As a kid I went through the wall, no one believed me, and I didn't know how to reproduce it. Two years ago I finally figured out how to trigger the glitch on purpose. Ninja is still one of my favorite C64 games. Your explanations are amazing. Thank you so much!

other youtube videos i classify as "talking head", this channel is the only one i classify as "talking hand"

My brother found the glitch by accident one time when we were kids. Now I finally know how it happened.

Ninja is the best "budget" title I ever bought.

This reminds me of a KZfaq channel called "Boundary Break" which uses hacks that allow the guy to explore outside the normal boundaries of a game into areas we were never meant to see. Like you, by doing this it reveals various methods the developer uses in game design and it's quite fascinating, especially with larger 3D games. But this is also interesting the way you done it with an older 2D game.

I love how the Il Ninja is constantly taking his shirt on an off.

I wish the guys who originally made the game had put as much effort into it as you did investigating this glitch. Great video, thanks.

Viewer: I just watched your video. I know coding and Kung Fu. Robin(Morpheus): Show me!

Regarding the Atari 8-bit / C64 versions being on the same side - I copied off the Atari version once. Here's how it works: The first track and the last 20 tracks of the disk are Atari formatted so the game can be booted. You should hear the game bootup with 3 sector read beeps and the disk drive head scooting over half way and loading. The C64 version is on tracks 1 to 19, since track 0 is Atari. The BAM and directory can be anywhere on a Commodore disk, the drive just has to find it.

As the game becomes more glitchy in the minus worlds, you could name it the “MTV Room”! By the way, I have been through that rear back door in the game, it’s actually a kitchen area. The kitchen includes a drive-thru window when someone orders chicken stir fry to go! It’s called “Kung Fu Drive Thru You!” That’s how the bad guys earn money to make their rooms so fancy and glitchy! Great video!

okay you made me giggle blending in with the other Ninja... "secret huh.. like a Ninja!" you're wholesome and awesome, Robin.

Very cool! Glitch worlds are always tons of fun. This reminds me of something similar that happened to a game I programmed for the Genesis/Megadrive. It was a mining game. Normally, there was a limit on how deep you could go. However, I found a glitch to bypass this. The game's world was all stored in RAM, but variables, and the CPU stack were at the end of RAM. Digging down enough would cause the game to read past the level data, and start reading this variable&stack data. It was interpreted as glitchy graphics pretty much the same way as in this ninja game. The interesting part is that the player could interact with this data the same way as you could with normal level data. All sorts of crazy stuff would happen.

I love your vids. I bought my first 64 in 82 and love watching you explain a lot of things that I never had the patience or knowledge how to explore!

You definitely succeeded in making this entertaining. I love seeing how this stuff is put together, especially since it's not something I have access to do myself. Keep up with the great content. :-)

Man a realtime monitor/disassembler running on a second monitor would be 8-bit sweetness.

I remember buying Adventure for the Atari 2600 just because it contained that awesome Warren Robinett glitch.. So yes, these types of videos are very interesting and entertaining. Thanks!

Fascinating video Robin. I love videos like this!

Please promise you're going to look into that "three versions of the game on one disk" thing later. I am DYING to know how they got the Atari and C64 versions to coexist on the same side of the disk.

You did a great job, and I'm really glad you made this video.

I don't understand the least 'bit' (😏) of machine language, but for some reason it is quite fascinating to watch. Thanks for making these videos!

Your time is appreciated, You explain very well and I at least find it entertaining. Thank you.

Its always enjoyable to watch your vids, thanks!

Thanks Robin, this really takes me back. Especially the music! Interesting glitch! :)

Thanks Robin, Very interesting, the only questiion I had was why you were able to glitch through screen 21 in the first place, was that due to the programme not handling the sprite position properly?

Gosh, I don't guess we'll be seeing a fascinating machine like this again in the future. Thank you for your beautiful channel.

You sir are a true hacker in the best sense of the word (i.e. Richard Stallman). Playful cleverness at its finest, combined with excellent presentation. Subscribed!

