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flyboi posted:So friend is giving me the Commodore 64 for free! Is there a megapost or any info on what I need to make the thing pimped out for tons of games? Do they support SCART output? The C64 does RF, S-Video and composite, you want S-Video and this is possible via SCART. Special cables are required though. A very good and cheap way to use a C64 with a modern computer screen is to get an old TV-Card for your PC. They can be picked up very cheap and work great with the freeware program DScaler. (direct hardware access = no TV card drivers required!) DScaler even does deinterlacing in software if you need it to, and it also has some filter settings to clean up the picture some. The picture quality depends on what revision C64 it is, although you will never get a perfect picture out of a C64. Some memory timing signal is interfering with the video signal inside the graphics chip, leading to a "jail bar" effect that is especially visible on high resolution screens and with the later revisions of this graphics chip. Some C64s have specific chips that will eventually fail and need to be replaced. Some modifications also could be helpful in lengthening the lifespan of the C64. As disk drives for the C64 are very complicated beasts which are basically their own computers (with the same CPU as the c64 and memory and everything) emulation here is difficult. I can advise this http://www.1541ultimate.net/, it's a floppy emulator with many features that takes a memory card and can even handle very timing-critical loaders, like from demos. It's a bit on the expensive side though. The guy who makes them is dutch and just produces them on the side, so it can take a while after payment to actually get it. There are cheaper solutions but they all have their disadvantages. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jun 1, 2014 |
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Jun 1, 2014 15:20
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Yeah I saw the S-Video stuff after posting and that card. I'm planning on plugging it into my xrgb-mini so I'll just get a s-video cable as that port isn't populated on my device so that should be easy. That flash cart however is really, really expensive. Is there a matrix somewhere that compares the options and what you don't get going with a cheaper option? I honestly know nothing about C64 as I've never used one in my life and throwing that kind of cash down to play games is kinda scary to me.
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Jun 1, 2014 15:35
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The SD2IEC is cheaper if you don't need really high compatibility. http://www.sd2iec.co.uk/
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Jun 1, 2014 16:04
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Police Automaton posted:Its reversible, but I should have been probably more clear: The rewiring has to happen inside the Amiga as the needed signals are not at the disk drive port. It is about soldering a socket adapter you stick between the Amiga and the even CIA chip, switching around the SEL-Lines of the chip making it think the external Drive is DF0: and the internal is DF1: (it'd be better to disconnect the internal drive then, though, as some games will demand to have their second disk inserted in DF1: making you look like a doofus for not having actual disks). You could probably bend the legs of the chips even without doing any soldering, but I wont advise that. I can explain the procedure but I have the feeling it is not what you are looking for. Yeah, that's not a modification I want to perform on my A500, thanks though  RE the warranty seal stuff, I totally don't care about it being intact(definitely didn't pay more for it), and the first thing I did when I got it was shove a screwdriver straight through it to make sure everything was OK inside. I bought it from the original owner who wasn't very technically inclined, and the system was so perfect inside and out I do feel it was the original warranty seal. It's a regular rev6 PAL A500, so no worries about leaky batteries or anything, the caps all look fine too. There was never even a RAM expansion used in it, I installed an aftermarket one without a clock. My A1200 is a later Escom model, do I have to worry about it's caps? I know the "real" Commodore A6/1200s definitely have lousy caps, but not sure about Escoms. d0s fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 01:22
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flyboi posted:So friend is giving me the Commodore 64 for free! Is there a megapost or any info on what I need to make the thing pimped out for tons of games? Do they support SCART output? If you have a Commodore 1084 (or similar) monitor, you can use a C64 video cable. The RCA jacks look like a standard Red/White/Yellow configuration, but the red and yellow are actually split Chroma/Luma as in S-Video, and white is Mono audio. Here's the back of a 1084: http://i.imgur.com/0wJay4D.jpg To play legit games, get a 1541(II) if you're in the US, get a tape drive if you're in Europe. Here is a cable that will let you attach a 1541 to your PC and write disk images to blank 5 1/4" disks, if you want to go that route. Either of the floppy emulators above are a great solution if you don't care about using the real drives. If you're using a NTSC C64, you don't need to worry about demoscene stuff because it's not going to work well or at all, also note that NTSC games sometimes had different titles than their PAL counterparts, and people normally refer to the PAL names. You will need to seek out NTSC fixed versions of games (done by amateur groups) or find the official NTSC releases (which might not exist). EDIT: Might as well post my latest C64 find, this is the NTSC version of Sensible Software's first soccer game, Microprose Soccer. Really fun, arcadey game:  This actually came to me sealed, opening brand new old software is always a trip. Even sealed it was only $20, C64 is a really cheap system to buy games for! d0s fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 01:38
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d0s posted:My A1200 is a later Escom model, do I have to worry about it's caps? I know the "real" Commodore A6/1200s definitely have lousy caps, but not sure about Escoms. My Escom A4000T had caps that tested bad when I was replacing them (though they looked fine) so I'd say it was probably just a matter of time before they would have started leaking.
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Jun 2, 2014 01:50
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EgillSkallagrimsson posted:My Escom A4000T had caps that tested bad when I was replacing them (though they looked fine) so I'd say it was probably just a matter of time before they would have started leaking. Awesome to know, thanks. Sadly I've somehow managed to be into old games and computers for like 20 years without learning how to solder (and have only had one thing die due to caps, a PC-Engine CD-ROM drive), I think I should get around to learning. I'm worried about the X68K more than the A1200 to be honest, it's like a ticking time bomb sitting on my desk.
