Can you please investigate the King Hippo logic to see if there is any possibility for him to get up after a knock down under any conditions? I have a vague memory of this happening once as a kid, but have never been able to reproduce it since.

Yes Parabens

cool

Your videos are criminally underated! there is so much going on, and so much work into these videos. thank you so much for these interesting and entertaining videos!🔥🔥🔥🔥

Pleaaaaase more punch out. I was sad when this video was over. Great work as always honestly. You rock.

Plus enhancement chip, mind.

It's a 1987 game, too. You just didn't see big detailed sprites like that very often until the 90s

True

Who doesn't give punch out credit, what a weird comment

This game always felt ahead of It's time. Still remained one of my favorite NES games throughout the NESs life.

A lot of 8 and 16 bit games used this kind of system. Some were even Turing complete.

A "state machine" is very old computer science concept, but a very powerful one. It's basically a way to organize something complex by breaking it into simpler pieces. It lends itself surprisingly well to languages that rely so heavily on indexing.

My WMG theory is that the boxing authorities know that some of the contenders aren't following "the rules of the ring" but don't want to cause a big ruckus going public with that information, so instead "plant" specific people in the crowds to help Little Mac (unwittingly on his part) beat the cheaters "legitimately" by making specific gestures at specific times according to opponent behavior.

It was a fairly recent fins too, made news in gaming websites!

​@@universalperson It was more rediscovery. Some digging by pop culture historians found references to the crowd cue in contemporary NES material (magazines, tip books, etc). However the fact that reddit post became such big news shows both how unknown it was and how punch outs difficulty and timing was so legendary that it echoes through to today.

@@medes5597 I was a SNES and N64 kid, so I never knew. Makes sense though - those magazines told me about stuff that would only be known on the internet years later.

Yeah it's really weird to have this actually explained, it was mentioned in game guides decades ago but of course they didn't give us any details at all about the code and logic behind it like this person showed us.

I second that!

Roblox is going up!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Sorry about that. This episode was a really tough one to break down into digestible segments because of the number of possible subjects to select for it and the volume of research done prior to scripting. I think I would change the opening and the RAM introductions segment if I were to do it over as those areas were a bit outdated in terms of video design by the time I zeroed-in on writing the later part of the video.

The key thing to take away is that, with many simple games, you can code an enemy (or really, anything) based on just doing some quick logic checks. "Did the player do this? Okay, counter with that. Is the player this close to that bomb? Okay, make it go boom." This works fine with simple behaviors, but can become a mess of spaghetti code (especially in the era of assembly) when you start dealing with more complex AI behavior. The way that they dealt with this in Punch Out was via two means: first, the use of what is called a state engine. This is a common principle in computer science where an object exists in a specific state, and that state has its own behavior and conditions that need to be met to go to a different state. You can almost think of a state as its own mini-program, which just focuses on doing one single thing, and once it determines that a different state should run, it'll switch to that state. For example, with Glass Jaw, he has his default idle state. All this state does is handle drawing his idle animation. Either he remains in this state until the timer runs out, or until he's hit by Little Mac. Once any of those conditions are met, he switches to the state that handles the appropriate condition: throwing his own punch, or reacting to being punched. The second technique they used was effectively a simple scripting language to describe the behavior for a state. This is the large table of commands that Displaced shows that's based off of one byte. This was a very common technique back in the day and allowed you to basically write a simple program with very few bytes that could then be interpreted by the game engine. Because you only need the commands to work in the context of, in this case, the opponent boxer, this lets you keep things extremely focused while still letting you accomplish a lot. Separately, these two techniques helped improve the development of Punch Out!, but by combining them together, they were able to make use of the best of both worlds and create extremely creative opponents in tight memory constraints without having to worry about handling a lot of weird, arbitrary rules all over the place. It's a very elegant solution, and I hand it to whoever designed that code, they did a fantastic job building it.

@@MNGoldenEagle Thanks a ton for the breakdown. I do have some game programming experience so the concepts aren't totally foreign, and this video makes a lot more sense now that my head is cleared.

@@DisplacedGamers I regret if my comment sounded like a complaint. I had been meaning to drop a line about how I find your videos very welcoming and easy to follow (most of the time), so it's unusual that I had trouble with it. After some sleep and another commenter kindly summarizing things for me, things are making more sense. Even though I have a fair bit of game programming experience, my brain tends to check out whenever Assembly shows up. :)

Thank you! I am a Ben Heck fan as well.

I heard "Punch Out esque game", and now you have my attention.

@@TheFandomFather Me too!

@@TheFandomFather It's by no means a 1-1 port of mechanics. I took inspiration from DMC/Ultrakill for stuff like combo multipliers and ranks, and there's a system where different attacks are dealt with different methods (yellow = dodge lr, red = block) and you can also parry red attacks with good timing. Other than that, there's running platforming stages and cutscenes adjacent to something like Undertale.

@@PowerUpT You still have my attention. One of my favorite surprise hits for me was Fight Knight, which used a 1st person punching system akin to Punch Out or Teleroboxer.

@@TheFandomFather I can confirm that there will be one suprise first person fight to achieve a specific homage, but I haven't made it yet. If you want to check out the demo it's called Sock It

Even if they did, the "tells" justify being in the final game by adding a layer of mystery and intrigue to the game's world ("Why is this guy doing this thing at this particular time? Is he trying to help Little Mac out in some way?") The fact that many of the opponents in Punch-Out are doing things that would be illegal in real-life professional boxing only bolsters the idea that the "tells" are a clue that SOMETHING is going on outside the ring...

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks, Adrian!

I think this game has been picked apart quite a bit over the years. I'll bet they know a heck of a lot more than me!

Same. Later on my dad bought Evander Holyfield Boxing on the Genesis and while not as fun as Punch Out it is still a decently fun boxing game. Some of the few good memories I have with my dad before he met my step mom who ruined our relationship.

Thank you!

Thank you, Mew!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thanks!

😐

Thanks!

I have a follow-up video in the works that will talk about it.

It's nowhere close to the FX chip. It's just a mapper. All it does is swap out the tileset at designated times. And swap out the accessible program data on command. And raise an interrupt at a given scanline. Comparatively simple tasks. It's a little unusual in how it knows when to swap tilesets, but that's all.

lol

If the bytecode set is chosen carefully, and this one was, you're replacing a lot of subroutine calls (with 16-bit target addresses) with single bytes, so it can be both scripting and compression at the same time.

I had definitely never heard of the sunglasses guy before

OK. I was wondering about that. I was uncertain if Super Macho Man's sunglasses guy had been mentioned yet.

@@DisplacedGamers There's a video of it from 2016 that credits SummoningSalt for telling them about it, so it seems it's been known for a while. Also amazing video! The genius of the programming and design of Punch Out really can't be overstated.

Someone suggested the "crowd hints" were something the developers created to help in testing the game. As for why they were left in the finished game, noticing the crowd reactions would naturally prompt speculation by players (especially if you try to come up with an in-universe explanation for them - "Why is this guy doing this thing at this specific time? Is he trying to help Little Mac out somehow?") and encourage them to keep looking for other "Easter Eggs" in the game.

A finite state machine defines a series of states and the conditions needed to go from one state to another. Here, we have a sequence of commands executed in order with some branches (some random, some directed) redirecting the flow so this is actually a programming language, not a state machine.

I agree. Reversing each of those games in order to do the comparison would take an extremely large chunk of time for a single person, though.

I guess the only way they expected you to know was to publish it in Nintendo Power at some point. :-)