Today’s post may look like garbage at first. But when you take a step back and examine it more closely, you’ll find that… Well, it still looks like garbage. That’s because garbage is exactly what it is. As we approach the end of 1996, I’m taking a brief sidestep from normal game discussion today—and it totally doesn’t have anything to do with me spending too much time making wallpapers to properly cover the next game on my list, X-Men vs. Street Fighter. That’s purely a coincidence. Really.
Arcade cabinets, much like early personal computers, had dedicated startup sequences fueled by their on-board ROM. Anyone who has owned or emulated a Commodore 64, for example, is likely familiar with the random graphics that appear during a soft reboot. The concept here is much the same, although the cause of the graphics is slightly different. During startup sequences, games would run through ROM and RAM testing routines (to verify that hardware was functioning correctly and possibly even as anti-piracy measures), which often involved writing data to the memory regions responsible for graphical displays. Since this would only be seen when the game was turned on, potential players would be very unlikely to see these glitch-like graphics and have their impression of the game affected. Nevertheless, many hardware sets were designed to not even activate screen outputs until ROM-RAM testing was complete.
Initialization graphics can be beautiful and fascinating. Colors scintillate and symbols flicker in wild sequences. Epileptics may find this a little less amazing. Sometimes there are apparent patterns, like a procession of the alphabet or fragments of developers’ names, and sometimes the results are truly random. Depending on the hardware involved, there can be only a handful of colors or hundreds. At times—as was traditionally the case with Williams games—the startup yields merely a mass of colorful pinpoints of light. The prime of startup garbage screens was in the mid-80s; hardware and software designs from 1984 to 1988 were especially prone to this kind of output, although there are definitely games outside of that date range with the phenomenon, like Defender’s graphics from 1980, seen in the seventh image above.
Yes yes yes - retro gaming beautiousness forever
