Throwback... Sunday?

[bazz]

So who else remembers learning SNES from Yoshi's tutorials, specifically that register document, and at the end was a register $FEED, and it said something about feeding bananas with that register... That shit had me so confused cause I barely grasped the concept of a register to begin with at that point, and I'm like LOL is this real shit? Is this like a "game" register? lol....

http://patpend.net/technical/snes/snes.txt
do a search for "banana"

[Drag]

It looks like a joke added in by one of the authors.

[Drew Sebastino]

Out of the short time I looked at Yoshi's docs, I do remember some mess ups though, particularly him switching the character and the "palette/extra character/flip" byte.

[koitsu]

Given that I'm Y0SHi, what's the question exactly? :P The $FEED register joke has been something I've answered numerous times over the years, but because the Internet is chaotic I think the story has been more or less lost repeatedly.

The short of it is: unless you were part of the snesdev scene in the early 90s the history wouldn't make any sense to you (i.e. you had to be there). There were a limited number of people involved in that scene (maybe 50 people tops, I'd estimate). There was a guy who went by the moniker of Felon who I became friends with, and while I was doing my SNES documentation he and I both thought it'd be funny to put in a fake MMIO port that correlated with something completely outrageous -- something so outrageous and silly that there's no way anyone could take it seriously... or that's what we both thought at the time. It was extra funny considering the release of Donkey Kong Country (game involves bananas) came out about a year later.

The register has come up on at least 3 separate occasions that I can recall (so this would make the 4th), and 2 of those occasions have been people asking me "what exactly is this, and how do I implement it?" Meaning: people actually took it seriously. Still to this day I feel that's telling, in a sad sort of way -- I can't tell if some people just lack a sense of humour, or if some part of their logical/literal brain couldn't be turned off for them to realise the impossibility of a video game console being able to track how many bananas some random dude on Earth happens to have in his possession at that moment in time.

And in case there's any question of my authenticity: here's something I tweeted back in October: https://twitter.com/koitsu2009/status/5 ... 3894267906

[Drew Sebastino]

You're Yoshi? Small world. What made you decide to change your name to koitsu? What does that even mean?

And in case there's any question of my authenticity: here's something I tweeted back in October: https://twitter.com/koitsu2009/status/5 ... 3894267906

What exactly are you trying to show us?

[koitsu]

You're Yoshi? Small world. What made you decide to change your name to koitsu? What does that even mean?

I've gone by lots of different aliases over the years. The list since childhood is almost embarrassing to recall: Ryu, Shadow, Yoshi/Y0SHi, k9. The only few I keep around now are koitsu, aitsu, tsuchinoko, and dukandricka, with the former being strongly preferred given its meaning.

In Japanese there are a series of common words that refer to a person ambiguously (meaning you don't know their name or haven't been introduced to them; if you used these words to refer to someone who you knew or "should" know that would be considered quite rude in Japanese culture):

* koitsu = this person
* aitsu = that person
* soitsu = the person (e.g. a person whom you don't know giving a presentation could be referred to as soitsu)

In colloquial American English, we'd just say "this/that dude" or "this/that guy". Ambiguously referring to someone (whether you know them or not) isn't generally considered rude here, at least not in most cases, and not to the scale it is in Japanese culture.

I picked the moniker because as I got older, I realised that it in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter "who" I am. I'm just this guy..... just like everyone else. :-)

tsuchinoko is a mythical Japanese snake. I got introduced to it via Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.

dukandricka is just short for "du kan dricka!" ("you can drink!", as in alcohol) in Swedish, and comes directly from one of the Jönssonligan films (I forget which one, it's been a while).

What exactly are you trying to show us?

That I am who I say I am (that's why I said "any question of my authenticity"). Those are private mails between another snesdev member (Gau) and myself -- same fellow who I worked with on the defunct Super Kid Icarus project.

At least now you have a better idea why I'm able to help with all of your 65816 and SNES "stuff". :-)

[tepples]

while I was doing my SNES documentation he and I both thought it'd be funny to put in a fake MMIO port that correlated with something completely outrageous -- something so outrageous and silly that there's no way anyone could take it seriously... or that's what we both thought at the time. It was extra funny considering the release of Donkey Kong Country (game involves bananas) came out about a year later.