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Jun 2, 2014 02:10
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d0s posted:My A1200 is a later Escom model, do I have to worry about it's caps? I know the "real" Commodore A6/1200s definitely have lousy caps, but not sure about Escoms. The legend goes that the caps were soldered in too hot at manufacturing and that's why they fail in spades now but the truth is both escom and commodore just took whatever cheapest supplier of the week they could get for their electrical parts and that included the caps. All caps in all SMD models are affected, there are no exceptions. Let me tell you a story about Escom. Escom was a german retailer of computers, think somebody like Newegg in the US, with the exception that they also involved themselves in other parts of the world that is retailing home computers, including the manufacturing. Not so surprising for the early 80s when they started off, as it simply wasn't that high of a volume market. The C64 was very instrumental in kicking that one off, something surprisingly few people in general are aware of, although I am sure most people in this thread are. (to quote Tramiel "computers for the masses, not for the classes". btw. did you know he was a holocaust survivor? Look it up) When companies like ESCOM started off, these were other times. A computer, especially a professional one like an PC was a very serious investment. You could not just go and buy a used core2duo for 50 bucks or something. They were hellish expensive. My first PC was from ESCOM. Anyways back to ESCOM. ESCOM snagged the rights for the Amiga directly out of commodores bankruptcy assets in early '95. There was a not small media campaign stating their goal of producing more batches of the C64, the A1200 and the A4000. Yes these geniuses (initially) still wanted to sell the C64 in 1995 as a serious low-budget gaming console. The Sony Playstation debuted that year. To be fair, it never came to it, though. Quite honestly, by '95 even the AGA-Amigas ESCOM sold (1200/4000) really looked old compared to PCs. They could do nothing what a reasonably modern (for '95) PC couldn't do already much better. There was also really little in the way of Software and everyone having a somewhat beefier Amiga would use it to run MacOS. The AGA chip design was always a bit problematic and only meant as a stopgap to have something new to give to people until the Hombre Chipset was ready, (after the AAA chipset was overtaken by PC developments and canned) and also for the fact that C= basically managed to run almost all the talented engineers from the original Company that made the Amiga off, if they didn't outright lay them off. (Commodore didn't come up with the Amiga, they bought the company that did) If you look at the custom chip designs of the AGA chipset closely, you'll find fairly quickly that most of it is just the ECS chipset from older Amigas, with some features straddled to the chips. You would maybe even get the impression that the people making it lacked the understanding of the older chipset. Some chips even remained completely unchanged, for example the CIAs which are for many purposes just slightly upgraded designs of what was used already in the C64. Then there were things like the Buster-Chip who manages the Zorro III bus in A3000 and 4000s and was basically hacked together by David Haynie alone by more or less his own discretion, while in the PC world dozens of companies and hundreds of people worked on things like VLB and EISA. It was just not a race Commodore could have won at this point, the funds weren't there and their "head in the sand" management strategy didn't help. Funnily enough, the CD32 (which was an amiga-chipset based games console not dissimilar to the Playstation) sold really, really well in the US and might have tided the company over for longer. Commodore just ran out of money to produce it. Well anyways. ESCOM faced quite a few logistical challenges with their big Plan, for example missing blueprints for some of the custom chips. Not even kidding here. By pure coincidence HP (which manufactured some of the custom chips of the AGA-Agmias) still had Masks in storage, also even more important ESCOM was successful in securing some old stocks of assorted parts and Tools to make them, like for the plastic cases. So ESCOM Amigas are basically the worst in the chipset department because you have no idea what revision chips you are getting, because they put into the computers literally whatever they could find. ESCOM also started a daughter company called Amiga Technologies GmbH, which also was succesful in acquiring some ex-commodore people. (I have a few chips here labeled with "AmigaTech" instead of "CSG". How much was produced where I have no idea and it does not seem anyone really does.) They actually managed a lot in their short life, they created the "Walker" (which was supposed to be a new Amiga) which, while still technologically quite disappointing, might just have paved the way for a future for the Amiga. It was basically a bit of an easier to make A4000 with some Operating System bugfixes and expansions and some low-level hardware additions added to some programmable FPGAs. (as opposed to masked chips, making the computer cheaper in lower production runs) The Walker was received very badly though in the big Amiga community of Germany, as it was just another glued-together stopgap like AGA pretty much already was without any real improvements and the gap to the IBM clones was getting bigger and bigger. The 68k CPU line also had no future, the Pentium was out and Motorola started focusing on the PowerPC architecture. (Which was highly encouraged by Apple which never even used the latest-gen 68060 in their machines, Apple was also struggling very hard and almost declared bankruptcy themselves) Amiga Technologies also went into talks with Phase 5 for creating an PPC-based Amiga. Phase 5 being a germany-seated company, highly acclaimed for their 68k and PPC accelerators for Amigas and Macs. The sales of the Amigas also went really surprisingly well (as they were sold very aggressively and cheap) and things were looking up. It never came to all that though, as just a year later, ESCOM declared bankruptcy (they made a few very bad strategical decisions, their bankruptcy wasn't the fault of the Amiga though) and everything regarding Amiga was sold off to Gateway 2000. Things lingered on afterwards and there was even a new release of modern Amiga computers, an upgrade to the old 68k Operating System and a new PPC AmigaOS but nothing of that really is of much notice. So in short - no ESCOM Amigas don't have better caps. I don't really know why I wrote all that even, I just randomly remembered it and thought that maybe some people would be interested in the ESCOM-Amiga connection. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 03:25
