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Is the Upside-Down "feature" of Karateka endemic to the Apple II?

Arqade Asked by Trish on February 15, 2021

According to Jason Scott, 1984 saw Broderbund’s Customer Service answer the following error quite a lot. The question came up because allegedly Jordan Mechner and the company found it funny to increase the manufacturing costs for an easter egg:

My screen is upside down! How do I fix that?!

Here you can see that it works…

Of course, the answer lay in the shape of the floppy disk and explained in the same talk: there is an index hole on them. Typically, a floppy reader had two readers for that hole. Often, B was empty. But for Karateka, the B-side had the same stuff on it, yet all the images upside down, rendering the whole game upside down.

However, the game also, again, Jason Scott quoting Jordan Mechner, was totally re-coded to get it to other platforms, such as Atari 8-bit, C64, NES and others till 1990.

Was the "feature" of the upside-down B-side exclusive to the Apple II edition?

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