR) mode. Absolutely essential for games, thousands of which use the HGR mode.  Without this functionality, only purple and green colors are displayed in HGR mode.  Also useful in eliminating color fringing in text modes on color monitors, making it easier to load and save onto cassettes and turning the system on. Usually not an issue, since Apple IIs with revision 0 motherboards command the highest prices and most people probably would want to keep those in pristine condition.  With some user modifications, the revision 0 boards can have the features of a revision 1 board.

Disk II - Another essential upgrade, cassette tapes were seen as too slow and unreliable for most commercial software after it was released.  Most Apple II games come on 5.25" floppy disks.  The Disk II Interface Card is needed to connect the drives to the system, and each card can support up to two drives.  I know of no game that supports more than two disk drives.  The card is installed into one of the expansion slots in the Apple II, and eventually slot #6 was settled upon as the de facto standard installation slot.

When the Disk II was first released in 1978, it had two 4-bit PROMs on the card that supported 13 sectors per track (256 bytes per sector) on each of the 35 tracks of a single sided drive.  The earliest public releases of the Disk Operating System, DOS, only supported 13 sector disks.  This encompasses DOS 3.1, 3.2 and 3.21. Apple later found that using 16 sectors was within the tolerance of the drives, and updated the PROMs in the Disk II Controller Card and released DOS 3.3 to support 16 sector disks.  DOS 3.3 had three releases, the first in 1980 and two bugfix releases in 1983, and the vast majority of games were released on 16-sector disks.  Some early games were intended for 13-sector disks, but most have been converted to 16-sector.

Games will often require DOS 3.3 to format blank disks for save games.  ProDOS will not work for these games.  Some really early versions of Sierra's Mystery House and other early text adventures may require DOS 3.2 13-sector formatted disks for saves.  Later versions of these games include a utility to format the disk for the appropriate geometry needed for the game.

The Apple II+ is an Apple II with Applesoft BASIC ROMs instead of Integer BASIC ROMs.  Many games and programs require Applesoft in ROM.  I cannot think of any that cannot get by by having Integer BASIC loaded into the RAM of the Language Card.

Language Card - The Language Card was released with the Apple PASCAL system and added 16KB of bankswitched memory to the Apple II or II+.  It was installed in slot 0, which was specially made for RAM or ROM upgrades.  Many, many games require 64KB, especially after the Apple IIe was released.

When DOS is booted, it loads a copy of the BASIC version not found in the ROM.  So when DOS is booted on an Apple II, Applesoft BASIC is loaded into RAM.  Conversely, when DOS is booted on an Apple II+ or IIe, Integer BASIC is loaded into RAM.  The version of BASIC currently in use can be selected with a simple command.  This way, older programs written for Integer BASIC can still be run on newer Apple II+ and IIe machines.

Apple released a Firmware Card that was inserted into slot 0 and contained the ROMs not found on the system board.  The ROM used could be changed with the flip of a switch.  However, this did not allow for the Language Card to be used, since both used slot 0.  The Language Card is more flexible and adds that extra crucial 16KB.

Mockingboard - In the early 1980s, Sweet Micro Systems released a sound card for the Apple II/II+ in four varieties: the Sound I, Speech I, Sound/Speech and Sound II.  The Sound I came with one AY-3-8910 three voice programmable sound synthesizer, the Speech I came with one Vortrax SC-01 speech synthesizer chip, the Sound/Speech come with one AY-3-8910 and one SC-01 chip, and the Sound II came with two AY-3-8910 chips.  Many games assume that the board would be located in slot 4 of an Apple II, II+, IIe or IIgs.

Eventually, Sweet Micro Systems refreshed their line and released the Mockingboard A, B, C and D.  The Mockingboard A has two pin reduced AY-3-8913 chips and two sockets for SSI-263 speech chips.  The Mockingboard B was a SSI-263 speech chip.  The Mockingboard C included two AY-3-8913s and one SSI-263.  There was a Mockingboard M that had identical capabilities to the C that was bundled with the Bank Street Music Writer.  The Mockingboard D was an external unit that connected to the Apple //c's serial port.  The Mockingboard D is utterly incompatible with games.

Games typically only supported one AY chip.  Ultima IV supported two AY chips and Ultima V three AY chips, requiring two Mockingboard Sound II, A, C or M.  A few games like Crypt of Medea and Crime Wave supported the speech chip.

Applied Engineering released the Phasor sound card, which could emulate a two AY chip Mockingboard.  It had four AY-3-8913 chips, one SSI-263 speech chip and a socket for a second speech chip.  Ultima V could take full advantage of it.

Super Serial Card - One of the most popular expansion cards for the Apple II, II+ and IIe is the Super Serial Card.  This was typically used to connect to printers like the Apple ImageWriter II and Modems like the Hayes Smartmodem line.  They typically go into slots 1 & 2.  A few games supported printer output, like Wasteland, which could use a serial or parallel printer.

