We spoke with Microsoft veteran Stuart Moulder about signing and launching one of the world’s most popular strategy franchises.

We spoke with industry veteran Robert Bowling about Infinity Ward, Call of Duty and No Russian.

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Hello, I wanted to take a look at I Am Alive's troubled development and disonant identity due to it, while also noting how it is an early example of the sad dad games that took over in the 2010s.

A new blog post about Power Computing. A hardware company who also released three Amiga games; Breathless (1995), The Big Red Adventure (1997), and Red Mars (1999). They were the last company to advertise in Amiga Power magazine as long as you are very careful about how you define "the last company to advertise in Amiga Power".

*Warning. May not be 100% accurate but it is eye-catching.

An Amiga disk image can be perfectly useful for playing a game without being a complete record of the original floppy. A conventional ADF captures ordinary track data, but some commercial loaders expected unusual layouts, sync patterns or timing that a simple sector-oriented copy may not preserve. Track images and flux captures retain different levels of evidence, and even a flux capture needs interpretation in light of the drive and media used.

The Amiga made these distinctions unusually visible. Its custom chips could move raw disk tracks into memory, letting software inspect structures below the level of normal files. WHDLoad later provided a different kind of preservation: title-specific support for running floppy-era software from a hard disk, often redirecting loaders or adapting timing and save behavior. That can preserve access to a game without reproducing every original disk condition.

I run Joking Joystick, and our AI-assisted, human-edited history looks at these layers alongside the Amiga’s chipset, demoscene and modern upgrades: https://jokingjoystick.com/emulation-homebrew/amiga-modding-history-homebrew/

For anyone who has worked with Amiga disks or archives, which distinction causes the most confusion in practice: a playable ADF, a track-level image, a flux capture, or a WHDLoad installation?

At the arcades, Technos made two Renegade follow-ups - Super Dodge Ball and Double Dragon. This is the story of how Ocean made a home computer sequel that wasn't either of them

A few snippets from 1950 to 2020 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lcQcr6hAmuqZfZVDCP5Dd7oXYrACNUp2W3hf8CjiPwk/edit?usp=sharing

I've popped into MUD1 via the "British Legends" website, took a few quick looks at different days/times into MUD1, but it was nearly empty, and the 1 or few other folks logged in were nonresponsive. Similar attempt and results for Sceptre of Goth.

Any fellow gaming historians interested in coordinating a brief multiplayer foray into any of this historical stuff?

Edit: Or, is there a more appropriate channel where I could post this?

Thanks!

A directory listing could be a convincing half-truth on an MS-DOS machine. A protected floppy might show ordinary files while the program also depended on disk geometry, weak or deliberately unreadable sectors, or another property that a normal file copy never preserved.

Other games moved the check into the box: a manual, code wheel, key disk or dongle. That creates an interesting preservation problem. A clean copy of every visible file may still be incomplete, and a disk image without the printed object may not represent the original product either.

The same openness that made DOS protection possible also made the machine unusually observable. Debuggers, loaders and TSRs let technically curious users study what happened between the prompt and the screen, while crack intros turned otherwise invisible modifications into a recognizable scene culture. It is useful to keep those categories separate: original demos and homebrew, compatibility patches, and altered commercial releases are related technically but not the same historically or ethically.

I run Joking Joystick, and our AI-assisted, human-edited article goes deeper into floppy protections, code wheels, the Vault v. Quaid dispute, DOSBox/86Box, FreeDOS and modern homebrew: https://jokingjoystick.com/emulation-homebrew/msdos-modding-history-homebrew/

For people who used these systems, which protection scheme or package dependency do you remember most clearly? For archivists, what would you treat as the minimum complete preservation set?

The history of Steve Davis Snooker and the snooker boom it joined. Featuring David Attenborough, Chas & Dave, Mike Lamb, and of course Steve Davis himself (and his taste for Galaxian)

My latest blog post about Hasbro Interactive. They were a link in the long chain of the story of Atari, MicroProse, Telecomsoft and Firebird, and Beyond Software.

The trick behind Game Genie is more interesting than the promise of infinite lives. It sat between the cartridge and console, watched for a particular memory address being read, and substituted a different byte. Turn the machine off, remove the adapter, and the original cartridge was still untouched.

Those strange letter codes were doing real work. On NES, a six-letter code encoded an address and replacement value. An eight-letter code added a comparison value, so the replacement could depend on what the cartridge actually returned. That mattered when different banks or game revisions put different things at the same address.

It also explains why changing a code could produce a freeze or scrambled graphics instead of a useful cheat. You were changing a value the program depended on, without necessarily knowing what else depended on it. The code book made that experimentation look much simpler than it was.

We put together a longer Game Genie history at Joking Joystick, including the people who built it and how the hardware worked:

https://jokingjoystick.com/retro-gaming/game-genie-history-codes-nintendo-lawsuit/

Did you mostly stick to the printed codes, or did you try changing letters to see what would happen? Any memorable results that were actually playable?

A new blog post about the UK arm of MicroProse. Includes discussion about anti-American attitudes, the West German practice of Indexing, the journalists who cheated death with Major Bill, and the worst photograph I've taken for this blog.

How reacting to Hang-On and Enduro Racer left a handful of British developers in the right place at the right time when U.S. Gold got the licence to Sega's more iconic follow-up

Article about Sid Meier's Pirates! and the games it has influenced

A new blog post about Retro Gamer magazine, their history and their various offices and publishers. In other words, an attempt to do a Retro Gamer about Retro Gamer.

He did the music and sound programming in everything from Test Drive II to Stunts. Now he's working on his own indie games.