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Here's something cool. There are lot of low-cost floppy drive emulators on eBay that load disk images over USB, aimed at people maintaining industrial machinery, synthesizers and PCs. A hobbyist has written new firmware that adds read/write support for Amiga ADF images. Drives are only 30-40USD right now. I have one on order to try this out. http://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/
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Mar 2, 2014 03:42
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You know what I miss with computer gaming? Roller Coaster sims. Not roller coaster tycoon straight up build a coaster and then ride it like a stone-age kerbal space program. I'd effort post but I'm lazy however Disney's Coaster was freaking magical and I wish that they evolved rather than being abandoned.
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Mar 2, 2014 04:14
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Well, I finally took the plunge and spent a good many hours today cleaning out my shed. Threw out tons of poo poo, as well as finding loads of stuff I forgot I had that have gone back into the house. For some reason I'd hung onto a bunch of Novell Netware 4 user manuals and all manner of old bits of wood and piss-poor cables. Figured I probably didn't need a rusted out paint-tin filled with rusty bolts, door hinges and calipers. Weird. Anyway, amongst the dross was my old C64 and Amiga 2000, which is what you'll see some of below. I didn't fire any of it up, as I don't have the space to really lay it all out and plug things in, and I'm too scared to open up the 2000 and find the battery leaked all over the motherboard, as they are supposedly guaranteed to have done. But I'll go through what was there anyway. First up I uncovered my C64, which you've all seen before. Along with that and the 1541 disk drive and the datasette tape player, I found these other peripherals:  The Commodore Music Maker sits over the C64 and mimics a real awful plasticky keyboard you can attempt to play. It's there in the box along with the manual and tape-based software. The VIC-20 paddles work on the C64, and I really should have got them out to show them off in all their glory. In back there you can also make out my Commodore 1081 monitor, as well as a stack of Amiga floppies. Next up are a couple of shots of my game boxes. Mind you, for the most part they are really just flat disk sleeve cases, not really "boxes" per se.   The Starglider box comes with the Novella and associated bits and bobs, and the Leather Goddesses of Phobos I think still has the scratch and sniff sheet and so forth. The bottom right of the last shot shows a fat box with VIC-20 VICfile home accounting software in it. I've no idea where the tapes for it are, unfortunately. I hate to think how much accounting you can do with about 1k of RAM and tapes to store stuff on. Finally we come to my Amiga stuff. I have an A500 as well as the 2000, but the A2000 was bought with my own money back in 1987 or 1988, whereas I acquired the A500 some years later as a hospital I worked at was throwing it away.  Yes, as you can see my late-teenage self thought it was a great idea to do one of the worst resprays possible and make the A2000 black. You couldn't see it before, but the 1081 monitor was also made black. In both cases the paint is peeling off very badly. A badge also fell off the back of my Holden VK Commodore car, and you can see I thought it would be amusing to glue that "electronic injection" sign onto the front of the Amiga. Ho ho ho! The 1084S was a part of the stuff I got from the hospital. Speaking of the Commodore monitors, I remember that I didn't have a TV in my bedroom as a kid so I used it hooked up to a VCR and could switch between Amiga and video/TV as needed. Sweet! Finally under a table was my vast array of Amiga floppy disks, being a terrifying quantity of pirated software, sprinkled with a small amount of originals here and there.  Maybe 1000 disks in there or something. The two large flat boxes were given to me by a friend long ago, but the actual unwieldy disk boxes are all mine from the good old days. Eventually I'll hopefully fire it all up and go through some of those to see what they are like. I've no idea how well the disk have fared, it's not exactly a great environment in my shed at the best of time. Still, if nothing else I can see what's written on the labels and run disk images up on an emulator and see what they were. Hopefully I can follow up at some stage with this stuff being switched on and played with, but that's a long way off as I just can't see myself finding space in the house to get it all set up. Maybe when I move house I'll need to get one with a dedicated retro gaming room or something. Got a CRT TV here as well that needs an old console to play on it.