Apple IIe - This is an Apple II+ with a Language Card built in, far fewer chips integrated on the motherboard and added DE-9 port for game controllers.  The official Apple II Joystick and Hand Controllers plug into this port, which is much easier than plugging older joysticks into the Game I/O socket.  The Apple II Joystick could operate in self-centering or free-form mode by a switch for each axis on the base of the joystick.

The Apple IIe has a newer keyboard with a much more IBM-like layout.  Gone is the REPT key, its function is contained in the ROM.  Added keys include Up and Down cursor keys, Open and Closed Apple keys (corresponding to joystick buttons 0 and 1) and a Caps Lock key.  The Apple IIe has true lowercase support and fully functional shift keys.  Initially, BASIC commands could not be entered in lowercase.  The IIe machines also have a socket to connect the Apple IIe Numeric Keypad, except for the Platinum, which has most of the previously-separate keypad built-in.  The Numeric Keypad, whether attached or detached, functions as duplicate keys, they do not report their own scancodes.

The Apple IIe has an AUX slot for memory expansion.  This could house the 1K 80-Column Memory Expansion Card, which allowed 80-column text.  Later releases of Infocom text adventures supported 80-column text.  Wizardry does not intentionally support 80-column text, but will display its text in an 80-column mode with each character separated by a space if there is an 80-column card in the system.  The other option was the 64KB Extended 80-Column Memory Card, which added 64KB of Bankswitched Memory and the 80-Column Text Mode.

Revision B Motherboard - Changes in this motherboard allowed Apple IIe machines to use Double High Resolution Graphics Mode with an Extended 80-Column Memory Card.  While an Apple IIe Revision A Motherboard could use the extra 64KB, it could not display DHGR graphics.  A user modification exists to fix the Revision A boards.

Third party boards like the Applied Engineering RAM Works exist to expand the Apple IIe to well beyond the extra 64KB of the Extended 80-Column Memory Card, but it relies on an extension of the bankswitching memory scheme and it is unknown whether any game ever used more than 128KB of RAM.  There is also an Apple-branded Apple II Memory Expansion that fit in one of the seven slots of an Apple II=//e can could provided more memory, but the memory addressing is utterly incompatible with the addressing of the 80-Column Memory Card, which is what games used.

Apple //c - The Apple //c was a portable version of the IIe with 128KB and contains the equivalent of two Super Serial Cards, a Disk II Interface.  Its DE-9 port also supports a one-button mouse.  One floppy drive is built-in, a second external drive can be added.  First versions of this system did not allow RAM to be expanded beyond 128KB, later versions did.  It supports DHGR graphics.

Apple Mouse - The mouse was supported in approximately fifteen or so games, so it is not a major peripheral.  Balance of Power was one such game.  The Apple IIe required a Mouse Interface Card to be installed, while the Apple //c's mouse connected to its joystick port.  The IIe can use standard Macintosh mice from the time period, but the //c requires its own mice.  However, its de facto slot is slot 4, which is where many games expect to find the Mocking Board.

ProDOS - This is Apple's successor operating system to DOS 3.3, and it came with the Apple //c.  Several later games have obvious ProDOS derived boot loaders, and they often load far more quickly than older games based of DOS 3.3.  Unless a game informs you it needs ProDOS, stick with DOS 3.3 as needed.  Several games will require the user to format save game disks, but they will insist on the DOS 3.3 format.

Apple //e Enhanced & Platinum - This exchanged the original 6502 for the slightly more advanced 65C02 and new character and firmware ROMs.  I have never seen any box state that the game requires an enhanced Apple //e, only that it requires an Apple IIe with 128KB of RAM.  This would suggest that no game uses the extra features of the Enhanced model.  Except for some minor backward compatibility issues regarding games that used illegal opcodes of the 6502 (the original Ultima's space battles are an example), the Enhanced //e is just as good as the IIe with a numeric keypad.

Apple //c+ and Accelerator cards -  The Apple //c+ is an Apple II running at 4 MHz.  Many accelerators for the II-//e run at 3.58MHz.  While rare, these accelerators can really help with games that use double high resolution graphics like Rampage or King's Quest.  However, most games assume that the Apple will be running at 1.02MHz and time everything by that speed.  Moreover, transfers from and to the 5.25" floppy drives will occur at the 1.02MHz speed.

Upgrades Not Useful for Gaming :

Apple II/II+ 80-Column Cards - Games would simply not support 80-column text prior to Apple standardizing it with the IIe.  Earlier cards had no particular standard, but the Videx Vidterm was a popular choice.  Games also do not like lowercase characters until the Apple IIe became popular, so there is no immediate need for a shift-key modification or a character ROM replacement.

Microsoft Z-80 Softcard - This card enabled Apple II users to run the CP/M operating system.  CP/M games are generally text-based and platform agnostic.