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Police Automaton posted:So in short - no ESCOM Amigas don't have better caps. I don't really know why I wrote all that even, I just randomly remembered it and thought that maybe some people would be interested in the ESCOM-Amiga connection. It was interesting anyway, so thanks. I am actually reading a book about Commodore and Tramiel right now called "A Company on the Edge", fascinating stuff. The author of the book is kind of nutty politically if you check out his Twitter, but he doesn't let it leak into the book very often. He was supposed to do a followup book about the Amiga, but has said that project is canceled EDIT: Here's a really great video I found about Sensible Soccer, very interesting to watch as a US person who missed out on all this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f9RNup5rEs The Tehkan Soccer arcade game that inspired Microprose Soccer looks amazingly fun to play on the real cabinet, would love to try one. d0s fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 03:31
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Police Automaton posted:Things lingered on afterwards and there was even a new release of modern Amiga computers, an upgrade to the old 68k Operating System and a new PPC AmigaOS but nothing of that really is of much notice. edit: MorphOS, on the other hand, was pretty handy awhile back when I wanted to set up an old Mac for the nieces to watch videos on. It was, surprisingly, able to play 720p mkv files on a 1.42ghx PPC without stuttering. Something even OSX failed to do. EgillSkallagrimsson fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 04:03
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EgillSkallagrimsson posted:Anybody up for a good laugh should look into the X1000 and the current state of OS 4 hardware. I really can't understand the devotion to Amiga OS. I understand it's capabilities were awesome in the 80's, but using it today is kind of nightmarish. I absolutely love the Amiga as a game machine and for some standalone programs like DPaint but I dread using Workbench when I have to, it goes beyond the bad interface; the system internals are just really bizarre to me and I don't understand why anyone would use it today beyond nostalgia. Getting my 1200 talking to the internet (see my post about it earlier in this thread) was a grueling process I wouldn't wish upon anybody, and I'm used to lots of really unfriendly UNIX systems and stuff. I love the Amiga hardware as much as anybody but the people trying to bring the OS back seem truly crazy to me.
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Jun 2, 2014 04:12
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d0s posted:I really can't understand the devotion to Amiga OS. I understand it's capabilities were awesome in the 80's, but using it today is kind of nightmarish. I absolutely love the Amiga as a game machine and for some standalone programs like DPaint but I dread using Workbench when I have to, it goes beyond the bad interface; the system internals are just really bizarre to me and I don't understand why anyone would use it today beyond nostalgia. Getting my 1200 talking to the internet (see my post about it earlier in this thread) was a grueling process I wouldn't wish upon anybody, and I'm used to lots of really unfriendly UNIX systems and stuff. I love the Amiga hardware as much as anybody but the people trying to bring the OS back seem truly crazy to me. I actually love AmigaOS and if you are used to it and apply the proper patches, it can work really well. It's a proper dinosaur though and the worst downside is no memory protection whatsoever. One App misbehaves and writes into memory locations it is not supposed to and lots of bad things can happen, but that's just how it was. The only thing I find really bad is the hackish support for graphics cards which were really never properly intended by Commodore, most graphics cards being hardware hacks in their own right. A 1024x768x256 Workbench can be really nice and snappy though and the Apps can be really refreshingly elegant in their simplicity, compared to the bloatware you get on the PC nowadays. With the newer incarnations and alternatives I have never bothered as I am using a PC for proper everyday computing like a sane person. AROS' furry logo is pretty disturbing tho'. I think many people who spend that kind of money on an AmigaOS 4 System just want to be special Snowflakes who don't know what Linux is. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 04:29
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d0s posted:If you have a Commodore 1084 (or similar) monitor, you can use a C64 video cable. The RCA jacks look like a standard Red/White/Yellow configuration, but the red and yellow are actually split Chroma/Luma as in S-Video, and white is Mono audio. Here's the back of a 1084: http://i.imgur.com/0wJay4D.jpg How does C64 handle video output? Are NTSC straight up NTSC and it's not up to the software? I do know that I can put 50hz into my xrgb-mini and it will upscale fine to 1080p so I was just hoping that the system didn't care about 50/60hz and just did whatever the program said.
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Jun 2, 2014 04:37
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flyboi posted:How does C64 handle video output? Are NTSC straight up NTSC and it's not up to the software? I do know that I can put 50hz into my xrgb-mini and it will upscale fine to 1080p so I was just hoping that the system didn't care about 50/60hz and just did whatever the program said. PAL and NTSC C64s are different machines that run at different clocks and everything. They are not compatible to each other and switching NTSC to PAL involves soldering and exchanging the graphics chips.
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Jun 2, 2014 04:42
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flyboi posted:How does C64 handle video output? Are NTSC straight up NTSC and it's not up to the software? I do know that I can put 50hz into my xrgb-mini and it will upscale fine to 1080p so I was just hoping that the system didn't care about 50/60hz and just did whatever the program said. I wish it was that simple but no, unless you do some hacking you're not gonna be running PAL software on a NTSC machine  It's not like the Amiga where you really need a PAL system to play the majority of games though, plenty of awesome stuff had NTSC releases, aside from Turrican and Armalyte I don't really miss anything with my NTSC system. You will absolutely miss out on demos though, which is a major bummer and the reason I'm looking for a PAL C64. I've managed to put together a really nice library of NTSC games (click for big):  
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Jun 2, 2014 04:53
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The gently caress is Mind-Roll Man I swear there were infinite games released in the 1980s. I love it. I like that your copy of Super Boulderdash is molded in almost the same way my copy is, haha.
