First Stealth Video Game: Lost & Found. Manbiki Shounen / Shoplifting Boy for Commodore PET, 1979

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Way back in 1979 in Japan, Hiroshi Suzuki programmed a game for the Commodore PET that many consider the first-ever Stealth game: Manbiki Shounen aka Shoplifting Boy. Predating Castle Wolfenstein, it's a game in which a young shoplifter attempts to clear a supermarket of all items on the shelves without being caught. While this game has been ported to other platforms and those versions survive, the original PET game was considered lost! But now it's been found. Today we'll play this "lost" game on the Tynemouth MiniPET 40/80 produced by The Future Was 8-Bit, as well as on a mostly-working vintage PET 2001-N from 1979. I also explain the alternate control schemes and optimized version I created, while trying to preserve the legacy of this game. Finally, the game is now available as a .d64 download to play on your PET or emulator. Also, thanks to Rudy's Retro Intel for his PET Companion which assisted in the audio and video capture. Check the many links for more information.
Download the game: 8bitshowandtell.com/downloads...
Play the game online: masswerk.at/pet/?run=manbiki....
Tynemouth Software Blog: blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2...
MiniPET 40/80 available again, SD2PET SD Card Disk at The Future Was 8-Bit:
www.tfw8b.com/product/minipet...
www.tfw8b.com/product/sd2pet-...
Rudy's Retro Intel: / @rudysretrointel
PET Companion purchase / inquiries: retrointeldiy@gmail.com
"The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers: Volume 1": www.hardcoregaming101.net/book...
Stealth Docs / First Stealth Game: • The 'First' Stealth Ga...
Jim Gerrie MC-10: jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2019/04...
RAM Magazine / Manbiki Shonen scan: www.junirose.com/manbiki/
2022 Manbiki Syonen footage (bad scaling?): • Video
Interview with Hiroshi Suzuki: readonlymemory.vg/ascii-corpo...
Thanks again to Ryan Devan for the great info that started all this!!
To support 8-Bit Show And Tell:
Become a patron: / 8bitshowandtell
One-time donation: paypal.me/8BitShowAndTell
2nd channel: / @8-bitshowandtell247
Original title for video: Found: "Lost" 1979 Stealth Game: Manbiki Shounen / Shoplifting Boy - Commodore PET (Japan)
Index:
0:00 The first Stealth game - lost?
4:25 Manbiki Shounen - found in RAM Magazine!
8:25 Tynemouth Mini PET 40/80, SD2PET, Commodore PET Companion
9:46 RUNning Manbiki Syonen - Menu, Title, Intro, controls
12:10 Playing the original game
14:27 Why 6 versions - the menu
17:45 The optimized version - Shoplifting Boy
21:48 One problem I learned
23:15 Flowchart / High-level code walkthrough
31:25 History of game: Hiroshi Suzuki
36:05 Manbiki Shonen on vintage PET 2001-N
40:50 Thanks

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Опубликовано:

3 авг 2024

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Комментарии : 140

@Sketcz 5 месяцев назад

Thanks for mentioning my books. I appreciate it. :) Thanks for all this work. This is fantastic. Very, very cool. I've passed it on to a colleague of Suzuki-san, to pass on to him. I'm sure he'll be very pleased to see people still interested in his original game. --- EDIT: As an aside, when I first discovered this, after interviewing Suzuki-san, as you can imagine in 2013 there was almost zero information, even in Japanese, and finding screenshots almost impossible. I had to rely on a scan from a magazine. So to see now, 10 years later, the game preserved as a piece of history for anyone to play, it's fantastic. Thank you. I don't have my interview to hand, but as I recall, the 1979 version was shown at a fair? It was part of this deal they had with Taito. They were paid to come up with these computer games. They would create games and show them to Taito. Except Taito didn't publish them - though in the case of this specific game, Taito copied the idea for its Lupin arcade game, which Suzuki was not happy about, since there had been talk of royalties, which ultimately did not materialise. (The entire reasoning behind the deal is a mystery lost to time.) Now, finally, this lost artefact can be viewed easily in its original and optimised context. Kudos to you, good sir, and your efforts.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

And thank you for all your work interviewing and writing, and helping preserve this important history! I'm especially interested when it intersects with Commodore history, as a US company trying to break into the Japanese market with at least a bit of success for the first few years.