Apple IIe Video Upgrade Cards - No game is known to use one.

3.5" Floppy Drive - The Unidisk 3.5" drive required its own special controller because the Apple IIe could not quite keep up with the drive.  The 3.5" drives on the Apple //c+ provides the same functionality.  Very, very few games were released on the 3.5" disk format, and all have more common 5.25" versions.

Modem - Only two games I know of, The American Challenge: A Sailing Simulation and Battle Chess, support modem play, and the latter game is too slow to be enjoyable on an unaccelerated Apple II.

This blog entry does not cover the Apple //gs, which deserves its own discussion.

Ultima IV - Best on the PC

If you actually wanted to play Richard Garriott's masterpiece, Ultima IV - Quest of the Avatar, on real contemporaneous hardware, and had a choice of the platform to select, which platform you choose?  Would you choose the original Apple II, the Atari 8-bit version, the Commodore 64 version, the IBM PC version, the Atari ST version, the Amiga version, the NES or the Sega Master System (Europe Only) version?  Outside of Japan, these were your choices.

Putting the console versions aside, which are not quite 100% faithful to Garriott's vision (the SMS is very close and quite enjoyable and easily puts the NES version to shame), the version to play is the IBM PC version.  That version may not have the nicest looking introduction and has no music, but what it does have is the advantage of speed.  It is the only version that can officially be installed to a hard disk.  All the other versions had to be run off floppy drives.  The 8-bit home computer versions typically required disk swapping with four disk sides.

Ultima IV accesses the floppy drives a lot.  Every time you enter or leave a town or castle, the game needs to load the next area from the disk.  Every time you initiate a conversation, the game needs to access the disk to load the NPC's responses.  Every combat requires a load.  There is a load for each 16x16 tile boundary crossed.  On the 8-bit systems, entering or exiting a dungeon requires flipping the disk over.  8-bit systems have slow floppy drives.  The Apple II is the fastest but does not really have a hardware disk controller.  The Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit machines have hardware disk controllers in their drives but their systems speeds are crippled by the slow serial buses these systems use to connect their floppy drives.  Try any of these versions in an emulator with the authentic disk drive speed on and see how much fun you will have. IBM had a true disk drive controller and an adapter solely for the disk drive, so its disks transfer with comparative speed.  Hard drives were not standard on the Atari ST and Amiga in the first few years of their lives, so these ports were not designed to be hard drive installable.

Ultima IV on the IBM PC suffers from an absolute lack of music.  When the port was released in 1987, supporting the EGA card was considered a big deal.  Sound cards were at best an emerging technology, and the only PC compatible systems that had a music chip were the discontinued IBM PCjr. and Tandy 1000 series.  Although there is a patch for the PC version that adds music, and later combined with a patch that adds VGA graphics, it requires a 386 to run at all.  Moreover, the PC Speaker sound effects and spell effects are lost due to the increased speed.  It is not suitable at all for machines which Origin targeted.

The music is not really a big deal.  Relatively few Apple II owners owned a Mockingboard and the game itself, and without that, there was no music on the Apple II.  Atari 8-bit users did not get the music due to Origin not feeling the need to support 64KB Atari machines.  The Commodore 64's music is not that great, neither is the Atari ST or Amiga's.  Besides, there are only eight music pieces in the game (Towne, Castle, Wanderer, Combat, Dungeon, Shoppe, Rule Britannia and Shrine), and they get old very quickly.

Ultima IV scales reasonably well on low end machines.  It runs extremely well on my Tandy 1000SX in the 16-color Tandy Graphics mode at 7.16MHz, and it also runs well in 4-color CGA mode at 4.77MHz, making it suitable for IBM PC and XTs.  The IBM PC version requires 256KB RAM.  The Apple II and Commodore 64 versions require 64KB and do not utilize extra RAM.  The PC can load conversations and combat scenes in memory. The increased loading speed of a hard drive means that loads from a hard drive can occur much more quickly than even the 16-bit machines.  With real floppies, the game will check the floppy to ensure that the genuine article is being used, but there are cracks and the CD compilations do not suffer from the checks.

Ultima IV is not atypical of the Ultima series or PC ports in general.  While many PC ports were graphically or aurally inferior to their Apple, Commodore and Atari counterparts, they can run far better than any of those on real hardware.  The 8-bit machines required accelerators (except for the IIgs, which could accelerate 8-bit Apple II software), which are hard to come by and can screw up timing.  Non-PC 16-bit machines also tended to be tricky to get working faster.  PC ports by the mid to-late 80s were programmed to be at least somewhat flexible in regard to system speed.  In this case, once you get beyond character creation, the 16-color EGA and Tandy graphics are almost on par with the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga graphics.