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Jun 2, 2014 06:46
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Quarex posted:The gently caress is Mind-Roll I have Mind Roll in Cart format. Eventually I will have a Coco3 to play it:  Sadly the Robocop and Predator games are more or less based off the NES titles. Rad Warrior is sometimes known as Sacred Armor of Antirad in PAL land. (Barbarian over there? Death Sword over here. Nebulus over there? Tower Toppler here.)
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Jun 2, 2014 07:11
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Quarex posted:The gently caress is Mind-Roll Mind roll is called Quedex in PAL land, you roll a ball around mazes and stuff. Absurdly good music, the SID was so great.
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Jun 2, 2014 07:16
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Captain Rufus posted:I have Mind Roll in Cart format. Eventually I will have a Coco3 to play it: I had ATOM for my CoCo when I was a kid, I didn't understand really what was going on and I was never very good at it
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Jun 2, 2014 13:50
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d0s posted:I really can't understand the devotion to Amiga OS. I understand it's capabilities were awesome in the 80's, but using it today is kind of nightmarish. I absolutely love the Amiga as a game machine and for some standalone programs like DPaint but I dread using Workbench when I have to, it goes beyond the bad interface; the system internals are just really bizarre to me and I don't understand why anyone would use it today beyond nostalgia. Getting my 1200 talking to the internet (see my post about it earlier in this thread) was a grueling process I wouldn't wish upon anybody, and I'm used to lots of really unfriendly UNIX systems and stuff. I love the Amiga hardware as much as anybody but the people trying to bring the OS back seem truly crazy to me. I can kind of see it up until the late 90s to be honest. It wasn't really until Windows 98 came out that there was a decent solution for PCs--Windows 95 was very clunky in a lot of ways and the transition from DOS was very messy. And DOS didn't even have a GUI. Pre-OSX Mac OS was a good OS but while less so than Windows 95, was very unstable and crash-prone, plus the Mac platform in the 90s was really fractured in general. Amiga OS was clunky but it still was a pretty good alternative back then.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:04
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Police Automaton posted:Escom and Walker stuff Ahhh, that was when even swivel-eyed fanboys like me knew the game was up. Everyone took the piss out of the Walker, largely for looking like a Hoover  (Hi-hi-hilarious 32 colour Amiga viewable image circa 1996 courtesy of - good Lord - Aminet, somehow, still) Never mind, I'm sure the tower version will look fine  oh
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Jun 2, 2014 20:53
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Genpei Turtle posted:I can kind of see it up until the late 90s to be honest. It wasn't really until Windows 98 came out that there was a decent solution for PCs--Windows 95 was very clunky in a lot of ways and the transition from DOS was very messy. And DOS didn't even have a GUI. Pre-OSX Mac OS was a good OS but while less so than Windows 95, was very unstable and crash-prone, plus the Mac platform in the 90s was really fractured in general. Amiga OS was clunky but it still was a pretty good alternative back then. I'm pretty sure the game was up once System 7 came out but maybe I'm the crazy one. It's just a usability and interface design thing, I know the tech was there but my god the interface was abhorrent (to me). I understand that if you use all sorts of addon programs and system hardware expansions you can get it resembling something approaching user friendliness but out of the box Workbench 3 just feels so behind it's contemporaries.
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Jun 3, 2014 01:38
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d0s posted:I'm pretty sure the game was up once System 7 came out but maybe I'm the crazy one. It's just a usability and interface design thing, I know the tech was there but my god the interface was abhorrent (to me). I understand that if you use all sorts of addon programs and system hardware expansions you can get it resembling something approaching user friendliness but out of the box Workbench 3 just feels so behind it's contemporaries. System 7 was pretty awesome. (actual multitasking, holy crap!) I have some rose-colored glasses for it--it was the OS of the first computer I bought with my own money, earned via a demeaning part-time job. But holy hell was it ever unstable. Constant freezes, playing with extension managers and fiddling with memory allocations for each program--it was a mess. Oddly enough the tiny handful of games it had were pretty awesome. In terms of graphics and sound it was pretty much head and shoulders above everything else until 3D acceleration took off. Look at Pathways Into Darkness or Marathon vs Doom 2 and the like. Or Prince of Persia 2 compared to its DOS counterpart. Anything that was a direct DOS port was always glaringly obvious.
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Jun 3, 2014 03:12
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Genpei Turtle posted:System 7 was pretty awesome. (actual multitasking, holy crap!) I have some rose-colored glasses for it--it was the OS of the first computer I bought with my own money, earned via a demeaning part-time job. But holy hell was it ever unstable. Constant freezes, playing with extension managers and fiddling with memory allocations for each program--it was a mess. Just anecdotally I experience far more instability on my A1200 with wb3.1 vs my Performa 631CD with 7.6. It's not the fairest comparison but I think the Mac OS was the winner in terms of usability, and had more logical internals. It was also just way, way better looking to me. Amiga OS has always felt very "hackish" to me, but this is going into subjective territory. I like the Amiga (OCS/ECS) better than the Mac as a games machine, just because it got more of the type of games I like to play. I think the Mac gets overlooked a lot and if you actually remember those times it almost always had the best versions of the games it did get and it's exclusives were phenomenal. I wanted a Mac badly as DOS PC user and gamer in those days. If I had known the Amiga 500/2000 existed (  ) I would have wanted them more.