@jandjrandr 5 месяцев назад

Thank you both for caring to preserve some software from early micro computing history.

@The8BitGuy 5 месяцев назад

That's an impressive PET game for 1979. Even more impressive that it is written in BASIC and still runs fast enough to be playable.

@RetroJack 5 месяцев назад

Nice to see you here! :)

@Yordleton Месяц назад

Hey Dave! Do you still terrorize the parents of school shooting survivors by bringing your rifle to the grocery store and filming it, like you used to do?

@talideon 5 месяцев назад

The animations have so much character! It's impressive that the original dev got so much out of plain PETSCII.

@ryandevan2793 5 месяцев назад

I agree, I find the animation very funny and amusing!

@MikoKisai 5 месяцев назад

Regarding the transliteration: There are two common systems in use when transliteration Japanese to Latin characters: Hepburn and Nihon-shiki. In *very approximate* terms, Japanese syllables boil down to an optional initial consonant (none, K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W), followed by a vowel (A, I, U, E or O). This allows you to make a table of all the valid combinations of consonants and vowels. There are, however, a few exceptions in how these are actually pronounced. In Nihon-shiki, the romanization follows this logical table: し is S + I, so it's transliterated as "si". But Hepburn approximates the actual pronunciation closer, and this character is one of those exceptions: it's pronounced "shi", so Hepburn uses that. But there is an added twist here: you can modify the I characters by suffixing a smaller version of a character from the Y line. The title is an example of that: in pure kana, it's "まんびきしょねん"; ma-n-bi-ki-shi-(yo)-ne-n, where the yo is one of those smaller characters that modify the "shi". When that happens, you replace the vowel with the vowel from the Y character, so しょis pronounced "sho", and Hepburn will romanize it as such. Nihon-shiki, however, writes it as "syo", replacing the I with the Y character transliteration. English speakers tend to use Hepburn when romanizing, but Japan itself generally goes with Nihon-shiki (or Kunrei-shiki, which is very closely related, and shares this particular difference anyway). It's generally not a big issue; for the most part the romanizations do align with each other, so once you've learned one, it's easy to learn the other as well.

@MxArgent 5 месяцев назад

Oh yeah, Nihon-Shiki conventions are also, for instance, Yoshi's name is romanized as "Yossy" at times in Japanese market media.

@dave4shmups 5 месяцев назад

That’s cool! The late Satoru Iwata, who worked for Nintendo, actually programmed his very first game on a Commodore PET.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Yes, at least, his first surviving game was on the PET. His first games were written on his HP-67 calculator apparently, but they're very much lost.

@dave4shmups 5 месяцев назад

@@8_Bit I didn’t know that.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

I'm hoping to make a video about Satoru Iwata's early game development days sometime soon-ish. Many sources say he had an HP-65 so I actually bought one (they're not cheap!) and just this past week I found out it was actually the slightly newer HP-67 he had!! Figures.

@VintageGearFreak 5 месяцев назад

The shop attendant mr K has quite the flamboyant walk

@Mordecrox 5 месяцев назад

Walking like that "Going to store" guy

@dave24-73 5 месяцев назад

The way this was presented and the fact you could type it in, would have certainly helped people to learn programming.

@MrThomashorst 5 месяцев назад

Oh yeah ... Commodore cursor keys ... I still have that shift-goes-opposite-direction-feeling stored in the muscle memory of my right hand index finger😂

@JSRFFD2 5 месяцев назад

What an amazing piece of preservation! Thanks for your hard work! The PET was the first computer I ever pressed a key upon, probably when I was 6 or 7 years old. I still remember the community college summer program where I saw it. I was hooked right away.

@Novastar.SaberCombat 5 месяцев назад

Pretty interesting blast from the past. Definitely shows how an intelligent individual can work wonders even when they're severely limited.