The only issue I have with the PC port is with the keyboard movement buffer.  The keyboard movement buffer will buffer up to eight keystrokes if you hold down a directional key.  At the 4.77MHz speed, however, the keyboard movement buffer will always store up to four to five presses of a directional key if you hold the key down.  On AT-class machines you can terminate the buffered movement keys by pressing the space bar, but that does not work at the 4.77MHz speed.

How to Destroy a Great Game Series - Eye of the Beholder

SSI will forever have a place in the hearts of computer RPG fans for bringing the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons ruleset to personal computers, beginning in the form of the Gold Box games.  The Gold Box engine was originally designed for the Commodore 64, and its top-down tactical turn based combat was one approach to interacting with a game world, other approaches existed.  The game Dungeon Master was very popular in the late 1980s on the Atari ST and Amiga.  Its real-time first person 3D perspective was innovative, even if you could only turn 90 degrees.  A port of this popular game to the IBM PC platform was slow in coming, so SSI commissioned Westwood Studios to make a game in the same style using the AD&D license it had.

Dungeon Master, the original 1st Person Dungeon Crawler

Eye of the Beholder, of course they didn't copy everything about Dungeon Master, as you can see

The result was Eye of the Beholder, which was slightly simplified or streamlined compared with its inspiration.  One feature that EOB had over DM was that the player could create four player characters from scratch, adjust (or max out) their stats, and choose their character class.  The graphics supported 256-color MCGA/VGA, an improvement over the 16 colors of DM.  The sound of EOB was fairly simple, supporting the PC Speaker, Tandy 3-voice chip or the Adlib.

This game was all about slaying monsters, solving puzzles and trying to avoid traps.  Since fights occurred in real time, fast maneuvers became important, especially with tough enemies.  You can attack enemies on their flanks, but they can attack yours as well.  Being surrounded meant that you could not move and unless you killed your enemies quickly, you were doomed.  Only the front rows could attack with melee weapons, the second and third rows could only use thrown weapons or spells.  Since this was a first person perspective game, all characters could only attack one way.  Automapping was not a feature in the original DOS version, but was available in some of the later ports.  Like DM, the EOB series required the player to find food for the party to eat, either in the form of rations or with a Create Food spell.

You will encounter many of these in your travels

The style of the game meant that the actual implementation of the AD&D, 2nd Edition system was simplified. Classes were basic, but the game engine imposed limits on the more unusual classes like the Bard and the Druid.  Item manipulation on the main window required the use of a mouse, just like DM.  Spells were generally limited to attack, defense and healing spells.  Magical items concentrated heavily on weapons, armor and wands.  Attribute bonuses, saving throws, THAC0 and Armor Class were all present. Alignments were generally not important to the game.  Your party is good, the monsters you fight are evil, and that is as morally complex as it gets.

This being 1990, and not 1987, players expected a bit more than to just read the manual and then thrust themselves into the game.  There was an opening cinematic outlining the plot and music (until you entered the game).  The plot was thin, even by 1990's standards, but if people wanted a good plot in a computer RPG, they would play Ultima VI.  The various levels of the dungeon had different designs, from the red brick and slime of the sewers to the stone work of the dwarven levels and the onyx designs of the drow.  Sound effects were especially important, as the various noises could tell you how close enemies were.  There was a special portal system to allow your party to warp to various levels in the dungeon.

Drow architecture, ornate yet oppressive

The game was a big success, and successes equal sequels.  The next game in the series, 1991's Eye of the Beholder II : The Legend of Darkmoon, used the exact same engine but made several improvements to the gameplay. The opening cinematic was pretty spectacular when people first saw it.  Outdoor areas were added, and the game was far larger than its precessor.  There was an ending cinematic, which was sadly absent from the MS-DOS version of Eye of the Beholder.  The monsters were more varied and more devious.  The game was more difficult and could at times be cruel to the player.  Items were not quite as nice as the first game.

From the EOB2 Intro : Look into my eyes, you will accept my quest!

The starting level for characters began just about where EOB left off.  Westwood Studios took inspiration from the Gold Box games and allowed you to import your characters from EOB.  Imported characters retained virtually all of their equipment, unlike the Gold Box games which generally found a way to nerf your characters almost every time you imported them from the previous game.  Even with your high-powered and over-developed characters from the first game, it was still hardly a cakewalk.  Perhaps due to the increase in difficulty, the game offered multiple save slots whereas the original game only supported one save.

Do you really have a choice?

Even without support for digitized sound, the second game was successful and improved on the weaknesses of the first game without alienating the fans of the first.  Both games ran pretty well on modest (386SX) hardware, and did not require EMS other types of exotic memory management.  For 1991, this was acceptable.