d0s fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jun 3, 2014 |
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Jun 3, 2014 05:13
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Retro Computing: Why Bother? Special: 1987 SSI Catalog. Why am I photographing an SSI catalog to share? Well for FUN mostly. For nostalgia. To share said fun and nostalgia. Also because it came in a boxed game I got cheap this week. A game with the best cover ever:  This is without a doubt the best electronic game cover EVER. It's so absurdly ridiculous and pandering to every 12 year old boy it isn't even funny. And that is why it rules. We have a dude with a shirtless vest on top of a truck holding on to it while standing with ONE HAND so the other can hold a crossbow while his BEST WOMAN who found the last remaining spandex bodysuit is holding on to him with one hand so she can have the other for her submachine gun. Oh... and he has on big 80s sunglasses because I don't know. He is just THAT COOL. I want a poster of this for my living room. I will frame it. Anyhow, let's move on to the catalog inside the box!  Front and back cover. It is the summer of 1987. I have finished 7th Grade and am about to endure the hell of 8th. I am spending this summer mostly putzing around with my NES and being pushed away from Transformers thanks to my mother who was a horrible person or completely nuts. The front cover there on the right is amusingly cheesy. 1987 computer nerds playing wargames of all things are probably not ones who go to the beach much. The back cover there on the left shows the game they are pushing right now. I cannot say this is a title I really ever wanted.  Our new games for the quarter! B24 seems kinda bleh much like President Elect. I love me a good wargame so Rebel Charge is a game I might look into getting in the future. I played the prequel to Eternal Dagger there (Wizard's Crown) on my C64 but never really got into it. If I can get it cheap for my Atari 8 bit I wouldn't mind trying it out. It is apparently a bit improved as sequels should be.  In 1987 the 16 bit Amiga and Atari ST were actually a little bit popular. Hence the ST getting four conversions of some RPGs of the day. DOS PCs got three, and the Amiga got one. For a very short period in the mid-late 80s the Atari ST looked like the horse to back. Then PCs got more and more popular in spite of the default CGA graphics being eye searingly bad in spite of being such expensive machines. And the Amiga took over from the ST for the enthusiast home computer gamer until both companies basically imploded in spite of both doing brisk sales in Europe.  Note they aren't calling them RPGs in spite of most of them being as such. The Commodore 64 was still KING at this time, though even a year from now when I would have the machine I would start to see more and more games appear for the PC and then maybe the Amiga. The Apple II series was the strong second place in spite of how bad its' audiovisual capabilities were. The Atari 8 bit was in this timeframe what the Apple II would be in a year and a half, and the C64 in two. Clearly not getting as many new games, but still plenty of titles to find. But we didn't have Ebay back then. So it was mail order discounters, dumb luck at garage sales, or the odd bit at retailers. In general most retailers outside of specialty stores only carried C64 heavily, with a smattering of other machines, most of which would have their space taken up by PC eventually. (Oh yeah. I pretty much want every game on this page just about. Some are easier to get than others.) Now for the four pages covering SSI's meat and potatoes (Until the AD&D Gold Box series came around anyhow..), WARGAMES. If hex and chit people think it is hard to find people to play these games with now, it was still very hard back then. Computers let one actually get one's fix without having to play solitaire and feel like a big loser. Bigger than one would already be for moving tiny pieces of cardboard on hex maps and referring to huge and complicated rulebooks.  The Cold War was in it's dying days around now but there were still the odd game simulating those potential conflicts. Of course World War 2 and the American Civil War were the main focus of wargaming. And they mostly still are. I wouldn't mind having Mech Brigade, Computer Ambush, Gettysburg, or Antietam from these pages.  I have passed on Knights of the Desert a couple of times but I wouldn't mind it honestly. I have Field of Fire already. Panzer Grenadier might not be too bad but it seems to be another wargame where you can only play the Germans and this kinda creeps me out. Nam I would like to get though. That conflict tends to not be covered too much. The wounds are still fresh even though it ended around forty years ago. Well forty from TODAY. So that era was to me what the 80s are to kids today. Yes folks we are old now. Broadsides I would like to get because AGE OF SAIL NAVAL COMBAT. Battalion Commander is a primitive RTS and I am not sure it is my bag. I have a previous RTS from SSI though. I already have Wargame Construction Set. Wouldn't mind checking out Colonial Conquest too.  Data Disks! Update your game without having to buy the whole thing over again! Electronic Arts HATES THIS. And they have proven idiots will rebuy the same sports game year after year with merely a roster update and a couple tweaks. The old days when a single paragraph was all one needed for a preview of a future game. Nowadays we merely look to the future and not backwards or what is out now. The other page has an accelerator card for Apple II computers to make them run faster, all for a mere 230 1987 dollars! A savings over 280! CHEAP. (Well for Apple I guess it was.) SSI advertising their free newsletter. I had a few of these but sadly I think they are lost to the ether. Some clearance prices for games without their boxes, and adverts to subscribe to Computer Gaming World or Fire & Movement.  And we end our little trip with the SSI LIST OF GAMES. This covers most of what is in the catalog in a nice easy to read format including system requirements. Going by this list, the Apple II and Commodore 64 are tied with the most games, with the Atari 8 bit rounding out the top three. The PC is just starting to take off, though most of the titles look and play worse than any of the rest. Macs have a mere four games, the Amiga six, and the ST eight. You would think from this list the four 16 bit machines wouldn't be a good buy. And well honestly for a US computer person of the time none of them really WERE. Within two years however everything would change. Perhaps when I find a 1989-90 catalog I will even show you. Until then laugh at the prices. One rarely ordered direct from the publisher because every mail order store and even most brick and mortar retailers sold games cheaper than MSRP back then. There was no real price fixing the way videogames are today. VVVV That's very kind of you! I generally like to use legit things I own whenever I can. And I might have a later catalog in Combat Leader or Gemstone Warrior. I just have to dig em out of the tub. I also need to switch tubs for the Atari or make use of this cool 3 shelf thing I got that probably would hold less but look classier. (As classy as a 13 dollar piece of plastic from Target can anyhow.) Captain Rufus fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Jun 3, 2014 |
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Jun 3, 2014 06:05
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Captain Rufus posted:Perhaps when I find a 1989-90 catalog I will even show you.