@DarkMoe 5 месяцев назад

what a wonderful story and piece of software, I find these ancient games and hardware analyzed through modern technology so nostalgic. Never heard of this game before, but quite cool of a concept, specially predating almost every game ever, 1979 is before Pacman, Donkey Kong. It's crazy

@karlramberg 5 месяцев назад

Song at the end was great. One of the best yet

@choppergirl 5 месяцев назад

A lot of these games weren't so much lost, but rather, just didn't have a way to get distributed and travel beyond your own machines. There were no BBS's, modems were uncommon, and the internet was pretty small only connecting universities mostly. Maybe you made a few copies on tapes (and then floppies) for your friends... I did this for my C-64 programs. I wrote a massive text adventure game for the TRS80 Model III that I guess you could say was the first and only text adventure game of someone's real life house and farm. And unlike Alexa, my text parser understood conjunctions, like AND, OR, NOT... When I finally did have a way to upload my hand written games to BBS's, I'd get random phone calls at very random times from people who opened up an about box and saw my contact info. I remember two in particular... one about a Trivia Hangman Game I had written for the Mac, and one about a copy I did of Milton Bradley's Merlin in Hypercard.

@GergoErdi 5 месяцев назад

"Stealth game too good at hiding" could be the headline for the first section of the video... I also like how at 19:05 you're already anticipating speedrun categories.

@RudysRetroIntel 5 месяцев назад

What a find!! It's completely amazing and love the changes you made. Thanks for sharing and the shout-out

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Thanks again for your help, and for making the PET Companion, it was very handy while making this video.

@lazarian4428 5 месяцев назад

This is awesome! It's great that someone archived those old magazines.

@twobob 3 месяца назад

closing music was genius. Shades of Crash Test Dummies.

@necronom 5 месяцев назад

I'm playing it on my 4032 :-) Thanks for the link to the disk file you did.

@ethandicks3 5 месяцев назад

The POKEs mentioned in the magazine article to save are absolutely necessary when saving to tape. It's a long-known problem that if you are doing CB2 sound and you leave the VIA registers in the state used for playing sounds, it prevents the tape routines from working. I haven't checked line-by-line, but if this program doesn't restore the original shape of the VIA registers, you have to use those POKEs. There is no issue with the CB2 sound interfering with IEEE-488 disk drive operations AFAIK.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Ah, if someone were to run the program before saving! I have learned the hard way to never do that :)

@markusjacobi-piepenbrink9795 5 месяцев назад

This is so funny! The old games really had charm!

@aresaurelian 5 месяцев назад

Brings back memories. These first games were innovative. Thank you.

@AxelWerner 5 месяцев назад

I am fascinated by the effort someone put into the PETsci graphics and animations!!

@GeoffSeeley 5 месяцев назад

Amazing that is written in BASIC. I remember being blown away by the Space Invaders game on the PET and hoping to look at the code only to find it was written in assembler which I hadn't (yet) learned.

@MrMegaManFan 5 месяцев назад

Thank you for helping to preserve this bit of gaming history by sharing it with the rest of us!

@HalfBlindGamer 5 месяцев назад

Really cool to learn about the game. Thank your for the clear explanations and your amazing work in optimizing the code. It's always a good day when old media gets rediscovered!

@PeterVC 5 месяцев назад

The "Syo" is indeed supposed to be "Sho", it's a different way of transliteration system. "Sho" is easier though for English speakers to pronounce correctly just by seeing it (as in "show"). You occasionally see also "tu" in the game, but that is supposed to be pronounced "tsu". I could talk an hour about this, haha ;p Might be able to translate some of it :)

@adriansdigitalbasement 5 месяцев назад

Wow! This is amazing! Can you make a C64 port and add some colour and SID beeps and boops? Not done watching so I’m sorry if you already talk about a C64 port.

@GazzJ82 5 месяцев назад

I have just finished doing a ZX Spectrum port

@Geenimetsuri 5 месяцев назад

Man, I really like the animations! Very well designed for typed in Basic!

@RandomBitzzz 5 месяцев назад

Wow Robin, this is great stuff (as always).