Priestly discipline at Temple Darkmoon

Dungeon Master was finally ported to the MS-DOS platform in 1992, and it was starting to look really creaky as it was the same game people had played on their ST and Amiga in 1987 and 1988.  Its Expansion Pack, Chaos Strikes Back, was never released for MS-DOS.  However, with 1993's Eye of the Beholder III : Assault on Myth Drannor, everything took a turn for the worse, a really bad turn.  Playing the port of Dungeon Master, going back to go through EOB 1 & 2 again or trying Ultima Underworld suddenly seemed very attractive

Westwood Studios was not involved in the development of EOB3.  Instead they used the engine to make the well-regarded game Lands of Lore : The Throne of Chaos.  SSI chiefly wanted to add digitized sound support to the EOB engine.  To do that, they hired John Miles, later famous for his middleware Miles Sound Drivers, to revise the engine.  The original EOB1/2 engine was strictly meant for real mode and 640KB of RAM.  Instead of just requiring EMS, which would have solved the problem of storage for sound samples, Miles rewrote the engine, called AESOP, to use the 16-bit protected CPU mode.

From the EOB3 Intro : Seriously, would you accept a quest from this guy?

16-bit protected mode was supported by the 286 and above processors.  By contrast, DOOM used a 32-bit protected mode and only worked on a 386 or better CPU.  By the time the game was released in 1993, nobody cared about the 286 and SSI did not even state that the game worked with a 286 on the box.  The engine's performance on anything but high end hardware was dreadful.  There is a patch to convert the game to use a 32-bit version of the engine, but it has issues with sound stuttering with real hardware and current versions of DOSBox, (it works in DOSBox 0.73) but apparently plays more smoothly than the original 16-bit engine.  Regardless of engine, loading a save game takes far longer than it should especially compared to EOB 1 or 2.

EOB 1 and 2 shared a connected plot.  EOB had no connection to the previous games other than it occurs after your party returns victorious from Darkmoon.  The plot is not particularly developed in the game, and the story in the manual has, at best, only a thematic connection to the game's plot.  The opening cinematic for EOB3 is nowhere near as impressive as EOB2's was.

The digitized sound that SSI and Miles were so keen to incorporate into the game detracts from the immersion instead of adding to it.  The ghosts in the opening level and the undead warriors in the mausoleum make machine-like noises.  The sound is extremely loud, usually unpleasant and it never seems to stop.  Turn down your speakers or your significant other will make you turn them down or order you to put on your headphones.  On lower end machines, the game will pause at times for the sound samples to load off the hard disk and into memory.  Playing with the digitized sound on on these machines can make for a really choppy playing experience.  In addition to FM music, the Roland MT-32 and compatibles is also supported, but outside the introduction music is heard so infrequently in the game that it does not really add to the game.

Eye of the Beholder : Lumberjacking Simulator

The greatest innovation this game could boast is the All-Attack Button, which let all party members selected attack at the same time.  There are some new portraits for your characters this time around.  Characters with polearms could attack from the second row, but that is it for the positive innovations.

The difficulty in this game was all over the map.  The first level of the mausoleum, which is usually the second level you encounter in the game, is almost certainly the hardest level in the game.  Most of the rest of the game is comparatively easy, even the final level.  There is a very difficult part just before you meet the Lich, however.  Other than that, the game is easier than its predecessor.  The Lich himself, who is supposedly the main antagonist in the game, is a pushover.  The game is (eventually) generous with items, but your mage will have a difficult time gaining the levels needed to memorize all the high level spells in the game.

These guys will make you wet your pants, but they are the third monster you encounter in the game

The opening level in the graveyard is extremely tedious due to all the time you spend hacking away at trees to find hidden alcoves and eventually the exit to the forest path to Myth Drannor.  Its also almost an entirely open space, and with no automap it is difficult to figure out where you are and where you need to go.  Import axes with your characters from Darkmoon.  As a result of EOB3, SSI declined to make more games in the series and it is now fondly remembered by its fans as the last of the great games from SSI's AD&D license.  It did release a tool called Dungeon Hack to allow players to make their own levels using the EOB engine, but it was not as successful as the similarly featured Gold Box engine tool Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures.  SSI would make more AD&D games in the first person format, but none of them garnered the critical acclaim or sales figures of the Gold Box or the first two Eye of the Beholder games.  Westwood Studios would go on to make Dune 2 and the Command and Conquer series.  FTL only made one more Dungeon Master game before going out of business.

The 64M GB Smart Card - Diamond in the Rough for your Game Boy

Update 10/15/17 : This device is on the list of risky, dangerous and flawed products for your retro consoles : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2017/08/flawed-risky-and-dangerous-devices-for.html  Don't buy, don't use, spend the extra money for a properly designed flash cart.  I threw mine away.