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Mar 2, 2014 06:37
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Goons and Goonettes, allow me to present the most retro of all retro computing. Firstly, how about a nice 4 MB HDD platter?  Secondly, The W.I.T.C.H - the world's oldest functioning computer. The anode tubes (the glowing things) are both memory and display, each storing a single digit. And finally, a walk-around of a Colussus machine Colussus at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchly Park. Whilst the real Colussus machines were the first programable electronic computers, this is a reproduction rather than an original. It didn't break the Lorenz codes itself - what it did was work out the rotor settings for the Tunny machines that did the actual codebreaking. The strip of punch tape is feeding through it at 30mph - 5000 characters per second. The punch tape isn't a program - it's the raw data that's being compared to rotor settings programmed into the colussus - when it had a good enough match to be worth telling a person about, it would fire up its output - a teleprinter. This Colussus is currently opened up for maintenance. The Enigma codes were broken by a different machine - the Bombe machine. edit:  A Lorenz machine - unlike the Enigma, this had 12 encryption rotors, and only required one operator at each end - the message was typed in plain text, automatically encrypted, and then printed out in plain text by the receiving Lorenz. The Enigma needed three operators at each end and only had four rotors. On the plus side it could be easily carried. Angrymog fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Mar 2, 2014 |
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Mar 2, 2014 21:27
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That's awesome--the CS department at college used to have some old hard drives like that tucked into some unused rooms. They made great end tables.
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Mar 2, 2014 21:41
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Gromit posted:GAMES Oh poo poo, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. I remember reading about that in some Top Ten list of erotic video games. It's text-based right?
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Mar 2, 2014 21:44
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Angrymog posted:Goons and Goonettes, allow me to present the most retro of all retro computing. Whoa, that brings back memories--my dad's office had those back in the late 70s and early 80s. I also did the most retroiest gaming ever at that office--gaming on a computer without a screen. I think it was some sort of maze game, and every time you pressed a key to move, the current state of the maze would be printed out on a giant spool of paper attached to the thing, as that's the only output method it had. Come to think of it, playing games on printer paper was something of A Thing back then--even the old Infocom games had commands that would output the game to the printer as you were playing it.
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Mar 2, 2014 23:16
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Excels posted:Oh poo poo, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. I remember reading about that in some Top Ten list of erotic video games. It's text-based right? Yes, definitely. And if memory serves me right it was chock-full of terrible puns too.
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Mar 3, 2014 00:03
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Quarex posted:Your enthusiasm led to me figuring "aw, I am sure I can find it if I look through every private message I have from someone whose name I do not recognize!" and I did that and I STILL FAILED TO FIND IT. I must have accidentally deleted it one of the times my mailbox filled up during the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter Hey! Sorry, I only now just saw this. Thanks a lot for trying to find it, I appreciate it. I just emailed Chip Morningstar on the off-chance he still has something, we'll see how that goes. After that, who knows, LinkedIn-stalk some former AOL employees?
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Mar 5, 2014 00:09
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The good news? I got this book on ebay relatively cheap to give my Might and Magic series some nice playability with lovely item lists, maps, and stuff.   That front cover is kind of a lie though. Its really a guide to 3-5. Which is kind of cool because those are the best of the classic games IMO. 1 and 2? Its a story synopsis. A page and a half synopsis! Covering both of those games. Oh well. Should have read the back of the book more closely.
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Mar 6, 2014 05:25
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I just discovered the DOS nostalgia podcast and am really enjoying it--folks here will probably appreciate it too. The latest episode has an interview with Clint from Lazy Game Reviews, and earlier episodes dig into great stuff like Doom, an interview with Jim Leonard/Trixter on the history of DOS, and more.