@klocugh12 5 месяцев назад

Thank you for the work put into software preservation.

@collectivesartori 5 месяцев назад

Very cool and great improvements!

@jamesdelancey9752 5 месяцев назад

Definitely worth documenting this game, improving it and contributing so much to preservation.

@noahw9549 5 месяцев назад

Love this video and your channel! Really appreciate all that you share.

@paulkoopmans4620 5 месяцев назад

what a fantastic episode again!

@lowlevelretro 5 месяцев назад

What a great game! =D Thank you

@sdesros 5 месяцев назад

This is so cool. As a VIC-20 kid, the PET was something that I kind of missed (still need to finish assembling all of the mini-pet parts.). But now I want to see if I can do a VIC-20 port. 🤔Just trying to figure out the best approach to make it fit within the vic-20 limited display resolution. Thinking of a "Zoomed out" view while in the game and a "Zoomed in" view during the animated sections (including when you're caught). I also want to see how far I can get on unexpanded. Thanks to your videos, I was encouraged to make my first assembly VIC-20 project. As a kid, I never understood assembly. But after multiple years working in high-level languages it was fun to go back to basics and bang the hardware. :)

@sdesros 9 часов назад

Just following up that that my vic-20 port is now on Github in the vic-manbiki-shonen repo.

@vidarlystadjohansen9829 5 месяцев назад

great video and cool game

@GoWithAndy-cp8tz 5 месяцев назад

what a game XD !!! Cheers!

@Lion_McLionhead 5 месяцев назад

Stealth mode & god mode were the only things that made Quake II addictive. Just racing through all 12 hours of obstacles without having to fight enemies or get past the enemies without being mortal was an exciting challenge on its own.

@robinbrowne5419 4 месяца назад

It's possible that the King's Quest games were among the first stealth games. You had to avoid getting caught by the witch, the wizard (Manannan), the troll, the wolf and a number of other bad guys. Although King's Quest was not really of the stealth game genre, you had to do a fair amount of sneaking around.

@dleigh112 5 месяцев назад

Mud1, created in 1978 may have a prior claim. You could attack other players while invisible.

@alfonsedente9679 5 месяцев назад

Fun Fact: Even in ascii one can tell, the Nord is enforcing the law, and the Redguard is looting.

@Jimbaloidatron 5 месяцев назад

Candidate for 'first game where you play as the villain' too? :-)

@thepenultimateninja5797 5 месяцев назад

An early game with a stealth element is Saboteur! for the ZX Spectrum, published in 1985. Stealth isn't a theme of the game per se, but it is possible to sneak up on guards and kill them without a fight. It works in much the same way as in Prince of Persia - running will cause a guard to turn around in the direction of your footsteps, but walking does not. Interestingly, Saboteur! does not even have a 'walk' feature, but you can simulate it by quickly tapping then releasing the direction controls so the character takes one step at a time.

@Skawo 5 месяцев назад

Pretty neat!

@MichaelDoornbos 5 месяцев назад

I happen to have a PET 2001-8N. Not very often you find a game designed for/on that particular model. Cool find.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

I think the 8K 2001 was briefly "the standard" for PET games especially in Japan where the later models didn't seem to catch on, after an initially good launch.

@MichaelDoornbos 5 месяцев назад

@@8_Bit , then I chose wisely. OR it was the one I could get my hands on in need of A LOT of repairs. One of those. Took me weeks to get it running, but it's great now.

@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266 5 месяцев назад

It's funny you should mention the Space Invaders soundtrack. My friend borrowed his older brother's boombox. A Pet 4016 I bought has an Archer speaker phone inside connected to the port for sound.

@JGreen-le8xx 5 месяцев назад

Pac-Man is "kinda" a stealth game. You're trying to clear the maze of dots without being seen and chased.

@CptJistuce 5 месяцев назад

What if the maze is a store and Pac-Man's actually shoplifting?!

@frioglobal 5 месяцев назад

Great video, thank you for going the extra mile and discussing the flowchart, it was really fun 🙂 By the way, what did you use to get the magazine pages translated and displayed on your iPad (or other tablet)?

