MissingNo.'s glitchy appearance in Pokémon explained

The clever ways engineers worked around hardware limitations back then never cease to amaze me. People today may not realize this, but when Pokemon came out on the Game Boy it was a technical marvel. When these games reached North America, the Game Boy was in it's 9th year as the king of handheld consoles. The fact that an aging machine designed to play Tetris and a stripped-down version of Mario could run a massive (for the time) RPG with hundreds of unique creatures and characters was nothing short of impressive.

Retro Game Mechanics videos are excellent. The animations he creates to demonstrate these principals are top notch. He should be teaching computer science courses, because I come out of some of his 15 minute videos with a better understanding of this stuff than I did after whole hours spent in real classes learning assembly.

I just realized its name, MISSINGNO isn't som randomly generated garble, but "Missing number."

And then comes this whole 20 minute video with all the mechanics of how games like this were created with such limited cartridge memory space and the weak processing power of the gameboy.

Fascinating.

Solid video, thanks for sharing. When he started explaining how the sprites are loaded from compression I had hopes that Missingno was just still compressed data and we'd get a look at some bits of sprites from various other sources to find out what the pokemon was "made of" so to speak. Disappointed that it's just buffer overrun, but still glad to know how it works now.