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Mar 7, 2014 07:25
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mod sassinator posted:I just discovered the DOS nostalgia podcast and am really enjoying it--folks here will probably appreciate it too. The latest episode has an interview with Clint from Lazy Game Reviews, and earlier episodes dig into great stuff like Doom, an interview with Jim Leonard/Trixter on the history of DOS, and more. I'll have to take a listen when I get the chance. A YouTube page with what looks to be Xtree or something like it full of DOS games as it's image background is certainly worth a look. And I still have to get back to my Win 98 rig thing. I've just been busy with a billion other projects both nerdy and actual important things like figuring out why the gently caress my washing machine is leaking and where I need to put the duct tape. poo poo I actually want to play more on it. I've been getting in a Warhammer 40k mood and some Final Liberation would hit the spot nicely. Because the game owns even if it never got any expansions even if the game had built in hooks for them.  I will just need to either get and burn a patch cd for it because no way am I hooking a 98se machine to the net . Or I could see if it's fine with a USB flash drive to get all those files across. Doesn't always work though. Burned a cd for my DOS rig and the drive refused to accept it. Maybe I needed to burn it at a lower speed or something... Always something to do...
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Mar 8, 2014 23:35
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I found this the other day at the thrift store: The shrinkwrap is original, which is really exciting to me not because it adds to its worth, but because it has an original barcode sticker from Office Max on the bottom and that always delights me for some reason. I also own this copy of Oregon Trail:  My favorite part of it is the price tag from Egghead. I'm not sure what it is about original price tags and stickers but it always makes me really happy when I find a game with them. Also that dos nostalgia podcast is run by a friend of some of my friends, he always has interesting dos based discussions on his twitter that you all might be interested in: https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic
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Mar 9, 2014 00:18
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Things that's pissing me off: Not being able to find a computer that can use a 5.25 floppy drive. Edit: This is to write disks for my X68000.
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Mar 10, 2014 21:39
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So I've had a C64 and 1541 drive for a long time, from my flea market expeditions in the mid-90's. At one point I had the serial cable to connect the drive to the C64 but I lost it somewhere along the way. After rehabilitating the A1200 and giving it new life as a game machine I decided to do the same with the C64, I got a drive cable from eBay. At first no disks would load so I opened the drive up and cleaned some dust out and brushed the read head with a cotton swab, after putting everything back together it fired right up. 1541s are tanks!  I only had three disk games, a double disk containing One Man and his Droid (poo poo) and Nonterraqueous (awesome), and Space Taxi (pretty good and seemingly "rare"  and expensive on eBay). I have some cartridge games but these seem uniformly bad, they're all Commodore branded and seem more like tech demos than games.I eventually want to get one of these cables and start writing C64 disk images to floppies, Particularly for demos and NTSC fixed PAL games. I've ordered some legit games too: Wizball https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK82X9VlE38   Uridium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0TfHkNpRNs   Trailblazer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EXsxd8O7eU   Parallax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbksq8PF71s   Infiltrator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9fzZ5SJws8   Alcon (US name of Slap Fight) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfesRpaNlsw   I know this system has an absolutely huge library, some of it's best titles like Turrican and Armalyte are PAL-only, and I'll have to find NTSCfixed versions. I'm wondering what the retro thread's favorite NTSC C64 games are? I'm so new to this system and there is just so much to look through.
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Mar 11, 2014 02:33
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d0s posted:I know this system has an absolutely huge library, some of it's best titles like Turrican and Armalyte are PAL-only, and I'll have to find NTSCfixed versions. I'm wondering what the retro thread's favorite NTSC C64 games are? I'm so new to this system and there is just so much to look through. I think my old C64 was an NTSC machine so here are some favorites. IIRC you're more into the action games, right? Those were my favorites on the C64 anyway. So here are some recommendations: Drol by Broderbund is amazing. Drol was the first video game I ever owned myself, and it still plays really well. Karateka and Lode Runner, also both by Broderbund, are really good too. The Datasoft movie games, like Conan and The Goonies are pretty good. They were really popular back in the day. Nearly anything by Electronic arts in the early-mid 80s is really good. Archon, Skyfox, Hard Hat Mack, The Last Gladiator, to name a few. Skyfox was particularly good. The Eidolon was a lot of fun, and possibly is one of the earliest (if not the first) FPS games. Brutally hard though. Trolls and Tribulations was a fun action/platformer. Impossible Mission is a must-get. Impossible Mission II I didn't like as much. (I never was able to finish it) The Epyx Games (World Games, Winter Games, etc) were really good as well. Most of Epyx's catalog is worth looking at as well. I think the Spy vs. Spy games might have been Epyx too? Either way they're worth looking at. Epyx's GI Joe is one of the few decent licensed games from the era.