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Thanks, I just used Google Translate which now supports images (and sort-of pdfs, but it worked better when I converted each page into an image).

@frioglobal 5 месяцев назад

@@8_Bit Thanks! For a long time all I could do to achieve the same has been to use Google Lens on my phone, not the most convenient way to read a full-page article...

@fnjesusfreak 5 месяцев назад

I happen to speak Japanese (not fluently though), and I can explain the "syo" vs. "sho" thing - it's two different styles of romanization. The "Hepburn" romanization is based on English pronunciation, so it's fairly obvious to an English speaker how to say something, and so 少年 would be written "shōnen" or "shounen". A simplification of this is the most common system used outside of Japan. But "Nihonshiki" or "Japan-style" romanization is more normalized according to Japanese use, so you don't have as many exceptions - but as a result it's not as phonetically accurate, and you get "syônen" or "syoonen" instead. You'll often see Nihonshiki romanization used in Japan proper, as it's the official standard there.

@johnps1670 5 месяцев назад

Nice game for a type in.

@JustWasted3HoursHere 5 месяцев назад

I don't read or understand Japanese, but if you use Google Translate in camera mode it pretty accurately (it seems) shows what those characters say on the cover of RAM magazine. [edit: Sorry, I wrote this comment before the video was finished. Seems Robin has the same idea!]

@j0eCommodore 5 месяцев назад

The way many do Commodore program loaders is to position the LOAD"[file]",8 and RUN commands on the screen load the keyboard buffer with a few 13s (return) and exit the program so the cursor lands on the LOAD line... that gets around the thing with end of BASIC not resetting when loading in program.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

I'm familiar with that technique on VIC-20 and C-64 but had trouble implementing it on PET and just went with whatever method I could get working.

@fllthdcrb 5 месяцев назад

"Shounen" and "syōnen" are just two different ways to romanize "しょうねん", which is pronounced like you pronounced "shounen". The second romanization is in Nihon Shiki, which is Japan's official system, in which they seem to prefer consistency over what makes sense to Westerners. In this case, し = "shi", ょ = small "yo". Small kana are used to modify the regular ones, so when you put these two together, you get "sho", but for them, spelling it as "syo" makes more sense, because all of the other combinations with "yo" are like that. Also, "ou" is just a long "o", for historical reasons, and Nihon Shiki writes it as "ō", which actually does make more sense to us. But obviously that computer has no such character, so the programmer used just a plain "o".

@properjob2311 5 месяцев назад

nice little game

@insertaverygenericnamehere 5 месяцев назад

10:33 万引き少年 (manbiki shōnen) means "Shoplifting-Juvenile" or "Shoplifting-Boy" (="young shoplifter") う！ない！(u! nai!) means something along the lines of "Ugh! There is nothing!" or "Oh, no!!" 監視員 (かんしいん) (kanshiin) means "guard" つかまえろ (tsukamaero) means "catch me" 文部科学省奨学金 (monbukagakushō shōgakukin), formerly also "Monbusho Scholarship" is an academic scholarship offered by the Japanese Ministry of Education that supports foreign students 空いててよかった！(Sui tete yokatta!) means "Good thing it's open!" いけ! (ike!) means "Let's go!" こい！(koi!) means "come!" まて! (mate(ee)) means "wa(aa)it!" ばかめ！(baka me!) means "(you) idiot!" うまい！(umai!) means "good" or "excellent" or even "tasty" いい気分 (Ī kibun) means "good feeling" or "feeling good" (from the Slogan 7-ELEVEN いい気分)

@insertaverygenericnamehere 5 месяцев назад

SUPER-STORE means a marketplace that is super, just like a "super market" POLICE means law enforcement, just like "the police" (not the band!) @!# means "Oh, my good lord, what has happened to me? Why do I have to suffer this fate? It all sucks here on this earth!"

@KasumiKenshirou 5 месяцев назад

@@insertaverygenericnamehere FYI, random symbols used in place of swear words are called "grawlix".