Very first Atari ST game i copied in 1987 and was amazed it worked (no protection)

Huge thanks for creating this. I remember that glitch world very well from my younger days. I loved this game. This is awesome!

That ninja is a real magician... at some point he just starts _random casting_ :D

I kept waiting for you to try out one of the throwing weapons. I remember those from playing this on the Atari.

Awesome video, really enjoyed it!

i once glitched in what i think was named "spider", a game from the magazine "input 64" from heise, i then could run above the whole game :)

As always, you did succeed. It was both entertaining and explanatory :) Thanks!

'bird on wall': Looks more like it's leaving a silhouette on the shoji.

How did you learn machine language so well? As a kid it was like this great mystery to me I could never figure out 😂

Missed opportunity not calling them “flippy floppy’s”

I give it a 10 of 10, because it´s stuck in my memory, and it was hell of a fun to play, despite the simple design. When I was a kid, the graphics and sound gave a certain mood, and it works well. If you know the memory locations, you can control the matrix - that makes you the king of ninjas! :-D

I know its 16 bits but when playing Judge Dredd on the real Snes almost 20 years ago, I ended up on minus world for no reason I remember. I have been trying to emulate that for years but I just gave up. Funny that the minus world had something written, like "exit here" so it means some programmers were expecting abnormalities to happen and had some sort of countermeasure. Jumping in the exit it restarted the level.

Paradroid on the C64 has a similar glitch where you can exit the main level area, ending up in a glitch world.

Part of the trick to multiformat has to do with where the directory structure is located. (This is, for example, how on the Apple ][ a ProDOS/DOS 3.3 hybrid disk is possible, since the DOS 3.3 directory has a master sector on track 17 sector 0 and the rest can be anywhere on disk; the directory on ProDOS is in track 0.)

Great video, I loved it - thank you! 😊

Thank You Man

Hearing you nonchalantly say, "A ninja. another ninja..", reminded me of the Chuck Norris movie where he tells someone in a rather matter-of-fact manner, "I ran into some ninja last night." Like that was a common occurrence in the USA in the 1970's :)

Everybody gangsta' until they start approaching A:;Y= L)A:;F= LL `

Glitch world looks like if Jackson Pollock made a C64 game.

This game seems like a good springboard for a shinobi port with a ram expander and more interesting levels

1:27 It seems that a composite C64/Atari disk would be pretty easy to make, since the 1541's home track is 18 and the Atari's is presumably 1 (I don't have much knowledge about Ataris). So, they could just make tracks 1 to 17 and 36 to 40 be formatted for Atari and tracks 18 to 35 for C64. The C64 would have 81.5 KiB available and the file blocks can be linked to never use tracks 1 to 17. The Atari would have 49.5 KiB of available storage, assuming its file layout can be manipulated to avoid certain tracks. 6:56 Reminds me of the "Saturday Night Live" sketch where the ninjas attack the hero one-at-a-time instead of all-at-once. 33:59 Apparently, snails have only one foot. I don't know what would (naturally) have three feet, or most odd numbers.

This is great to watch. How did you trace all these memory locations? Since watching your video's a few months ago, my commodore hart has been beating harder again and I've trying to program assembly on the C64 as well. I even bought a 128D when I saw one for sale. A lot of fun to spent time with these machines.

Loved this game as a child, loved this video ^~^

Paul Pridham made a glitch machine ios app years back that was awesome. :D Great guy too! :D

Dope game! Was always nice to beat

My copy of F-15 Strike Eagle was a flippy. Commodore version on one side, Atari version on the other.

nice i did this when i was kid i was like wtf how did i get to this and all my friends thought i was nuts or lying lol

Really great work! Congrats!!

Very interesting!

I'm now curious if "Glitch World" exists in the Atari 8-bit version, or any other version. I know I got the Atari ST version - "Ninja Mission" - to glitch one time after my friends and I had been playing it and other ST games for several hours. All of a sudden, we were able to hack off the limbs of the villains with the sword and even behead them. So that left a pile of body parts. The ST was very hot - it was a 1040STf with the built-in power supply - so I shut it down for about an hour to cool it off. I never saw that glitch ever happen again. Not that I ever played "Ninja Mission" for that long ever again either!