Update 12/29/15 : This device is almost totally obsolete compared to the EverDrive GB.  Read my review of the EverDrive GB here : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-everdrive-gb-game-boy-and-game-boy.html

Some years ago, I felt my Game Boy Advance SP (backlit) was not receiving the 8-bit love it deserved.  Tired of chasing down all the games I wanted to play on a real Game Boy, I decided to purchase a Game Boy flash cart.  The days of the Game Boy were long past in 2010, and handheld systems get precious attention from multi-cart designers.  The old devices from Bung and others had not been manufactued in a very long time, and who wants to deal with parallel port programmable devices in the 21st Century?  Nintendo manufactured an official flash cart called the Nintendo Power GB Memory Cartridge, but it only supported a select number of original Game Boy games, required a special commercial burner, and only had 1MB for ROM and 128KB for SRAM.

Fortunately, while interest in Game Boy games is fairly low, interest in Game Boy sound is high.  Chiptune music has become more and more popular, and the Game Boy's Audio Processing Unit (APU) is very similar to the NES's APU.  However, a Game Boy is portable, it can be brought to a party, a club or a rave and be controlled with the buttons on its face and run off batteries.  A NES requires a gamepad and a monitor screen of some kind, its not very portable and requires a free wall socket.  While you can make music on a laptop, its not very exciting to bring a laptop to a rave and emulation does not have the allure of real hardware.

A ROM program called Little Sound Dj (LSDJ) was developed to allow music programmers easy access to the Game Boy.  There was a need for a cart to store the music that would be played on the Game Boy at these parties and recording sessions, so a new breed of flash carts became available.  One of the most common ones, and one I purchased, is the following : http://store.kitsch-bent.com/product/usb-64m-smart-card

You can also purchase it here : http://www.nonelectronics.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=112&zenid=b54fe49ab9c28ca36063e603674744bc

At $40.00, the price is very reasonable and 64 Megabits / 8 Megabytes means that the cart can hold two of the largest Game Boy Color games.  There is also a 32 Mbit /4MB version.  It also has 1Mbit / 128 KB of SRAM.  It has a mini-USB port, no external programmer is required.  It will not work with Game Boy Advance games.

That 8MB is divided into two 4MB pages.  ROMs can be stored on either page.  When you insert the cartridge, the contents of the first ROM page is always displayed.  To get to the second ROM page, you must quickly turn off and then turn back on your Game Boy.  Game Boy Color should not be on the same page as regular monochrome Game Boy games, glitching will result otherwise.  The first thing you see after the Nintendo scroll is the menu (unless only one game is in the ROM page).  The menu uses the name in the game's header, not the filename of your ROM.  Some Game Boy and Game Boy Color games use a Japanese name even though the language of the game is English.

The cartridge is a cheap Chinese-manufactured device, but its essentially the only device around.  It does not fit in a Game Boy Advance SP slot quite as nicely as a real licensed cart, you need to listen and feel for the "click".  It sucks your Game Boy's batteries much faster than real cartridges, even Game Boy Advance games.  It backs up SRAM via a coin cell battery.  Writing to the card is slow, about 3.5 minutes for one 4MB page.  Each page must be written to separately, and writing a new game or games to the page will erase all the old games (because its flash memory).  A single game like Shantae or Dragon Warrior III can use one whole 4MB page.  Multiple games in a ROM page can use no more than 3.75MB because the menu for the page is stored in the last 32KB of the ROM page.  Usually that means that no more than three Game Boy Color games can be fit in a single page, because almost all Game Boy Color games are at least 1MB.

Game Boy (B&W) games range in size from 32KB to 1MB.  Like the NES, the first games released for the Game Boy fit inside the CPU's addressing space and did not require any additional hardware inside the cartridge.  However, almost immediately it was understood that 32KB (the limit of the CPU's addressing capabilities) was simply not going to be enough for games that aspired to something better than first generation NES games.   However, Nintendo kept much stricter controls on mapper hardware than on the NES, which had dozens of different mappers.  Nintendo in the early days of the Game Boy used two "mappers" called MBC 1 and MBC2 (Memory Bank Controller).  All licensed third party companies were required to use these two mappers (if their game was larger than 32KB) and did not use their own custom hardware except in a very limited way.

MCB1 could support 2MB of ROM with 8KB of SRAM or 512KB of ROM with 32KB of SRAM.  Games in the US were released with up to 512KB ROM with 8KB Battery Backed SRAM .  MBC2  games used 256KB ROMs with 512 nybbles of Battery Backed SRAM integrated into the MBC chip.  Much, much later, when the first Pokemon games were released, they used the MBC3 with support for 2MB of ROM and 32KB SRAM.  Additionally, the MBC3 also included a battery backed real time clock chip driven by an external oscillator.

For the Game Boy Color, Nintendo made a MBC5 chip that was included in virtually every Game Boy Color game.  This chip could support up to 8MB of ROM (no US game ever required more than 4MB) and 128KB of Battery Backed SRAM.  It could also support a rumble feature, but not a real time clock chip.  Only Game Boy Color games requiring a real time clock used MBC3.