@DontEatTheSquid 5 месяцев назад

Superb video, containing so much backstory and detailed information. Question: I assume the link to the game in your description is to your optimized version; is there a copy of the original version available for download somewhere too? Many thanks.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

The unmodified original program is option #1 in the menu. I wanted to give it priority on the disk, top honours.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Its file name is MANBIKI SYONEN.

@DontEatTheSquid 5 месяцев назад

@@8_BitOh, the file contains both versions. Thanks, I think you mentioned that in the video. Appreciate your efforts.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Yes, there's actually 6 versions on the disk, where the first 3 are the original (with two alternate control schemes to make it more emulator-friendly), and then 3 more versions with the same controls but with faster/optimized gameplay. I explain this at 14:27 chapter name "Why 6 versions - the menu"

@CobraTheSpacePirate 5 месяцев назад

Yeah, you pretty much said it correctly the first time. "Mambiki Show-Nen"

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Thanks, it was mostly the "syonen" spelling that was confusing me, as it looked like it would be pronounced differently as well but apparently not; even the "syo" should be pronounced "show", it's just an alternate way of spelling it in another transliteration system.

@CobraTheSpacePirate 5 месяцев назад

if it rally interests you, way back when there was two different romanization systems created, hepburn and some other... anyway I probably grew up less than 250 miles from you in central Michigan. My great Grandpa was born in the then territorries of today Canada. I really love and relate to every one of your videos, the ones with your old time buddies as well as the ones with your kids.

@WielkieG1 5 месяцев назад

"Szczepaniak" is a "simple" Polish surname, while your pronunciation was far from perfect it was a really good effort, 7/10 BTW, I reminded myself of a Black Box V8 cartridge that had a Polish version of a voice synthesizer (based on an English one, I would have to turn my C64 again to tell more about it) that was very hard to understand but did a pretty good job back at the time. And was also really funny, I like software trying but failing

@vytah 5 месяцев назад

It was SAM with text-to-phoneme module replaced with the Polish one. So it pronounced Polish using English phonemes, giving it an extra layer of strong accent.

@DavidYoud 5 месяцев назад

@8:25 When you showed the Mini PET, I was thinking "uh oh, is he going to type in the listing on that?!?" :D @22:00, Wait, the first program has to be longer than all subsequent programs?? Got more details on that? Also, what happens if the time runs out and you didn't finish shoplifting?

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

I really did consider typing the listing in on camera... See "Programming the PET/CBM" by Raeto West, page 90: "Loading from BASIC: This is perfectly successful provided that: (i) The newly loaded program is not longer than the older one...". I think the main reason is that variables are stored immediately after the program, so if you LOAD from in a program with a longer program, it overwrites those variables. I was under the impression that Commodore BASIC handled this okay with the caveat that effectively variables would be CLR'd. However, I had crashes and/or corruption happening on the PET. So maybe this is something that was better-handled in later versions of C= BASIC. If the time runs out, then somehow you're suddenly running away from the store (or is it the police station??) and get caught, just like if you were caught in-store but without the warden-down-the-aisle animation.

@smugshrug 5 месяцев назад

UMAI = delicious!

@katho8472 5 месяцев назад

That outro song is just plain awesome! Can you please release this somehow? :) I take it this is all a family production?

@rafaelgadret 5 месяцев назад

Thanks for the great video! What software was used to make the translations while maintaining the magazine's layout?

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Google Translate, which allows images to be uploaded and translated now.

@Thiesi 5 месяцев назад

I was following your explanation of the code along, but somehow I missed where it checks whether you have the shotgun equipped. Also, how were the microtransactions required to rent more backpack slots so that you can empty the entire store in one go implemented?

@JCCyC 5 месяцев назад

There's a Smiths joke somewhere in there.

@Curt_Sampson 5 месяцев назад

Stop. I think I've heard that one before.

@LordmonkeyTRM 5 месяцев назад

Definitely the first heist game... Maybe

@james_lockman 5 месяцев назад

Let’s not forget “Sneak King,” an XBOX game from Burger King where the purpose was to sneak up on people and give them Whoppers, shakes and fries.