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Mar 11, 2014 03:20
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Genpei Turtle posted:Impossible Mission is a must-get. Dude don't I know it, it's next on my list  Drol looks rad as hell too. Weirdly I've actually had a loose Amiga version of Archon floating around forever, never really gave it a shot. Currently looking up all that other stuff, thanks! EDIT Genpei Turtle posted:I think my old C64 was an NTSC machine so here are some favorites. IIRC you're more into the action games, right? Yeah but if you have games from other genres to recommend please do!
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Mar 11, 2014 03:35
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d0s posted:Dude don't I know it, it's next on my list For me the C64 was an RPG and Flight Sim machine first and foremost. Gunship. Project Stealth Fighter. Ultima 1,3, 4, 5. Bard's Tale 1-3. Wizardry 1 and 5. Empire. War of the Lance. Ad&D Gold Box. Keypunch Star Trek. That was my jam. But there were some boss action games. Up n Down. Pitstop 2. HERO. Gremlins. Ghostbusters. Impossible Mission. Aliens (US). Basically nearly everything SSI, Origin Systems, Microprose, and Activision put out is at least worth a look. Broderbund and Electronic Arts too.
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Mar 11, 2014 11:23
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I was looking for a game I used to love that I played on my dad's work computer... AND I FOUND IT! Watch "Sky Runner (1987)(Cascade Games)" on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzo027ZWwQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player Is there any way to find out more about the game or developer? Edit: Googling the programmers led me to this article. http://ironlord.acornarcade.com/faq.shtml I love reading about developing games back in the 80's. Is there a blog that has old interviews in a magazine format? RodShaft fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Mar 11, 2014 |
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Mar 11, 2014 12:18
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d0s posted:Weirdly I've actually had a loose Amiga version of Archon floating around forever, never really gave it a shot. Currently looking up all that other stuff, thanks! I've no idea where my Archon has gone. I distinctly remember owning it as I played it for ages, trying hard to work out what you had to do beyond killing everything. Then I discovered that the case came with a manual slipped into a hidden slot in the cover.
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Mar 11, 2014 12:24
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RodShaft posted:Is there any way to find out more about the game or developer? Mobygames is pretty good for that. The developers changed names before going out of business, here's what they did in total: http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/artronic-limited/list-games/
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Mar 11, 2014 12:33
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kirbysuperstar posted:Mobygames is pretty good for that. The developers changed names before going out of business, here's what they did in total: http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/artronic-limited/list-games/ Awesome. There's a couple I'll check out, but nothing looks that promising.
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Mar 11, 2014 12:49
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d0s posted:Yeah but if you have games from other genres to recommend please do! Well, I had a few RPG/Strategy games on the C64 growing up but due to its poor performance and slow disk speed on that front, even with a fast loader (and god help you if you don't have one) it's kind of a poor platform for those sorts of games, especially since you already have an Amiga. If you want to play those sorts of games stick with your Amiga or DOS versions and don't look back. But here are a few games worth looking at regardless: Test Drive is really good. Except you probably want the Amiga version.  Little Computer People is a weird-rear end but amusing game, kind of like a tamagotchi with a virtual person. Every disk had a different "LCP" on it hardcoded. I had a petulant little snot named Will who would get really mad/upset every time he played a game with me and ended up losing. Going to be hard to find a copy of this game that's pristine though, since your name gets recorded when you first start up and never changes. The Amiga version is apparently the definitive version but I never played it. Hacker and Hacker II are good. Hacker II I found pretty impenetrable though. Labyrinth, if you can find it. I had the Apple II version but the C64 verison has an extra area (though there's nothing particulary essential about it) Crush, Crumble & Chomp is a really fun simulation game where you play a Godzilla-like movie monster and destroy a city. You can even make your own. I liked making giant robots since they don't starve. On a similar note, Mail Order Monsters allows you to create your own monsters and send them to battle against each other. Nothing like a flamethrower-packing worm! Seven Cities of Gold is great. Everyone should play it. Again you probably want the Amiga version though. Oh, also another really good action game worth looking at is Dino Eggs. Forgot about that one.