Thug life is not so good in this game. :D A few other games also used to have "glitch" levels, that were supposed to be normal levels, because of corrupted level data; just one example from the top of my head is the third level of Red Max. Some copies had that one intact, in some others much of that level was gone, with just a pattern of dots in place of the missing part. My original copy (on tape) was the second one, and most of the emulated game sites got that one as well. It was kinda frustrating. Probably that was only an issue with the tape version. In Shadow Skimmer there was a possibility to go through walls and everything, but that'd normally never occur, unless you happen to play with a dismantled joystick, and press, I think, left and right microswitches / contacts simultaneously maybe; can't remember, it's been long ago..... Sometimes if you got stuck into a wall piece, the game would glitch up and crash. Good times.

Super interesting, thanks for posting.

Hey Robin, you should plan a book on "Writing C64 Games". Preferably without relying on PRGStudio or similar tools (so it can be followed with any OS, not only windows)

I have got a Bubble Bobble Copy that has something similar. After Level 100 it just goes up with weird Levels until it crashes.

I remember playing this game growing up, on an IBM compatible if I remember right. Don't remember this glitch though

This is one of the most interesting channels I subscribe to. ☺

I wonder what would happen if the game was modified to ignore all wall collisions. Would the game eventually crash at some point when going through the glitch world?

How the heck did you find those memory locations and how long did it take? The value for a hole could have been anything!

I remember cutting a notch in 5.25" floppies to allow the back side writing, thus transforming them into flippies; with the 3.5" rigid disks you needed to burn liteally a second hole into the plastic!

One is a monopod :o)

A game to rival Cheetamen! Just kidding. Looks much better. I'm learning to code demos on C64. Fingers crossed. 😊😊😊

Thanks for the video - enjoyed it. It may be the programmer(s) wanted to make the map bigger and ended up scaling it down and leaving in some of the legacy checking code. Or it could be just bad code :)

Really cool video I have a lot of retro machines. Can you please tell me what hardware you're using in the cartridge slot and also is their anything similar for the atari 800xl. Thanks for reading

Your vidz somehow always find something interesting to say.

8-bit ninja acid trip.

Interesting! I wonder if it works on the Atari also? They seem really similar. re: Bird - perhaps it was a translucent wall, ricepaper, etc? ; - )

I had this for IBM. But mine wasnt in color :(

I love this game

What is the name of the song at the end? I like it!

Glitchz word ELXARINB reminds me Elixir+magical drink.

Wow

Never used your knives our shuriken?

Try fix glitch in Battlefield ;)

imagine if you kept walking and it actually turned into a good game lol. i could never get into "ninja", i liked Ninja Master though, i was only a kid.

It's likely that the Atari version will share much of the same code, so I'm wondering if this Glitch World happens on the Atari version too?

What was the Mastertronic basketball game where you could accidentally play one on three?

I have to ask: how did you deduce the location of the memory addresses that manipulate the map? Perhaps looking for the PETSCII name of each room and working backwards?

which format is best ? will you be showing the 2

I wonder what grudge these game magazines held against the producer of this game. It might not be the greatest game, but for sure it's not as terrible as a game lower than 30% should be. And while as kids we might often have been naive and believed in the game testers as some always objective and truthful gods of judgement, we nowadays know better ;) In the most renowned German home computer and game magazine of that time, it scored 60% btw. and the game was sold at 9,23€, calculated from DM to € inclusing inflation until 2020 :)

Ninja's gameplay on C64 is broken, use Atari 8bit version

Flippy Diskette? Wait what..?

QUITE NEAT HOW YOU CAN FIND THE PROGRAMMING CODE AND JINX AROUND WITH THIS GAME...!

I don't know why the new commodore couldn't include a web browser and other stuff

People got paid to make this game.

Mastertronic is almost the same what LJN in on Nintendo. So many horrible games.

Wow i could create that game within a day using UNITY game engine

wow, looks like the most boring game :D

8-bit ninja acid trip.