Sean Carolan

https://routenote.com/blog/the-weird-and-wonderful-world-of-chiptune-music/
What are your favorite chiptunes or game soundtracks?

Chiptunes can be used to broadly describe any retro-sounding electronic music but there are purists who continue to make new music on the C64 SID chip. Check out this track for an example of pushing this device to the limit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJWyfyL1n8w

The C64 SID could use three channels at a time, each capable of producing sawtooth, square, triangle or noise wave sound waves.

Early video game systems had only basic sound capabilities. Most early games with music could only play a single melody in a never-ending loop. The Commodore 64 SID (Sound Interface Device) chip had capabilities far beyond its time.

👾 #retrogaming Throwback Thursday - Chiptunes 🤖

https://gamerant.com/most-infamous-kill-screens-in-video-games/
Pac-Man 256 gives the glitch a new life as it chases Pac-Man through an endless maze.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/455400/PACMAN_256/

has an infamous "negative world" glitch that traps players in an endless underwater level.

Galaga players who reach level 256 encounter the infamous "blue ribbon" screen with corrupted graphics, while Dig Dug simply freezes at level 256. In home consoles, Super Mario Bros.

Donkey Kong has its own famous kill screen at level 22, where the game timer is set to an impossible value, giving players only 7 seconds to complete the level. The Space Invaders kill screen occurs at level 256 when the game runs out of memory.

The Pac-Man "kill screen" is one example. If you can get to the 256th board a buffer overflow causes a bunch of tiles, letters, and numbers to fill the right side of the screen, making the game unplayable.

🕹️ #retrogaming Throwback Thursday - Game-ending Glitches 👾
Many classic arcade games have bugs that cause the game to crash when the user's score or level gets too high.

https://scummvm.org/
You can also purchase some of these titles on GoG.com or Steam, which has the entire remastered Monkey Island collection!

If you want to try any of these classic adventures like Monkey Island, or Day of the Tentacle, you can download the free ScummVM emulator:

Hundreds of games have been created with the SCUMM engine since the original Maniac Mansion hit the shelves. Some of the later games, called "talkies", have great sound tracks and audio dialog.

Many of these designers went on to found their own studios and continue making adventure games today.

Gilbert's creative genius shaped Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, while Schafer later led development of classics like Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango.

The SCUMM engine was created by Ron Gilbert (@grumpygamer.com) and Aric Wilmunder, while legendary designers like Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman worked on many of the most beloved SCUMM games.

SCUMM, short for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, enabled cross-platform reusability of the game code.

By the late 80s developers at LucasArts had created a game engine for point-and-click adventures, to allow designers to mock up locations, items and dialog sequences without writing code.

Point-and-click adventures were all the rage in the 1980s. The format allowed for rich storytelling and complex puzzle solving without requiring heavy graphics processing. Kings Quest was one of the earliest adventure games in this genre.

🕹️ #retrogaming Throwback Thursday - SCUMM and Villainy 👾

It's scary how quickly users attribute spiritual powers to these AIs. There are already influencers using them to hold virtual "seances" with historical figures.

The amazing thing is this machine doesn't use *any* emulation. By some dark sorcery the Artix-7 FPGA has hot swappable CPU "cores" that behave exactly like the OG hardware.

ZX Spectrum Next Issue 3 The Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next: the evolution of the Speccy computer, now expanded into the world of the Sinclair QL, C64 and... More!

The ZX Spectrum Next Issue 3 Kickstarter is live! This beautiful 8-bit machine can even run as a Commodore 64! #retrogaming 🕹️

www.kickstarter.com/projects/spe...

Add your favorite video game references from movies, TV shows or books in the thread. 🧵

* Hardball (C64) - The Princess Bride (1987)
* Rad Racer, Ninja Gaiden, SMB3 - The Wizard (1989)
* The Game - Star Trek TNG (1991)
* Dozens of 80s arcade classics - Ready Player One (2011 book, 2018 film)

* Computer Space - Soylent Green (1973)
* Space Paranoids, Light Cycles - Tron (1982)
* Global Thermonuclear War, Chess, Tic-tac-toe - Wargames (1983)
* Starfighter - The Last Starfighter (1984)
* Battle School - Ender's Game book (1985)

🕹️ #retrogaming Throwback Thursday - Video Games in Movies, Books and TV 🎬
Video games have been featured in popular culture since the early 1970s.
Here are some stories where video games made an appearance, and a few where games were central to the plot:

What's your favorite JRPG?
Here's a book that would make a great gift for the JRPG fan in your life:
https://www.bitmapbooks.com/products/a-guide-to-japanese-role-playing-games

Other influential classics include Dragon Quest (which predated Final Fantasy), Persona, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, and Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan). Each series brought unique battle systems and storytelling approaches.