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I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System Platform PDF

426 Pages·2015·21.69 MB·English
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I AM ERROR Platform Studies Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, editors Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, 2009 Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform, Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal, 2012 The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, Jimmy Maher, 2012 Flash: Building the Interactive Web, Anastasia Salter and John Murray, 2014 I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System Platform, Nathan Altice, 2015 I AM ERROR The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System Platform Nathan Altice The MIT Press C ambridge, Massachusetts L ondon, England © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected]. This book was set in Filosofi a by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Altice, Nathan. I am error : the Nintendo family computer/entertainment system platform / Nathan Altice. pages cm.—(Platform studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02877-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Nintendo video games. 2. Video games—Design. 3. Nintendo of America Inc. I. Title. GV1469.32.A55 2015 2014034284 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Amanda, as always Contents Series Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi 0 I AM ERROR 1 1 Family Computer 11 2 Ports 53 3 Entertainment System 81 4 Platforming 117 5 Quick Disk 163 6 E xpansions 197 7 2 A03 249 8 T ool-Assisted 289 Afterword: Famicom Remix 325 Appendix A: Famicom/NES Bibliographic Descriptions 333 Appendix B: Glossary 343 Notes 353 Sources 391 Index 419 Series Foreword H ow can someone create a breakthrough game for a mobile phone or a compelling work of art for an immersive 3D environment without under- standing that the mobile phone and the 3D environment are different sorts of computing platforms? The best artists, writers, programmers, and designers are well aware of how certain platforms facilitate certain types of computational expression and innovation. Likewise, computer science and engineering has long considered how underlying computing systems can be analyzed and improved. As important as scientific and engineering approaches are, and as significant as work by creative artists has been, there is also much to be learned from the sustained, intensive, humanistic study of digital media. We believe it is time for humanists to seriously consider to the lowest level of computing systems, to understand their relationship to culture and creativity. The Platform Studies book series has been established to promote the investigation of underlying computing systems and how they enable, con- strain, shape and support the creative work that is done on them. The series investigates the foundations of digital media— t he computing systems, both hardware and software, that developers and users depend upon for artistic, literary, and gaming development. Books in the series will certainly vary in their approaches, but they will all also share certain features: • A focus on a single platform or a closely related family of platforms. • Technical rigor and in-depth investigation of how computing technolo- gies work. • An awareness of and discussion of how computing platforms exist in a context of culture and society, being developed based on cultural concepts and then contributing to culture in a variety of ways — for instance, by affecting how people perceive computing. [x] Acknowledgments A book is a labor that leads to many thanks: B efore all others, I want to thank my wife Amanda for keeping me healthy, happy, and motivated during two years of writing and research. None of this was possible without her. I also owe my parents a special debt for buying my first NES. They are responsible for all of this. I want to thank my colleague and friend, David Golumbia, for his support, guidance, and enthusiasm, along with the remainder of my dis- sertation committee — Joshua Eckhardt, Ryan Patton, and Bob Paris — for their thoughtful revisions. Equal thanks go to MIT Press’ s Douglas Sery and manuscript editor Ariel Baker-Gibbs, and the Platform Studies series editors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, whose combined knowledge and patience helped bring this project to bear. I wish to thank Neal Wyatt for her camaraderie, conversation, and coffee breaks throughout the writing process, Aria Tanner for her excel- lent (and affordable) Japanese translations, Vera Brown for her friendship (and Dendy), Nate Ayers for his photo editing talents, Matt Schneider for his long-distance reading, Scott Benson for his Game & Watch, Justin Spears for his loaner NES, Nick Wurz for his capture card, and Steven Jones and George Thiruvathukal for first planting the seed for this project. This book would not exist without the decades of technical research shared among the members of the NESDev community. There are members there who understand the NES far better than I, and likely better than Nintendo ’ s own engineers and programmers. Theirs is a work of dedication and intellectual inquiry, and I thank every member who, know- ingly or not, contributed to this book’ s completion. I also owe thanks to the members of Nintendo Age, who together comprise a friendly and knowledgeable community. Their forums provide one of the best references for the beginning NES programmer and one of the biggest temptations for expanding my NES collection. A nd finally, I want to thank Zac Price, a great friend and a superior Mega Man 2 player— n ot superior to me, but to most. [xii]

Description:
In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it was actually a clumsy Japanese-English translation of "My Name is Error," a benign programme
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