The flash cart will work in a Super Game Boy or the GameCube Game Boy Player.  In the Super Game Boy, any game with Super Game Boy features will work fine if it is the only game in the page.  If it is not, then you must start the game from the menu, then reset the game to utilize the Super Game Boy features.  Otherwise, the Super Game Boy will play the game as if it were a regular Game Boy game.   It may be unreliable in a Game Boy Pocket due to the power draw, I would find the highest rated mA AAA batteries you can find if you used it in one.

While many, many games work correctly on this cartridge, quite a few will not.  Some write to the flash cart's registers and screw things up.  Some games written for MBC1-MBC3 hardware will sometimes fail to work properly or at all because they use a feature which does not work or works differently on an MBC5.  The only solution is to patch your ROM.  Virtually every game that has had problems reported on the NESDEV forum has a fix.  Most of them you can find here : http://thegaminguniverse.org/ninjagaiden4/mottzilla/ and some you can find in this thread : http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=5804.  According to this, the first revision of the 32MB carts had an functional MBC1 emulation mode : http://blog.gg8.se/gameboyprojects/week09/EMS_FAQ.txt

When I termed this flash cart to be a diamond in the rough, the main issue is the stock flashing program.  Engrish aside, the chief problem with the program as it runs on the Game Boy is that it only allows for one game to save at a time!  So if you play The Legend of Zelda : Link's Awakening, save and do not download your save to your PC, when the next game you play is Metroid II : Return of Samus, you will have wiped out your Zelda save.  Most Game Boy games only use 8KB to save the game and the cart has 128KB of SRAM available.  A NESDEV user named Mottzilla made a custom version of the PC loader that will allow for multiple save games on the cart.  It is a must-download, find it here : http://thegaminguniverse.org/ninjagaiden4/mottzilla/

With his addon to the flasher program, each game with save features has an 8KB slot in the SRAM reserved for it.  (MBC2 games still take 8KB even though they only save 256 bytes).  One 32KB game save (for games like Pokemon) is supported, so you can have up to 16 or 12 save files in the SRAM at any one time.  You can see which games currently have saves and you can delete saves from the flash cart's menu.  However, the SRAM is saved between the two ROM pages, so it is generally best to use one ROM page for games with save features and the other ROM page for games that do not save.

There are a few weird games that will never work with this cart.  Some Japanese games used more exotic mapping hardware like the HuC-1 and HuC-3, which supported an infrared sensor for wireless communication.  None were released in the US or Europe except for a Pokemon clone called Robopon - Sun Version, which used the HuC-3 and came in an oversized black cartridge.  It has an infrared port for commications with other Robopon carts.  Uniquely, it has the capabilities to make simple sounds from the cartridge when the cartridge is not in use.  It has a speaker and an extra (user replaceable) battery for this function in addition to the battery backed internal RAM.  Finally, it has a real time clock.  Kirby's Tilt 'N Tumble used the MBC7 due to its motion sensor.  The Game Boy Camera is another piece of unique hardware that includes a ROM which functions like a game cartridge.  Finally, there is an official ROM of Mortal Kombat 1 & 2 which uses MCB1 in an odd way to support its 1MB size, just use the standalone versions of the games instead.  Unlicensed games, such as those released by Sachen and Wisdom Tree, use their own custom mapper and are not playable with this flash cart..

Those of us who love Game Boy games have been yearning for years for a proper Game Boy flash cart like the PowerPak.  One that accepts microSD cards, does not suck down batteries, properly supports all four major MBCs and a real time clock, and whose menu hardware can be shut off from the system upon game loading.  It does not exist as of yet (but Gamegear carts do, strangely), so at the moment we are stuck with this device, which is much better than nothing.

The Sound Blaster 2.0 and the C/MS Upgrade

I decided to make this post to gather all the known, accurate and current information about the C/MS Upgrade for the 2.0.  This post supersedes anything I have said in prior blog posts.  As you should know, Creative Labs' first PC sound card of any note was the Creative Music System card (C/MS), later re-marketed as the Creative Game Blaster.  This card was based off two sound chips CL labeled as CMS-301, but were actually Phillips SAA-1099s.  The C/MS card was not a great seller, and even the name change failed to dislodge the Ad Lib card from its increasingly dominant position in the affordable PC sound card market.  Thus Creative came up with the "killer card", the Sound Blaster.  This card combined the full functionality of the Ad Lib card with almost all of the functionality (detection chip was eliminated) of the Game Blaster card and more.

While the Sound Blaster, with its joystick/midi port and digital sound processor began to sell well, the design was definitely in the past with lots of TTL logic chips.  The card was originally marketed as a "stereo" card, but the only thing stereo about it was the Game Blaster chips.  In the first production runs, the two Game Blaster chips, marked with a CMS-301 sticker were soldered onto the motherboard (so were the Ad Lib chips, marked FM1312 and FM1314).  However, almost nobody really cared about Game Blaster when the Adlib was also present, and virtually all games that supported the Game Blaster also supported the Adlib, so for the 1.5 version of the Sound Blaster, the chips were not installed by default.  The two empty sockets could be populated with chips purchased from Creative Labs fr the low, low price of $29.95.

