people aren't buying nintendo hardware just to play SMB

They're offering various emulated titles in their online subscription plan; so I guess even a clean source port like this *could* be used to make the claim that it leads to a loss of sales.

Having said that -- I just wanted to look up that 'subscription plan' to make sure -- which I thought would be a simple search on their website. Turns out the official Nintendo website is an overdesigned clickity-click-click hellhole not unlike the intentionally confusing web pages of mobile service providers. ... Now, call me crazy (?!?!), but there's an argument to be made about a POTENTIAL LOSS OF SALES for Super Mario World, because the actual content & the link for the godforsaken online membership plan is so well hidden.

-- hey Nintendo, time to cease and desist your own website.

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That logo brings back memories: https://youtu.be/yrjq6aNYVFk [External Link]

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Yeah the manual that came with the C64 was a ~200 page book, and you could also get a comprehensive 'programmer's manual' in addition to that (there's a pdf on the bombjack site I linked above).

... though the Turkish translation that I got with my C64 in 1992 was heavily abridged, and didn't have any of the chapters & appendices dedicated to BASIC, and the hardware addresses for the color & sound POKEs; but they did include the English original with the package. Not speaking any English at the time I poked around (no pun intended) the listings in the original manual and somehow managed to alter the DATA lines in one of the sample programs to play a different song, and the sprite map in the 'C= hot air balloon' program to show a different picture -- but with no understanding whatsoever as to how the rest of the BASIC code worked. To me it was a pretty frustrating experience.

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> They've either released or are preparing to release a modernized Commodore 64 for those retro-computer fans out there.

AFAIK the product the new Commodore is selling is a convenient packaging of the Ultimate II FPGA, with a newly produced 'breadbin' case & keyboard assembly. Enthusiasts were sourcing those parts separately, & building 'new' C64s themselves for a number of years now; this new initiative led by youtuber 'Periphractic' and the original designer of the Ultimate II FPGA makes it easier (& a bit cheaper, I think), so it's a very welcome development IMHO.

I've been eyeing developments in the 'retro'-revival hardware scene for a while now -- and while all of it is beyond the reach of a broke-ass bum like me, some exciting FPGA-powered projects are happening on the C64, Spectrum ZX, & Apple II fronts.

Also, with respect to 6502 assembly -- check out Jim Butterfield's book, available at: https://commodore.bombjack.org/commodore/books.htm#MACHINE_LANGUAGE_and_ASSEMBLY_LANGUAGE [External Link] (entitled: Machine Language on the Commodore 64, 128 and other Commodore Computers Revised and Expanded Edition); together with the 'Mapping the C64' book (just a layout of the C64 ROM, & how it's mapped onto the peripherals); & 'Compute's Programming the Commodore 64' -- all available on the page I linked.

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By the way, for some more pedantry in case anyone's interested in BASIC: What's being open sourced here is the 6502 assembly code for BASIC; not the grammar of the language itself; that has long been public (& MS's own extensions would've been easily reverse engineered as well).

-- BASIC interpreter in flex & bison: https://github.com/Dan-Jardim/BasicFlexBison.git [External Link]
-- as a PEG parser: https://git.sr.ht/~ach/minipeg/tree/HEAD/examples/basic.peg [External Link]
-- Antlr grammar for a BASIC that runs inside the JVM: https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/tree/master/basic [External Link]

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Another bit of trivia is that Bill Gates first tried his per machine licencing trick with BASIC on Jack Tramiel, founder & then CEO of Commodore; to which Tramiel famously replied 'I'm already married'.

A few years later the same trick worked on IBM with DOS, of course, which catapulted MS into desktop software dominance, and Gates himself into the most prestigeous of prestigeous lists of wonderfully prestigeous people.

MS paid a small company to plagiarize DOS out of Gary Kildall's CP/M, of course; and IBM got 'tricked' into the deal partly because Bill's mom was in the board of directors at IBM at the time.

Kildall always had a distaste for BASIC, by the way, and he thought a clunky procedural language like that did a disservice to programming education -- and not because he had a rival 'product' he was frustrated he couldn't sell instead. Kildall thought LOGO would've been a better educational language.

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While the sheer length of the words looks scary at first, it quickly becomes apparent that they're concatenations of nouns, or compounds of nouns + adjectives -- so it's all relatively easy to parse if you're at all familiar with the smaller words in that long train.

Agglutinative languages, on the other hand, present word-length horrors of a different kind altogether; some examples from my native Turkish:

- ayrı (separate)
- ayrıntı (detail)
- ayrıntılandırmak (to go into more detail)
- ayrıntılandırabilmek (to be able to go into more detail)
- ayrıntılandırılabilirlik (the capacity to get treated in more detail)
- ayrıntılandıramayacaklarmış ('They say that they will not be able to go into more detail.')
- ayrıntılandıramayacağımızdan emin misin? ('Are you sure we won't be able to go into more detail?')
- ayrıştırabilecekmişçesine (as if able to separate [for a concrete object] / make the distinction [for concepts])

I'm vaguely aware that Hungarian and Finnish also have these lengthy blocks that function like whole sentences.

'O Linux CDlerini masraf edilmemişçesine bedava dağıtabileceklerinden şüpheliyim.'
'I doubt that they'll be able to distribute those Linux CDs gratis, as if no costs have been incurred'

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> I didn't expect a total German name for a game.

Yes, the classic Spielnamenserwartungsverletzung.

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Looks impressive.

Clive Barker's Night Breed also looked impressive on the Amiga; though the gameplay, ... well ...

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Happy birthday!

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