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Mar 11, 2014 14:16
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Genpei Turtle posted:Little Computer People is a weird-rear end but amusing game, kind of like a tamagotchi with a virtual person. Every disk had a different "LCP" on it hardcoded. I had a petulant little snot named Will who would get really mad/upset every time he played a game with me and ended up losing. Going to be hard to find a copy of this game that's pristine though, since your name gets recorded when you first start up and never changes. Not strictly true. Zzap 64 published a listing for a program called the Little Computer Person Eviction Kit, which would reset all your game variables and create a new LCP.
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Mar 11, 2014 17:20
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Jedit posted:Not strictly true. Zzap 64 published a listing for a program called the Little Computer Person Eviction Kit, which would reset all your game variables and create a new LCP. Was the new LCP any different than the previous one and/or did it work on a non-pirated version of the game? From what I remember the variables were hardcoded into the game in the factory. I guess back then it was fairly trivial to write to most disks, but most copy protection prevented you from doing things to the master copy. Can't remember what LCP was like though, given that I haven't played it in 25 years.
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Mar 11, 2014 19:02
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It's funny reading all the back and forth in this thread over the Apple II and C64 because I had little to no exposure to them when I was a kid. One of my earliest memories was the summer day in 1981 when my dad had me tag along to Radio Shack when he bought the first Color Computer; I remember coming home and hanging out with him on the living room floor as he worked on it. On the weekends, my mom would send us out to the mall to get some item, and we'd spend 10 minutes buying that and two hours hanging out in Radio Shack and buying work programs (for him) and games (for me). Two years later, he got me a MC-10 because I was monopolizing the CoCo, but they only ever ended up making two games for it that Radio Shack sold, so a year after that he got me my own CoCo2 for Christmas. I spent hours poring over Rainbow Magazine and books on how to program in BASIC but I could never quite get the hang of it. I also remember the anticipation each month of waiting for the latest issue of Chromasette to arrive in the mail. As I got older, I grew vaguely aware that the CoCo was not even close to being the best computer gaming platform, but I didn't care. I remember a period in '85/'86 where I think the Nintendo had just come out, we were still three years or so away from buying our first IBM PC, and I was kind of bummed I didn't have more to play. One weekend, the local Radio Shack was having a clearance sale and my dad came home with a huge box of games and the enhanced sound/speech pack for super cheap. I spent another year or so playing games on that thing until I got a Nintendo. All our CoCo hardware is now long gone; about a year or two ago, I discovered this site and a few others, and I've spent a day or two with VCC playing some of this stuff. Some of my favorites include: Pyramid 2000 - my first IF game, I played the poo poo out of this on the original CoCo (and had no idea it was a partial rip-off of Colossal Cave, a game I wasn't aware of until years later). There's a great site here with a Java version and a complete breakdown of how the game was coded. Zaxxon - most arcade ports on the CoCo were rear end, but this was pretty amazing at the time and was officially sold through Radio Shack. Pegasus and the Phantom Riders - pretty nifty Joust clone. VARLOC - this blew my mind at the time. It's like Archon (everyone here is familiar with Archon I hope) except the battle portions were fought in a 3D wireframe playing field. Able Builders - Kaboom! clone I remember first playing on Chromasette. Downland - really tough platforming game taking place in a cave. Dungeons of Daggorath - probably the one CoCo exclusive that most people have actually heard of. I was never very good at it as a kid though. Fangman - Pac-Man clone, except you play as a vampire. Galactic Attack - Galaxian/Space Invaders clone, and I think the first CoCo game I ever played. Mega bug - Another Pac-Man clone with the gimmick that it takes place in a giant maze and the part you're in is magnified. I missed out on a lot of the big names (Ultima, Wizardry, etc.) since those were never ported to the CoCo, which is probably the only regret I have.