@TheHighlander71 5 месяцев назад

Hey hey not a single Sniper Elite game! I have many hours in those and I recommended them as a stealth game.

@terryraymond7984 5 месяцев назад

could this be ported to the Vic20?

@romaneberle 4 месяца назад

2:55 sometimes you sound very much like Christopher Walken. lol. 🙂

@ViegasSilva 5 месяцев назад

Choplifter>Shoplifter

@markjreed 5 месяцев назад

FWIW, the Y in "syonen" is a consonant, not a vowel, so it sounds like "s" + "yonen", which when run together is not all that different from "shonen". The two spellings are just different ways of transliterating the same sound, whose Japanese version is somewhere between English "sh" and "s+y".

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Thanks, I actually tried for a while to find an explanation of "syonen" and there was very little available online. Now I know the "y" is really just like an "h" when dealing with transliterated Japanese.

@markjreed 5 месяцев назад

The main takeaway is that in Japanese transliteration, Y is always a consonant, as in "you" or "yet", and never a vowel as it is in "byte" or "yttrium". So the name Ryu isn't rye-oo, but instead sounds like the word "you" with an R stuck on the front. Hard for English speakers, natural for Japanese ones. I find it helps to imagine a little apostrophe in front of the Y, so it's r'yu. Or s'yonen. When the consonantal Y sound comes after another consonant, the two sounds tend to merge over time into a single combined sound. This happened in many English dialects with the word "Tuesday", which went from "t'yoozday" to "chewsday" (though for me it's just "toozday", which I guess marks mine as a lower-class dialect). In Japanese that happened with the s'y sequence, and the result is very close to our "sh" sound. So some transliterators write it that way. But that doesn't help when Y comes after something other than S, and thinking of it as an H will only lead you further astray. So just remember that Japanese Y is always "yuh", never "aye" or "ee" or "ih". :)

@Curt_Sampson 5 месяцев назад

@@8_Bit No, the "y" isn't like an "h": it's there for a different reason. The five syllables starting with "s" are さしすせそ, "sa shi su se so." You'll notice that only the second one, "shi," uses an "sh" sound rather than a "hard s." "Shi" alone can be modified with a yō-on, a small "ya, yu or yo" ("ゃゅょ") after it to produce a somewhat different syllable, giving you "しゃ、しゅ、しょ" ("sha, shu, sho"). The "h" is there because し is pronounced "shi." When yō-on are used with other characters, you don't get the "h" sound, such as み ("mi") to みゃ、みゅ、みょ ("mya, myu, myo").

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

@@Curt_Sampson Okay, can you explain specifically the difference between "syonen" and "shonen" and "shounen" and how to pronounce each. I've seen all three in the context of this game.

@markjreed 5 месяцев назад

They're all pronounced the same: show-nen. The spelling "sy" is systematically derived from the Japanese writing system, while the one with "sh" is more phonetic, but they're representing the same sound. As for the "ou", that's an old convention for representing a "long" o, which in modern typography is more often written ō. (In Japanese, unlike the way the term "long" is often used in English, long vowels are literally just the same vowel sound held for a longer amount of time. In fact, if you were singing in Japanese, the word "shōnen" would usually be three beats rather than two.)

@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266 5 месяцев назад

That mistranslation is hilarious it's almost as bad as that one all your bases are belong to us

@belstar1128 5 месяцев назад

seems like the pet and vc 20 were popular in japan but commodore stopped being successful in japan quickly while the c64 was popular in many countries it was not very popular in japan. i think its because it doesn't support Japanese characters .they tolerated it in the early days when having any computer was a luxury and Japanese characters are harder to render anyway. and japan made their own systems that were very good unlike most countries that either didn't have the wealth or manpower or did but were not as advanced as America or japan or the uk. like in france they had a few systems but they fell behind quickly and started using the same stuff the rest of the world was using quickly. all the east block countries did it because it was the only option and gave up when it was no longer necessary but japan still had their own systems until the 90s i heard they had to stop Japanese companies from making their own systems instead of just making pc compatibles. because it was becoming a problem with the rise of the internet and having to port everything to those systems.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Yes, I think the MSX came along at just the right time for Japan. I think the Japanese C64 did support Japanese characters but it had compatibility problems with other C64 software. I'm not even sure the VIC-20 (or VIC-1001, which was the Japanese model) did very well in Japan.

