Hanno's blog

I am a regular author for the German IT news page Golem.de. Earlier this year they asked me if I wanted to report from the Black Hat and Def Con conferences in Las Vegas. The conferences will start tomorrow. As I don't want to fly half across the globe for a few days of IT security conferences I decided to spend some more time. So I spend the last couple of days in Las Vegas and will spend some time after the conferences travelling around. A couple of people asked me to blog a bit and post some pictures, so here we go.

Las Vegas is probably a place I would've never visited on its own. I consider myself a rationalist person and therefore I see gambling mostly as an illogical pursuit. In the end your chances of winning are minimal because otherwise the business wouldn't work. I hadn't imagined how huge the casino business in Las Vegas is. Large parts of the city are just one large casino after another - and it doesn't stop there, because a couple of cities around Vegas literally are made of casinos.

Beside seeing some of the usual tourist attractions (Hoover Dam, Lake Mead), I spend the last couple of days also finding out that there are some interesting solar energy projects nearby. Also a large Star Trek convention> was happening the past days where I attended on the last day.

If you are ever in Vegas and have the slightest interest in retro gaming I suggest to visit A Gamer's Paradise. It is a shop for used video games, but apart from that it is also a showcase for a whole range of old and partly very exotic video gaming equipment, including things I've never seen before. It also has some playable old consoles. Right beside of it is the Pinball Hall of Fame, which is also a nice place. So you can visit two worthwhile retro gaming related places in one go.

Pictures from Las Vegas
Pictures from A Gamer's Paradise
Pictures from Pinball Hall of Fame

Continuing my blog series about ancient file formats, today I want to have a look at tracker and other non-streamed audio formats. On my last blog entry, someone pointed me to the fact that calling the C64 SID format a tracker format is quite inaccurate, so I mention the "other" formats for clarity. (And I apologize and ask for comments if I write anything wrong here, most of it is from a time before I was into those things)

Last time I talked about streamed audio formats. The basic idea with streamed audio formats is that you have a data representation of the audio waves. This is how most modern audio formats like mp3 or ogg work. This approach works well today, but it was not feasible on older computers, because it takes lots of memory. So old audio formats store some kind of meta information that a computer then uses to "compose" an audio track live.

For old audio formats, it seems the Audacious media player is the free software solution that you should look for.

C64 SID files

Probably the most famous ancient audio format is the C64 SID format. The Commodore 64 had a special chip - the SID chip - for audio which has a very distinctive kind of sound. The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) contains around 40.000 SID tunes (though only 60 MB in size).

To play SID files, the SID chip needs to be emulated, as they basically contain code for the chip itself. The sidplay project seems to be abandoned since a few years, but there is sidplayfp, a fork trying to keep it alive. It has its own command line player. Worth mentioning may be that the SID files you find today didn't exist on a C64, they were invented for SID players on systems other than the C64. The concept of "files" with headers as we know today wasn't really existing there.

The Audacious player contains a plugin for libsidplay. There is also a plugin for the gstreamer framework, but it depends on a very old sidplay version.

ATARI SAP files

For ATARI SAP files, the story is quite similar to the SID one, although they're less popular. They contain code for the POKEY chip, which was used on 8-Bit-Atari-Computers. The Atari SAP Music Archive (ASMA) collects such music. Audacious plays the format out of the box.

Tracker formats (MOD, XM, IT)

Tracker or module formats became popular with the Amiga, which used the MOD format. It contains a couple of instruments and information how they should be played. Later, popular tracker software introduced new formats like XM (Fast Tracker 2), IT (Impulse Tracker) or S3M (Scream Tracker). Tracker formats are still popular within the Demoscene.

There are two free software solutions to play module formats - MikMod and ModPlug. MikMod was dead for a couple of years, but just recently it seems development has revived. Both played every module format I ever happened to see, so I don't make a specific recommendation. Audacious has a plugin for ModPlug.

Adlib and other small tracker formats

I'll start with a personal story here. Once I tried getting into assembler programming and created so-called 4K-Intros. I started this under DOS in a time when this was already fading out. For sound, I found a nice piece of software called the RAD tracker, which came with some assembler source code to play their own mini audio format.

There existed a couple of similar mini-tracker-formats, mostly for the Adlib sound chip. Pretty much every PC sound card in that time had the functionality of an Adlib sound chip. melcom's ChipTune Archive contains a collection of Adlib files.

AdPlug is our free software solution here and - you guess it - Audacious has a plugin for it. However, AdPlug was not able to play all the files in melcom's archive.