After CL released its new flagship product, the Sound Blaster Pro, it redesigned the original Sound Blaster as a budget card and released it in late 1991.  CL enhanced the new card's capabilities by allowing it to record up to 44.1kHz, but it was still a mono card.  The C/MS chips were left off the board again, but this time there was a third empty socket.  A special version of the upgrade was required from CL, one not really well-identified in the catalog accompanying the card.  The third chip had a sticker marking it as 0048013500, and underneath it was a pre-programmed PAL (Programmable Array Logic) chip.  (A PAL16L8 chip with the security fuse blown so it could not be dumped).  Eventually, CL stopped advertising the upgrade completely, and without the PAL chip the CMS functionality would not work even with the Phillips chips were installed.  Given the rarity of boards with the upgrade found in the wild and the lack of advertising, few upgrade kits must have been sold.

However, in 2012, a long-time member of the Vintage Computer Forum named Chuck(G) devised a method to determine the way in which common PALs were programmed.  He analyzed the PAL on an officially upgraded Sound Blaster 2.0 and released the instructions to replicate the programmed logic on a GAL (Generic Array Logic) chip.  Unlike PALs, GALs can be reprogrammed and do not require expensive and hard to obtain hardware to program.  The GAL required is a GAL16V8 and the file to program the chip can be found here : http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/entry.php?328-Cloning-a-HAL-PAL-Part-11.  The programmed chip is inserted in the only empty socket that can fit it, the one just above the FM1312 /YM-3812 chip.  However, in almost one year following the first successful report of a GAL SB 2.0 CMS upgrade, not all boards have worked with the upgrade.  Below I try to identify each board known whether or not to work with the upgrade.

Board Types :

The earliest known boards are CT-1350B boards marked with a rev 2, 3 or 4 and do not have "SOUND BLASTER" silkscreened.  Here is a photo of a rev. 3 board :

And here is a rev. 4 board :

Between the rev 2 and 3 and the rev 4 and later boards, there is one obvious difference.  The rev 4 added a DMACTL jumper.  This jumper will disable the DMA capabilities of the Sound Blaster, virtually eliminating its ability to reproduce digitized sound.  However, and it may not be truly visible in the photo, but both share a CT1336 Bus Interface Chip and a CT1351 DSP chip, version v2.01.  You can identify the DSP chip by this silkscreened text on the chip "CT1351V201", with the "V201" indicating the version number.

These boards have been proven time and time again to work with the CMS upgrade, whether a GAL or PAL.  Apparently there is no difference between Lattice Semiconductor and National Semiconductor GALs. Apparently SGS Thompson GALs do not work.

Later boards look like this :

Now the words "SOUND BLASTER" are next to the CT1350B.  This board's revision can be determined by the six digit number silkscreened to the lower left of the address jumpers.  The above board is a 049151 and it works with the upgrade.  059316 and 069328 are also known to exist and shown below :

Note the new CT1336A and DSP v2.02 on these boards.  The 059316 also has small surface mounted versions of the YM3812 and Y3014 chips and a 1993 copyright date silkscreened onto the board.  The last four digits refer to the design date of the revision in year-week format.  The 059316 and 069328  are the first boards confirmed not to work with the CMS upgrade, regardless of whether a CL PAL or a modern-programmed GAL is used.  However, the 049151 is not guaranteed to work, as can be seen here : 

It seems that the first two digits, 04, 05 or 06, refer to a revision number.  There are some mysteries remaining.  For example, will either one of these boards work :

The first is a 049151 with a v2.02DSP and a CT1336 chip, the second one is identical except for the word "SOUND MACHINE".  

After further testing, it has been determined that that the DSP version does not matter, the CT1336 version does.  If your card has a v2.01 DSP or v2.02 DSP, the upgrade will work.  If your card has a CT1336 Bus Interface Chip, the upgrade will work.  On the other hand, if your card has a CT1336A Bus Interface Chip, the upgrade will not work!  Since v2.02 DSPs tend to be paired with CT1336A chips, be very careful to check the bus interface chip before you buy.  Make sure your seller shows you a photo of the exact card you will receive.  

2019 Update

In the past year or so, one or two people found a Sound Blaster 2.0 card with an original Creative PAL, the two Creative-marked CMS-301/SAA-1099P chips and a CT1336A Bus Interface Chip, and the Game Blaster functionality worked!  Apparently CL revised the programming for the PAL to work with the CT1336A chip at some point, presumably when they started manufacturing CT1336A chips.  That way, when a customer called with an upgrade request, one PAL would work for all SB 2.0 cards.  This newer PAL has been reversed engineered and can be purchased as a GAL, see here for details : https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30242&view=unread#p726379