emulinks.de

Just read this in issue 66 of UK magazine Retro Gamer on the subject of Hudson and the PC Engine:

“Since 1984, Hudson had been engaged in developing for the Famicom, but there were few people who could write programs for CPU of the console,” recalls Takahashi.

We’re talking about the 6502 here. Maybe Hudson’s programmers were just exceptionally dense, who knows…

“Therefore, at the beginning of 1986 we started developing a chip for a game console that utilised the most popular Z80-series CPU and whose programs could be easily written.”

The HuC6280 used in the PC Engine is as much a 6502 derivative as the Famicom’s 2A03. No Z80 involved anywhere, which also means that this is not just a case of someone mixing up two 8-bit processor families, but that the whole story makes NO SENSE AT ALL!

Did Retro Gamer make this up, or does that guy simply not know what he’s talking about? Research on the web reveals an interview with this Takahashi character that was available on a now defunct Hudson website and has thankfully been archived by the Wayback Machine, in which he states the same nonsense:

The whole point of the PCE was to make a platform that was easy to develop for. The Famicom’s CPU was the 6802. The PCE processor was based on the Z80 (same as the Sega Master System and Sega Genesis).

OK, I guess all you can blame Retro Gamer for is that they don’t recognize a fool when they see one. a) the Famicom’s CPU is a Ricoh 2A03 based on an NMOS 6502 core, b) the PC Engine runs on a HuC6820 6280 which is based on the 65C02, c) the Sega Genesis is 68k-based and only has a Z80 audio processor, and d) SHUT UP!

Thankfully, no one has picked up on this, as it seems. Except Retro Gamer, of course…

This Spanish page, being from a web forum, is a little too temporary for the archive, but it contains a lot of links to high-quality vintage computing and gaming-related videos in different languages downloadable from Megaupload, so I’ll just post it here.

If you don’t find at least a dozen really stupid mistakes in here, you are not reading this anyway.

I just put a Plus/4 port of Boeing 727 Simulator online, a basic (BASIC, in fact) flight simulator I used to play on my uncle’s C64 when I was a kid. Check the Plus/4 page.

If you haven’t noticed yet, I have put online a Sinclair ZX Spectrum game I wrote for my wife’s birthday last year: “Jib Goes Shopping“. I don’t really remember why I wrote this for the Spectrum, but I found it a really neat machine to program for.

I am just playing Sam & Max Hit the Road, and it is definitely the worst LucasArts point-and-click adventure game I have ever played, and I have played them all (except The Dig). There is hardly a puzzle I can figure out without UHS hints. Cycling through the actions with the right mouse button is absolutely nerve-wrecking. Pathfinding and collision detection are suboptimal (try walking through the vortex without falling asleep), the conversations repetitive and not interruptible (I don’t give a fuck about Snuckey U., especially after I have sat through the same moronic speech five hundred times!!), and did I mention the puzzles lack any logic whatsoever? To top it off, the jokes hardly ever work for me, particularly those that are supposed to be self-deprecating. This heap of rabbit intestines is parsecs away from Day of the Tentacle.

Some time ago I felt the urge to port some C64 games to the Commodore Plus/4, namely Centripod and Attack of the Mutant Camels. Now I finally got around to put them up on the web. Check it out.