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Jun 3, 2014 07:32
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d0s posted:Just anecdotally I experience far more instability on my A1200 with wb3.1 vs my Performa 631CD with 7.6. It's not the fairest comparison but I think the Mac OS was the winner in terms of usability, and had more logical internals. It was also just way, way better looking to me. Amiga OS has always felt very "hackish" to me, but this is going into subjective territory. I lately spend some time with 68k Macs too, having basically known next to nothing about them.  I got a used Performa 475 that basically still looks like new and costed next to nothing. I *love* desktop cases. I think towers are ugly. (I have a deadly expensive Lian Li Case for my PC just because I looked for an comfortably sized and well produced case that wasn't some "xxxtreme gamer" thing and looked like a LED-lit clowns rear end in a top hat. I still think this Performa is way prettier) The first thing I noticed was how much better and thought out the whole case is. While the Amiga cases are, lets face it, super cheap and like to have parts breaking off just from opening them, and aren't really intended to be opened at all, the Performa case was laid out to be easily maintained. There's one Screw that is optional and keeps the case from being opened and everything else inside is neatly compartmented and completely screw-less.   This specific computer has 1 MB Video-RAM (the two sticks in the lower right corner) a nice graphics chip (right besides it) and at the top the sound chip, memory controller etc.. Equipped by default with a 680LC040 25 Mhz (LC means "Low Cost" = no FPU) and 4 MB of RAM, this machine is upgraded to 36 MB via a 32 MB memory stick. I upgraded this machine to a full 68040 with 33 Mhz by now. (Soldering required) It's quite a beefy little machine and a similarly equipped Amiga would set you back a few hundred bucks today. This computer costed me about twenty-five. It also has onboard SCSI and an expansion port at the top. (I got a network card for it, also very cheap and never used, still in it's original packaging) Now here it already starts with Macs. Contrary to Commodore, Apple was very hush-hush about the specifications of the custom chips and there seems to be very little knowledge about them in general. Apple unlike Commodore didn't have a Chip fab and had them all produced outside by different manufacturers. That's about all I know about them. There's not a big retro community around old Macs either, which doesn't help. Apple highly discouraged direct bit-banging (writing software that directly accesses the Hardware and bypasses the OS) and basically all Apple-Software is very OS-friendly written. (which is an advantage for the Amiga, I'll come to that later) Even not only almost all games, but also lots of Amiga Apps directly accessed the Amiga-Chipset and Commodore did very little to discourage such practices, which led to such things like Deluxe Paint being unable to use a graphics card even if you had one. Commodore kept promising unified APIs and OS-hooks for 3rd party graphics- and sound cards but never delivered on that, which means that all graphics cards drivers that exist for the Amiga to this day are third party hacks that replace certain OS-functions in memory (hooray for no memory protection) with varying degrees of compatibility problems. Somebody also came up with something similar for soundcards. Most of these systems are actually well written and were developed till the late 90s - early 00s but still, they are hacks and there are compatibility problems sometimes. No such things on the Mac. Apple was much better at offering clean ways for programmers to work with their OS. To be entirely fair to AmigaOS though, it was an amazing operating system when it first debuted and many years after, the multitasking was great, the graphical GUI was highly responsive on a comparably slow CPU.. it was just amazing that such a thing existed. Middle of the 90s, not so much anymore. Still to this day, you can make it a very comfortable experience with the propper apps and patches. You just have to dig in and you will even find it is a quite powerful and customizable system. I'd even put it above System 7 and 8 regarding that. About the Amiga you also have to understand that it did not have a BIOS in the traditional modern sense. As all Amigas were more or less created equally in certain ways, it was not necessary. The Kickstart-ROM actually directly contains parts of AmigaOS and is accessed for certain functions. Now, almost all games that ran from disks bypassed a lot of that and disabled the OS, so games basically took over the entire computer and came with their own file structure on the disk, their own way of handling the memory etc. etc.. So you could say, every game was it's own island. That's also the reason why usually, you can't even read the files of a game disk from the Workbench. It just doesn't understand the file system used as the programmer came up with something himself. You can see how completely different this is from what Macs did, or what programmers do today. It was necessary though, as you really needed to squeeze the last bit of performance the computer could offer. High programming languages existed, but lots of things were written or at least hand-optimized in Assembler. That's why I always say that Programmers back then actually knew a lot about computers and were a lot more skilled. Programmers today just slap together a dozen of 3rd party libraries and call it a day. Now to the nice thing an Amiga can do with all this I alluded already a few times earlier to: An Amiga has almost no problem whatsoever running MacOS from inside AmigaOS. All that is needed for that is Shapeshifer or Fusion (two Amiga Mac-Emulators, google them) and a Mac-ROM image. As all Mac Apps are written so OS friendly, there are almost no compatibility problems and also almost no speed loss, as the CPU architectures are the same and there is no direct access to hardware from Applications and Games that needs to be caught by emulating. I can run everything up to and including System 8.1 on my Amiga 2000 just fine, vastly expanding the Software library my Amiga can use, as 68k Mac Apps and Games were developed much longer. Duke3D, Warcraft II and Master of Orion, or Netscape Navigator and Adobe Photoshop are just a few games&apps I can run on my Amiga 2000 via Mac Emulation. The funny thing is also as I have an 68060 inside my Amiga and the 68060 