tetris

Bilingual

The BBC Tetris Companion
2 months ago
- The author created a Tetris-like game called Bridgetris for the BBC Bridge Companion, a niche 1985 console.
- They reverse-engineered the console's BIOS to accept custom ROMs and learned Z80 assembly in the process.
- A broken Bridge Companion was purchased on eBay and repaired, including replacing the mangled cartridge slot.
- The manufacturer Heber was identified, and the author obtained documentation from a former engineer.
- A custom cartridge PCB was built to avoid destroying original cartridges during debugging.
- A composite video mod was developed to improve the console's output quality.
- Detailed follow-up articles are planned, covering repairs, mods, and game programming.
The Brick Game, Through the Ages
2 months ago
- The 'talking' Brick Game 118-in-1, from a late 90s or early 2000s church fundraiser, features a menu that scrolls using Level, Speed, Mode, and Rotate buttons rather than directional keys, and Tetris is the primary game, playing Korobeiniki music.
- Inside the classic model, there is a thin PCB with an epoxy blob (chip-on-board) and separate button PCB with rubber contacts, typical of handheld consoles, and a capacitor/transistor for audio filtering.
- Modern Brick Games under $10 have a new design: larger screen, thinner body, single rubber controls, an up button, and a different menu (numbered game types, not lettered), with reimplemented software and perhaps different microcontroller cores.
- The new model combines controls and LCD on one PCB, has a perfectly round glossy epoxy blob, and is dated 2025.10.27, showing ongoing production and improvement.
- Despite cost-cutting (no packaging, worse screen, missing Korobeiniki), the Brick Game persists due to Tetris's enduring appeal and its role as an affordable gaming option for children without other access.
My quest to see all of Tetris
2 months ago
- The Antithesis team aimed to 'beat' Tetris by reaching 'rebirth' (level counter rolling over from 255 to 0), a goal inspired by teenage gamers who had surpassed traditional human limits.
- They used a fuzzing approach with random inputs, game state snapshots, and an objective function to guide exploration, evolving tactics to mimic human strategies like Tetris readiness for four-line clears.
- A critical bug in the line count calculation (misinterpreting BCD) caused a stall at level 160, which was fixed by correcting the code, allowing them to achieve rebirth and match human records.
- Along the way, they encountered various glitches in deep levels, such as color palette issues, freezes, and unusual bugs like the 'FBFBFB' score glitch, highlighting software's unpredictable corners.
- The project demonstrates how automated testing (like Antithesis) can explore edge cases in software, using survival-of-the-fittest strategies to uncover bugs and achieve complex goals.

tetris

The BBC Tetris Companion

The Brick Game, Through the Ages

My quest to see all of Tetris