That and two other things. First, 1980s arcade games are known to offload parts of game logic to MCUs with a separate, well-protected ROM that is harder to reproduce, and the Super NES. Bubble Bobble, for instance, took a long time to get emulated properly because MAME was emulating a bootleg MCU that was producing mostly compatible but not bit-exact behavior. Second, just look at all the oddball behaviors in Chinese mappers for the Famicom that have since been discovered. So combining these, it wouldn't surprise me much if some games decided to involve MMIO ports at random addresses in the calculation of score or player resources, such as the example of Donkey Kong Country.

こいつ (koitsu) is a Japanese pronoun literally meaning "this one", a person near the speaker with a negative connotation. Compare to John McCain calling fellow U.S. Presidential nominee Barack Obama "that one" in an October 2008 debate.

"How can pronouns have connotations?" In Japanese, pronouns have a lot of synonyms with different connotations. The most common word meaning "I, me" is わたし, pronounced watashi. But there are also あたし (atashi), うち (uchi), ぼく (boku), おれ (ore), and more. This is because Japanese pronouns are subject to the euphemism treadmill, just like words for sex, ethnicity, or disability in other languages. Some pronouns are so impolite that they're almost like swearing; it is sometimes joked that in a translation of "fuck you", the bad word would be the word for "you" rather than the word for making sex. When one pronoun becomes considered impolite, another noun gets pressed into service, sometimes with a change in accent.

[bazz]

You are YOSHi Koitsu?! That's sweet, I always wondered of YOSHi was some mythical dev creature from the past that I would never get to meet.. who just fell off the face of the planet... In fact, that's one of the first things I used to wonder when I started SNES dev 9 years ago.. Where's YOSHi now??? lol


Btw I recognize Gau of Veldt, I learned the basics of BRR from a tutorial of his Cool!

Getting back to $FEED -- it was at a time I decided to learn SNES when I had little programming background, aside from some BASIC and maybe beginnings of C++ .. Just no understanding of almost everything. $FEED did not help straighten me out lol.... When I first started learning SNES there was nothing for me to grab onto and understand.. I remember perusing your docs hoping I would land on something... when I landed on $FEED and I was just like.. .WTF... lol... wtf is this shit lol..

[KungFuFurby]

My first taste in ASM was in 2008 on the SNESDev.net forums. I only remember this because some of the posts survived on archive.org. Originally, I would either hack the RAM values (not always successful) or mindlessly crash the games spectacularly while trying to use obvious opcodes (A9, A2 or A0). I got better over time, catching on to pointers (I caught on to HiROM first, then LoROM), byte ordering, and ultimately indirects (after pointer identification by intentionally freezing the game or trying to track it in real time).

I've gotten so good that sometimes, not even code that is generated in real-time can stand in my way (as in, code executed in RAM)! This is because the emulator's RAM lookup feature takes care of that problem (although it does make for a headache if I were to try to hunt it down in the ROM).

SA-1 games can still be problematic because I have no BW-RAM analysis, although usually I invent music modifiers, meaning they're usually not a problem.

[psycopathicteen]

When I first got into homebrew, around 2007-2008, I remember feeling very disappointed in the SNES scene at the time. All that was around at the time were stupid scrolling demos, and bland SMW hacks. Even the ASM hacks were disappointing, not only in terms of gameplay design, but on a technical level too. The new "bosses" were just a 64x64 sprite moving back and forth, with no animation.

[KungFuFurby]

On the same grounds... musically, I only adhered to the 8 channel limitation (and no filters). Other than that, I didn't have a clue on sample optimization, and memory limitations were second-hand to me. Thus, my earlier work was way too large on the sample sizes. Surprisingly, I am able to convert some of the songs, but under the condition that I optimize the samples (and patterns if SNESMod is involved, for which I have decided I'll create a new sound driver instead).

Now I feel like I can still go all out on the music (I've been back to creating songs that SNESMod could not handle), but I try to be sensible on sample optimization because I have to deal with data swapping in these cases.

[ccovell]

* koitsu = this person
* soitsu = the person (e.g. a person whom you don't know giving a presentation could be referred to as soitsu)

Koitsu, Aitsu, Soitsu, and Doitsu are also characters in the Parodius game series, which is the reason I figured you had chosen it, considering your domain name...