@Curt_Sampson 5 месяцев назад

@@8_Bit Yes, there was a Japanese C64 that replaced many of the graphics symbols with katakana on both the keyboard and in the character ROM. It's pretty rare now (more rare than U.S. C64s here in Japan!) so I'm guessing it didn't sell well. I'm not clear on the compatibility issues, but I'm guessing that it goes both ways, and the later VIC-20 was equally incompatible with the original VIC-1001 (designed and first sold here in Japan).

@Curt_Sampson 5 месяцев назад

There was no need to "tolerate" western computers in Japan from about 1980 onwards; by that point there were several Japanese manufacturers of excellent and relatively cheap computers, often offering more memory and better graphics than western computers. (Part of the reason for better graphics was to be able to render kanji on the screen; 640x200 8-colour RGB was by 1982 the standard for home computers not focused only on gaming, and by 1984 640x400 was becoming standard.) But yes, it was only in the early '90s that Japan finally started switching in a big way from locally developed systems (mainly PC-9801) to PC-compatible systems. It was the introduction of VGA, followed by DOS/V (adding kanji display to DOS--see the Wikipedia entry on that for more) that made the switch possible.

@Pandamad 5 месяцев назад

A lot of sloppy unnecessary code. Just looking at the movement routine for example. Looking at lines 4005 and 4010 it appears there is a slightly higher chance of switching to the left, since it could switch right then immediately left. The movement could have been better coded using Q=1 for movement in the right direction and Q=-1 for a moment in the left direction A change of direction could be simply coded as if RND(1) < 0.0286 THEN Q=Q-1 And subsequently A=A+Q could have been used. Small improvements like this could speed up the game.

@csbruce 5 месяцев назад

21:50 You should be able to do the keyboard-buffer-POKE thing like a lot of VIC-20 and C64 programs do to load the next part of a program as if the user had entered LOAD and RUN manually.

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

I did think of that briefly but when I got this working it was a "good enough" moment. It's funny how many things we do on the VIC-20 and C-64 actually don't work, or don't work easily, on the PET despite the huge similarities. Even loading my credits program on the PET involved messing around with a hex editor due to the PET not doing relocatable loads. My C64 credits program loaded at $0801 on the PET instead of at the $0401 it needed to be at.

@terryraymond7984 5 месяцев назад

thats okay Im not up on my Japanese either. 🙂

@spambotfodder 5 месяцев назад

the orgirinal thief dark project IS THE BEST STEALTH GAME EVER RELAESED. the 2014 version you had in your intro is HORRIBLE.

@botoxedballsack7391 5 месяцев назад

NOT FIRST!!!

@CptJistuce 5 месяцев назад

NOT SECOND!!

@rotordave81 5 месяцев назад

This game wouldn't translate well for Americans these days. All the items would be chained down.

@Mrshoujo 5 месяцев назад

万引き少年- Shounen is pronounced Show Nen which means "boy" or "young boy." For some reason, some Japanese people use the 'y' in romanizing Sho - like an upside-down H. It's still pronounced 'sho' and in this case, it's a long O, held for an extra syllable. Shounen. Momotaro - Mo Mo Tah Roe Composite - com POZ zit Koi - "Come!" Matee - mah teh! "Wait!" or "Hold it!" Bakame - bah kah meh "Dumbass" Yoku yatta - "You did well"

@8_Bit 5 месяцев назад

Okay, thanks. I think I was pronouncing "Shonen" or "Shounen" correctly when that's what the text said, but the "Syonen" was confusing me. So now I know the "y" is just like an "h" . Thanks for the info.

@KasumiKenshirou 5 месяцев назад

@@8_BitAnd Momotaro is the titular character of a Japanese fairy tale. You should be able to look this one up easily in a search engine so no need for me to summarize the story.