For example, there is a collection of files created with the Edlib Tracker. While there seems to be a Winamp Plugin and a Player for MacOS X, I found no free software to play the files. However, there's still the backup solution of emulation. The DOSBox emulator does a fine job and you can run the original Edlib player in it.

Video Game Music

There are vast collections of sound archives extracted from old console video games. As systems like a GameBoy or a NES don't have "files", these formats have been created afterwards by enthusiasts to collect the music. There's a whole number of them, you can find samples of files like NSF (Nintendo Sound Format for NES games) or GBS (Gameboy Sound) (you'll find many samples behind the links). There's something special about these: They usually don't have one file for a track, but one file for a game. So e. g. an NSF file contains a whole buch of sound tracks.

The solution to play them is called Game Music Emu. And - you already guess it - Audacious has a plugin for that.

Conclusion

Free software plays pretty well with all kinds of strange audio formats, although the situation is a bit more scattered than with streaming music, where you pretty much have one solution for everything (ffmpeg). I stumbled at least across one case where no free software solution was available - but emulation helps out.
Audacious seems to play a central role in supporting all kinds of audio files. It's available for Linux and for Windows (although I haven't tested if it plays everything under Windows as well - comments welcome).

Recently, Nintendo released a new game called "Donkey Kong Country Returns" - I thought I'd take that as an opportunity to tell you a bit about it and it's main figure, Donkey Kong.

What's interesting about this is that it's a revival of a revival - the original game is almost as old as I am (from 1981, so I can't tell you about the "good old times" here). It was released on an arcade machine and later ported to several consoles. You played Mario in the game (yes, this was also the very first time Mario appeared in a video game) and had to rescue the princess from a big evil Gorilla. Not very creative, but who cares about game stories anyway, right? You had to jump over barrels to get to the gorilla.

I think the first time I saw the game was this one. It is from the Game and Watch series, mobile devices that had just one game built in. The Game and Watch games had no real display, they were only able to switch some elements on and of. For that limitation, the games had surprising complexity (another one I really liked is the Super Mario Bros. 3 wrist band game). Still, it is far away (or let's say rather different) from the original game.

The second time I saw a Donkey Kong game was a (probably inofficial) remake in DOS. To be honest, it wasn't very good, but I had not many games at that time, so I played it a lot. You had to go up to the princess and after that, the gorilla threw something over the screen and you had to go down again, but now with fires and more holes. Sadly, I can't provide it to you as I didn't find it online (maybe I have it on an old CD, I'll have to look for that).

The very first time I played the "real" Donkey Kong was much later - 1992 Nintendo released the first two Donkey Kong games together as "Donkey Kong Classics" on the NES. There was also an advanced version for the Gameboy which featured the original Donkey Kong levels and about 100 more levels afterwards (I played through all of them).

1994 was the "first revival" - Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo, a game which had impressive graphics and was a technical breakthrough at that time. It has not much in common with the original game beside the character and the fact that barrels still play an important role. A nice gimmick: It had a character called "Cranky Kong", who was said to be the "original Donkey Kong" from the old game. He was always grumbling that todays games are far to easy.

Now Nintendo is doing the second revival - interesting enough, it doesn't really use much of the possibilities the Wii offers. It is a classic jump and run game, very much like Donkey Kong Country (Nintendo just recently released "New Super Mario Bros", quite similar also a classic Mario jump and run). I like that. Though I played the game a bit and I must say I'm not highly impressed (at least yet). I'd rate it a nice game, but not a great game. But I also have to say that the old Donkey Kong Country is not on my all-time-favorite video games list. Maybe I'll tell you more when I played it longer.

What else? No blog about retro gaming without some links to really cool stuff:
A house with Donkey Kong design (does anyone know where this is?
Donkey Kong in Lego
(have more? post links in the comments)

I have a small collection of classic Nintendo Game and Watch devices, I once promised to put images online. I may add further old videogaming stuff I have.

Here they are, not much, but at least from all generations. Especially the wrist watches from end 80s / beginning 90s are quite rare. If you see some devices somewhere and wanna donate something to me, that'd be a very good idea :-)

Wikipedia page about Game and Watch is quite good, if you're looking for more info.

Today I saw that in the Rewe supermarket, they sell remakes of old Nintendo Game and Watch games (called Mini Classics). For those who don't know, Game and Watch where early Nintendo Games, only one game in a device, with an lcd-screen.

I bought the two classics Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Junior (there were some others but none of them seemed to be of the original titles). I also have a quite nice collection of older Game and Watch titles, I think I might upload some pictures of them when I find time for it.