is so vastly superior to the 68040, my Amiga is actually faster running Mac Software than any 68k Mac that was ever made. Because Mac software is also written so OS friendly, I can also actually use my Amiga graphics card with them, and am not dependent on the slower and limited Amiga Chipset anymore. MacOS and AmigaOS both run concurrently, I can mount Mac-Harddisk images inside the AmigaOS and switch between them with a key combination. It's a lot like running a virtual machine these days. This was the primary function of many Amigas post '95 and expanded the lifetime of the System by quite a few years. I am always surprised how many people do not know this today. Why the Amiga is more popular than the Mac I can explain though. As the Amiga existed in many Kids' bedrooms there's a lot more nostalgia for them. The Macs you'd find in working places, (at best) maybe in schools and at the dentists office. They just have a completely different place in people's minds. EDIT: A little advise to 68k Mac owners: They also suffer from leaking SMD-Caps. The pictured machine had to have all it's caps replaced as at least half of them were already leaking. Take care of it. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jun 3, 2014 |
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Jun 3, 2014 14:28
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Captain Rufus posted:VVVV That's very kind of you! I generally like to use legit things I own whenever I can. And I might have a later catalog in Combat Leader or Gemstone Warrior. I just have to dig em out of the tub. I also need to switch tubs for the Atari or make use of this cool 3 shelf thing I got that probably would hold less but look classier. (As classy as a 13 dollar piece of plastic from Target can anyhow.) I can scan 'em if you're interested. I had assumed that since Curse of the Azure Bonds was a 1989 game it would have the 89-90 catalog, but apparently the one I have was printed later.
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Jun 3, 2014 22:26
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SubG posted:Turns out my ancient copy of Curse of the Azure Bonds has two catalogs in it, both from 1992. One is `1992 Catalog: The Magic of Computer Role-Playing' and the other is a smaller fold-out thing labelled `New from SSI! Summer 1992 Catalog Update...WE'VE GOT WHAT'S HOT!' I went through my SSI games of Atari 8 bit vintage. Has the 1988 Summer catalog. I am currently flattening it because it was somehow bent. (It is under multiple volumes of the collected Strangers in Paradise comic.) I miight make use of those later ones if I don't have any other newer ones myself. I haven't looked in my PC game SSI boxes lately. I might however also do a catalog thingie with some of my old Avalon Hill catalogs too. But they are as much boardgame as computer. (Luckily my blog's primary focus is supposed to be hobby gaming so it like has double use as opposed to just DURR HERE IS MORE RETRO COMPUTER STUFF http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/ ) These catalogs and the like are a really good indicator of how poo poo really was back in the day as opposed to MY CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIC MEMORIES SAY THIS WHEN I LIVED IN RICH gently caress LAND. (Like Genpei!  )I even have a couple old Amiga mags I kind of want to do this to as well. Just photograph the whole fuckin thing. Yeah photos look uglier than scans but its less copyright infringing (I cover Games Workshop stuff a lot. They can be.. special about such things.), and a bit easier than dealing with my Canon printer's dumb rear end scanning program. I am an ethical retro gamer. I even try my hardest to own legit copies of games even if I just play em in an emulator. 
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Jun 3, 2014 23:48
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The back of the summer catalog update has a list of prices on the back, which the regular catalog doesn't have. Eighty bucks for a game on a floppy. And that ain't a record.
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Jun 4, 2014 00:47
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What's a good place to read up on running an Amiga/Amiga emulator? I'm not interested in any coding/fiddling with the hardware, just getting and playing the games I wanted but couldn't get as a kid. I want basically the Amiga equivalent of autoexec/config/conventional memory configuration, IRQ/DMA on sound cards, etc. Something that gamers of the day took for basic skills but would surprise a first-time user.
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Jun 4, 2014 00:58
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Pierzak posted:What's a good place to read up on running an Amiga/Amiga emulator? I'm not interested in any coding/fiddling with the hardware, just getting and playing the games I wanted but couldn't get as a kid. I want basically the Amiga equivalent of autoexec/config/conventional memory configuration, IRQ/DMA on sound cards, etc. Something that gamers of the day took for basic skills but would surprise a first-time user. If you just want to play games the Amiga is essentially a console. Turn on, put disk in drive. Get an Amiga 500 or emulate one using an Amiga 500 profile.
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Jun 4, 2014 01:03
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poo poo I am overloaded with classic gaming catalogs considering my huge assortment of complete-in-box games from ~1988-199X. That seems like a worthy project for the next time I assault my parents' house.Captain Rufus posted:A game with the best cover ever: (Plus that really is great cover art, I agree) And wow, never heard of Realms of Darkness before, despite being an SSI fanboy at one point. Um, wow, Adventure/RPG, too; that genre is so small that I am shocked this game has not received any attention. It must really suck! And drat I legitimately got chills seeing that master list of SSI games. I cannot even tell you how much time I spent as a child, generally of course in the months leading up to my birthday or Christmas, carefully circling games in lists just like that one. And I often selected games based entirely on their title since I somehow did not know about the concept of gaming magazines, haha. poo poo, I had Gemstone Warrior for my Atari, but I had no idea I could have gotten into Phantasie and Questron on my first computer, too. That would have really accelerated my shift towards being an RPG fiend I think.