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Mar 11, 2014 19:53
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Bruteman posted:CoCo Stuff It's awesome to hear about systems you don't normally hear about. I had the most boring computer as a kid, an IBM PS/2 Model 80 from my dad's old office, and all the other machines seemed so unique and interesting even if the 286 was technically more powerful. I was definitely a console gamer, but I was jealous of friends' Apples and Commodores, which is what probably lead to me spending my teenage years in the mid-late 90's scouring thrift stores and flea markets and finding all these old machines, playing with them for a bit and then giving or throwing them away . I am really glad I kept the C64 and Amiga stuff though. I kept an Apple IIe, but can't get it to boot anymore  I gave away an Atari computer collection that would have made me quite a lot of money today, including a 400, 800xl, 130xe, XE game system, and a 1040 ST  I gave it all to the friend who gave me the XE stuff because he was expressing an interest in getting back into Atari stuff and I didn't realize these systems had anything worth playing on them (because I am an idiot). All I ever did with the machines was boot into BASIC and in the ST's case play with it's weird neon green window system. I've recycled a VIC-20, C= 16, C= +4, many others and bags full of peripherals, disks, tapes, carts. It's so weird how this stuff used to seem almost worthless, and I thought I'd always be able to pop into a thrift store and find stuff from that era, as if they wouldn't end up full of a new generation's "junk". Getting old is realizing that your trash is someone else's collectable antique. It's cool that you mention the Micro Color, one of those actually survived my purges along with a Model 100. Can't find any of the cables for them anymore though, and I will probably end up putting those on eBay along with a Timex Sinclair 1000 that I kept for some reason (certainly not out of any love for it, miserable system).
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Mar 11, 2014 22:36
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d0s posted:It's cool that you mention the Micro Color, one of those actually survived my purges along with a Model 100. Can't find any of the cables for them anymore though, and I will probably end up putting those on eBay along with a Timex Sinclair 1000 that I kept for some reason (certainly not out of any love for it, miserable system). Oh poo poo, I totally forgot my dad had one of those Model 100s! During the summers I used to tag along with him on consulting jobs he did and I'd sit somewhere and play games on that all day.
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Mar 12, 2014 00:09
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Can anyone help me with the name of an old C64 game? I used to play it at a friends house when I was a kid and it used to scare the poo poo out of me! From what I remember, it was sc-fi, but with an egyptian theme. I think the opening had you landing on a planet in a space ship and entering a pyramid, then cranking a lift handle to go down. You where then in a maze and had to navigate in a first person view, solving puzzles involving hieroglyphs whist being stalked by zombies. I think your health meter may have been the speed that you were breathing, or you heart rate. Any help in tracking down the name of this game would be great!
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Mar 12, 2014 01:17
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It sounds a lot like "Total Eclipse".
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Mar 12, 2014 01:21
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Scarabaeus?
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Mar 12, 2014 01:21
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That is exactly it! http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Scarabaeus Thanks!