[koitsu]

* koitsu = this person
* soitsu = the person (e.g. a person whom you don't know giving a presentation could be referred to as soitsu)

Koitsu, Aitsu, Soitsu, and Doitsu are also characters in the Parodius game series, which is the reason I figured you had chosen it, considering your domain name...

There's an intertwined relationship there which is hard to explain. Hmm, first time I've had to take a shot at this. I'll give it a go.

The first Parodius game I ever saw (I can't recall where, since it was only released in Japan and Europe; I think someone must have shown me a picture of it in a magazine or something) was Parodius Da!. The premise was weird/quirky but I immediately got the Gradius + parody reference and the game kinda stuck in my mind. This would have been the early 90s. Come to think of it, it must have been in a magazine -- a couple weird North American gaming mags occasionally had pictures of Japanese or European games in them -- and probably the European release because I distinctly remember "Palcom". And at that time I had no idea what the MSX was.

Sometime in the mid-90s was when Gokujou Parodius for the SFC got released, which is where Koitsu/Aitsu were introduced as characters. I was able to play Gokujou because I had a SNES copier by that point, and the game stuck with me (I particularly loved the weird "Alex" option-character you could get, and even though I couldn't read the Japanese, the super weapon you could get where you spewed out a string of Japanese text as a weapon made me laugh hysterically -- I always assumed they were either raunchy or rude phrases, aside from E=MC^2). But I had already learned what koitsu/aitsu meant in Japanese by then, 'cuz I thought "what the hell, paper airplanes and stick figures? I guess that's one way to depict the meanings! Konami you so crazy". During this time I was mainly going by Yoshi or Y0SHi (the latter was because of an incident on what was to be known as EFnet, where some software cracker or hacker guy who also went by Yoshi insisted that the nickname was his, and rather than get into a battle with someone on IRC over it, I just let him have it and went with the "elite" permutation).

I didn't end up starting Parodius Networking (specifically parodius.com/net/org) until the late 90s -- I wanted to say 1998 but WHOIS says March 1999 is when I registered parodius.com -- as an ode to the game series (I had played Sexy Parodius by this time on either the Saturn or the PlayStation, I can't remember which). At that time I was going by Y0SHi, and around 2000 or 2001, I went by k9. I ended up changing to koitsu because of what I said earlier, but also partially because 1) there was some social drama relating to myself and the IRC server I had to maintain as part of my job at Best Internet/Verio, and 2) because I had someone on IRC spend an entire year deceiving me just to get $2000 out of me + once she got that, I started getting harassing phone calls and messages and other shit not worth going into here. So I just kinda said "fuck all this" and went with the moniker I did for multiple reasons.

Funny fact: ancient folks from old snesdev and emulation days (e.g. Neill Corlett, Charles Doty, etc.) would likely remember Crystalis Software (crystalis.com), which is the original domain I started doing stuff under. This would have been 1995 or thereabouts -- it's old enough that even archive.org doesn't have archives dating back that far. I let the domain expire in early 1997 and within about 6 months it was registered by someone else (I think a woman who sells "crystal" jewellery and the like) and that person has had it since.

[Drew Sebastino]

You know, I thought a bit "inconsiderate" of me to ask what your name meant without telling you mine, so I will tell you. Espozo doesn't mean anything in Japanese (or any language, for that matter) but is instead an awful mispronunciation of my last name. My father is in the military, and some guy asked for commander Espozo, and no one knew what the heck he was talking about. My father's last name (which is obviously mine) is Sebastino, so you can see why there was some confusion. I mean seriously, where did they get the z from? Most people accidently pronounce my last name as a mixture of Sebastino and Sabastian, Sabastiano. Since I gave you my last name, my first name is Drew, so yeah. (My fathers only about a 4th Italian, but he has an Italian last name. He is about half Irish, and a quarter who knows what.)

[koitsu]

I always figured being in Texas and having the username Espozo meant you were Hispanic. :-) Sebastino I'd pronounce "say-bass-tee-noh" (4 syllables) because my first assumption would be the word was of Spanish origin; I wouldn't have guessed Italian (know little to nothing about Italian language and culture).

Nice to meet you!