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Jun 4, 2014 02:22
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One thing that's immediately obvious from those scans is just how cheap computer gaming has gotten. Phantasie III costs $88 in 2014 dollars. War in Russia costs $176 in 2014 dollars. No wonder we could barely afford games back then, and piracy was so rampant.
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Jun 4, 2014 02:27
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Captain Rufus posted:I am an ethical retro gamer. I even try my hardest to own legit copies of games even if I just play em in an emulator. I feel the same way. Wages of Waris shipping to me, hope to have it running on dedicated Win95 hardware, or Win95 virtual machine/linux mint+wine soon. For anyone interesting in retro-gaming with linux, I cannot over-recommend Linux Mint 32bit. Linux Mint is one of the easiest Linux distributions to work with for newcomers to linux, and installing DOSBOX or WINE on linux mint is very easy. Linux Mint 64bit works too, but 64bit WINE's code hasn't fully implemented all the fixes of 32bit WINE, so you might have to manually patch & recompile 64bit WINE. AKA use LinuxMint 32bit. I've also spent the past 3 weeks trying to track down a boxed copy of electronic arts title Fountain of Dreams. I know FoD is extremely rough, and all the other shortcomings it has compared to Wasteland 1, but I'd still like to track down a legit copy & play it. If anyone has any leads on a copy of Fountain of Dreams(IBM version preferred), please contact me.
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Jun 4, 2014 02:52
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Police Automaton posted:Why the Amiga is more popular than the Mac I can explain though. As the Amiga existed in many Kids' bedrooms there's a lot more nostalgia for them. The Macs you'd find in working places, (at best) maybe in schools and at the dentists office. They just have a completely different place in people's minds. In the US this is different, lots of people have Mac nostalgia because they were in most of our public schools, whereas Amigas were mostly used for TV production work, and were rarely seen in schools or homes. The first Amiga I ever saw was an A2500 with a Video Toaster in my high school's TV production lab. In the 1980's I think the A1000 did pretty well as a general purpose/gaming machine but soon faded into obscurity here, and the A500/2000 sold only to hardcore people/video people in the A2000's case. Our computer culture was heavily into the PC standard at the time and lots of publications warned people against deviating from it. Combine that with a big console game culture but a kind of underground/older computer game culture (pretty much the opposite of what was going on in Europe) and you have a recipe for disaster for the Amiga. It wasn't a case of kids having something different in their bedrooms, it was a case of most kids simply not having a computer in their bedrooms period (but typically having a NES or similar). I was lucky enough to have found a NTSC A1000 and A500 at a flea market here in the late 90's, and later even an Escom NTSC A1200 at a thrift store. But there was seriously nothing to do with any of them because there was just no NTSC content. I only really started having fun when I got a PAL A500, and started playing all the great Amiga games that we missed here.
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Jun 4, 2014 03:02
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Pierzak posted:What's a good place to read up on running an Amiga/Amiga emulator? I'm not interested in any coding/fiddling with the hardware, just getting and playing the games I wanted but couldn't get as a kid. I want basically the Amiga equivalent of autoexec/config/conventional memory configuration, IRQ/DMA on sound cards, etc. Something that gamers of the day took for basic skills but would surprise a first-time user. Get WinUAE, find --->A500 Kickstart 1.3 ROM<--- (like the Amiga BIOS) and put it where WinUAE wants it, use the quickstart configuration for "A500" that says (most common) next to it. Leave "NTSC" unchecked no matter where you are. Insert your game .adf ROM in the virtual floppy drive (df0) and reset. Don't get suckered into paying for Amiga Forever. If you want to buy an Amiga make sure you get the same configuration and make sure it's PAL. d0s fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 03:04
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Pierzak posted:What's a good place to read up on running an Amiga/Amiga emulator? I'm not interested in any coding/fiddling with the hardware, just getting and playing the games I wanted but couldn't get as a kid. I want basically the Amiga equivalent of autoexec/config/conventional memory configuration, IRQ/DMA on sound cards, etc. Something that gamers of the day took for basic skills but would surprise a first-time user. Well there is a place that has made a shitload of Amiga games into UAE executables in Windows with a couple function keys for emulation option menus and to savestate things. (No normal saving possible.) But that would be :files: so I can't link it here. Ask me in #retrochat if you ever come by IRC way. (irc.synirc.net) I have bought DOS ports on GOG or owned an Amiga game then played it using an executable. Win UAE can be fiddly. In some cases there are Genesis or PC ports for the early 90s era that hold up nicely. Maybe not as good but usually. Sometimes better! (And for Genesis if the game runs too fast? Go to 50hz PAL mode in your favorite emu!) And yeah retail games cost a LOT back then. But in late 1988 dollars Ultimas mostly retailed for 60 MSRP, even for ones 3-4 years old at the time. Except mail order places sold them for 40. People always forget games used to be heavily discounted. Like almost always. And eventually got on compilations or just generally discounted. Not to mention anyone who could pirate usually DID. Quarex: I am pretty sure Joe Chiodo wouldn't be willing to sell, and I wouldn't be capable of affording it. Now a poster or a 10-20 dollar print? That I could manage.
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Jun 4, 2014 03:35
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Captain Rufus posted:Well there is a place that has made a shitload of Amiga games into UAE executables in Windows with a couple function keys for emulation option menus and to savestate things. (No normal saving possible.) I seriously don't get what's so hard about using WinUAE that people need things like this.
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Jun 4, 2014 03:36
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d0s posted:I seriously don't get what's so hard about using WinUAE that people need things like this. WinUAE can be kind of a pain to use and configure on its own without a proper frontend. FS-UAE I've had a lot better luck with.
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Jun 4, 2014 04:18
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