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Mar 12, 2014 01:29
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While looking for the copy of Archon I mentioned earlier in the box of random Amiga disks that came with an A1000 setup I got at a flea market a long time ago (the hardware is long gone sadly) I found something pretty interesting: If you follow the instructions you get... a rather unfinished flight simulator!  It's rough but obviously a professional work and not just some bedroom coder's BASIC project, I wonder if this is a beta of something we know or maybe an unreleased game? The rest of the disks are mostly a bunch of early EA NTSC Amiga games and just random disks labelled with the same handwriting but boring stuff like Workbench boot disks and backups of the standard Amiga tools. Aside from an official copy of the first Deluxe Paint (that doesn't work) there are no programming tools. I know EA had/has offices in Florida, it would be awesome if I had one of their coders' disks! EDIT: drat this doesn't look like any of the games here: http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/list.php?&list_genre=Simulation&list_sub_genre=Flight&lineoffset=0 EDIT2: The disk's name when you try to look at it in workbench is "radar", the disk itself just throws read errors when you try to explore it. The game is rough but is controlled by mouse and keyboard, holding a mouse button down and dragging adjusts thrust etc. The sound effects are really very good and professional, and flying around is actually a lot of fun! It's pretty buggy though and I've already gotten it to guru. EDIT3: Some more pictures  Some mountains, I'm a terrible pilot who can't keep his glitchy plane straight  The runway. The game starts off in midair, as in the first screenshot here, and you can't really do anything but spin in a circle. Mashing the keyboard gets you here (haven't figured out exactly what button or sequence of buttons does it yet) and it starts behaving like a normal flight sim. You can take off and fly around and stuff, holding the left mouse button down and dragging adjusts thrust, no buttons pressed and dragging controls your plane's movements, right button brings up a yellow box cursor which might be a gun target or something, I was not able to figure out how to shoot anything and there doesn't seem to be anything to shoot games without shooting are lame EDIT4: Found another interesting disk, looks like an early paint program. Trying to open "heart" gave disk errors      d0s fucked around with this message at 12:59 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 11:14
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d0s posted:While looking for the copy of Archon I mentioned earlier in the box of random Amiga disks that came with an A1000 setup I got at a flea market a long time ago (the hardware is long gone sadly) I found something pretty interesting: Interesting, could be a prototype of what was released as Flight Simulator 2, with a placeholder version of the finished displays. The runway graphics here look pretty similar to the demo: 
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Mar 12, 2014 17:02
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d0s posted:
Graphicraft was the first real graphics editor on the Amiga, written by RJ Mical, one of the original Amiga engineers http://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/12v/The-stupidest-thing-a-software-company-can-do.html Included on some early beta versions of Workbench: http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_b0x.html Edit: Oh and it's also what Andy Warhol used at the Amiga launch party.
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Mar 12, 2014 18:16
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Castle Radium posted:Interesting, could be a prototype of what was released as Flight Simulator 2, with a placeholder version of the finished displays. Yeah I was thinking that, especially since some of the interface looks like it was taken straight from Jet, a previous game by the same developer. EDIT: Yeah holy poo poo it's definitely that, check out the landing gear icons etc. d0s fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Mar 13, 2014 |
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Mar 13, 2014 01:55
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While not as old as most of the computers in here I got a new computer for retrogaming today! It's a G4 1Ghz TiBook - the last and fastest Apple laptop to still support OS9 fully. I ended up throwing a brand new 40GB IDE hard drive I got from Amazon in and spending the afternoon loading it up with Tiger and OS9. Now I need to get Toast loaded up so I can play games that are actually fun  EV NOVA HERE I COOOOOOOME
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Mar 14, 2014 04:02
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Lazy Game Reviews covered the Amstrad CPC today. It mostly had a lot of lazy ports of Spectrum games and sometimes added color. It has a bunch of day glow colored keys. That Alan Sugar guy owned the company that made it. Most owners probably wished they had a C64 instead. http://youtu.be/bhzEZcfinsI But it's good info and worth a watch anyhow.
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Mar 14, 2014 22:02
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Bruteman posted:VARLOC - this blew my mind at the time. It's like Archon (everyone here is familiar with Archon I hope) except the battle portions were fought in a 3D wireframe playing field. A couple other titles listed on that site that I dumped hours and hours into:
And you mentioned Rainbow magazine, which was always a loving brick of a magazine. There were also a couple smaller magazines, like Hot Coco, and a third whose name I can't recall but I assume it also sounded vaguely like a fetish mag. I used to write games for all of 'em. I remember one time submitting a text adventure where I'd written the text parser in assembly, and they sent it back with a note saying that they didn't want to require readers to use/have access to an assembler. I generated a scrap of BASIC that had the same code as a bunch of POKE and DATA statements, resubmitted it, and they accepted it.
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Mar 14, 2014 22:24
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Strategy games for C-64? Lessee now... From the lighter end of the spectrum you have to try Sixgun Shootout. This is one of my all-time favorite beer & pretzel strategy games and I'm sad no one has tried to modernize it. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has Blondie start in the bathtub, for chrissakes. While you can't edit maps, you can edit weapon loadouts and character skills, or simply randomize them for replayability. This makes some of the scenarios very, very challenging. Theatre Europe is a classic, not for the gameplay but for the phone number required for nuclear weapons release code. This is one of the earliest (and to my knowledge, only!) anti-war games out there. Worth trying. Zoids is my mandatory action strategy. The action is twitchy in the right parts, but setting up an assault on shield-domed city was the real meat and potatoes. Jam the enemy transmissions, lay down a couple mines to catch enemy runners, evade enemy missile defenses and make good your escape before reinforcements hunt you down... and then figure out how to reach the next four-city complex, to locate all Zoidzilla parts. A true classic. Probably incomprehensible without a manual. Microprose is a legend and their games are very much worth trying. Unfortunately all the best versions are on Amiga, except one. Airborne Ranger, the thinking mans shoot-em-up works best on C-64. M.U.L.E. is one of those games that were so far ahead of their time, they still haven't quite been replicated. A four-player(!) game of cutthroat cartels, colonization and cost efficiency. Build a colony, manufacture resources and mine precious metals, trade with other players and deal with surprises. The game holds up to this day, no excuses made. Wargame Construction Set is probably the best callback to a time that we've lost. Practically every game used to come with editing tools, some simple, some complex. WCS was a surprisingly versatile set of tools which allowed a vast variety of interesting scenarios ranging from a regiment-level clash at Bull Run to individual fantasy adventurers (and a dragon!) to hypermodern mech infantry assault on missile batteries defending Mars. Comes with a few ready-made scenarios but really, the best part of WCS was building battles to challenge your friends or take them on. I've mentioned SSG and their Run 5 engine already in this thread, but it merits another go. Panzer Battles is one example of their games. You command groups of a few battalions to divisions, giving them one high-level order per turn and leaving the details to computer. A very hands-off approach, forcing you to think in different terms than how you would if you could micromanage all your units individually. Emphasizes logistics in fun ways not readily apparent; for example, how do you not turn an unopposed advance into a massive traffic jam when you cannot order individual units around? Storm Across Europe, despite the somewhat clunky UI, is a fun strategy game about Hitlers war in Europe. Very replayable, allows up to 3 human players. Reading the manual is recommended, as some game mechanics will likely go unnoticed otherwise. Games by Gary Grigsby are mostly a historical curiosity by now, but if you want to see the original source where Wargame: Airland Battle draws inspiration from take a look at Kampfgruppe and its sequels Typhoon of Steel, Overrun and ultimately Steel Panthers once hardware got more powerful. Completely unplayable without a manual and a 40-page equipment list that came with each game. If you play strategy games, you probably know brothers Gollop from UFO: Enemy Unknown. Try their previous games! Laser Squad doesn't have the campaign layer but the tactical action is already there. Very replayable and has all the trademark tense moments. Lords of Chaos is another great tactical game, this time a fight between wizards who are out to loot the lands and escape via a portal before all is lost. One of the earliest examples of permanent terrain deformation I can recall. Unfortunately the base game only comes with three scenarios and there isn't much multiplayer balance to speak of but still good fun. Except when your friend bumps into a dragon herb right outside the door. 20 years and I haven't forgotten! Bubbling under: Supremacy, Imperium Galactum, War of the Lance, Archon, Defender of the Crown, Battalion Commander (wanna see how C-64 handles realtime strategy?)and NATO Commander, 50 Mission Crush, They Stole a Million and last but not least Psi-5 Trading Company. And of course you should give Gunship, Pirates!, Project Stealth Fighter, Silent Service and Red Storm Rising a spin. As for RPGs, I'll just pass it on to the master.
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Mar 15, 2014 01:37
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