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Mak0rz posted:This game loving rules and I'm sad it doesn't really exist anymore "From the makers of The Incredible Machine..." Contraption Maker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXER2hPuZfw My earliest memories of computing is of a Chendai brand IBM clone. All the games we had for it, I think, Dad got from work. The first was a shareware collection of generic versions of popular arcade games of the time - "Gorilla Gorilla!", "ASCII Man", etc. All were ASCII graphics. There was a lunar landing game called "Eagle Lander". One of the family favourites was a horse race game called "PC Derby"; you didn't actually do anything in it except watch the horses. It must have had it's own weird operating system because you had to boot from the disk (5 1/4") and you couldn't read it in DOS. We had Alley Cat, too (we knew it as just "Cat"). Our PC was pretty slow and monochrome so for a long time we thought all there was to it was jumping onto the fence and the clothes lines and dodging the occasional shoe thrown. I remember being blown away when I played it on a slightly newer computer with CGA graphics and realised, "Wow! You can go into the windows?!". Another favourite was PT 109, a patrol torpedo boat simulator. Gonzo the Eggman has a new favorite as of 13:18 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 13:04
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Gonzo the Eggman posted:"From the makers of The Incredible Machine..." drat that looks good. And drat I hate the term 'maker' for some reason.
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Jan 15, 2016 13:15
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Humphreys posted:drat that looks good. And drat I hate the term 'maker' for some reason. "From the Mak0rz of The Incredible Machine..."
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Jan 15, 2016 13:20
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Mak0rz posted:Being a gamer from the Amiga era must have really been something. A lot of the games I see look fantastic and have pretty amazing soundtracks for the era. my first computer was an amiga, not the 2000 but the og one where either 32kb or 64kb of ram were these huge external boxes you slapped on the side of the computer case and the os was first loaded into ram on startup from a floppy. I remember playing games like neuromancer, Larry bird vs. magic johnson 1 on 1 bball, some flight sim, and of course psygnosis games which were my favorite of the bunch.
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Jan 15, 2016 13:27
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Going super obscure here... in 1985, my best friend had an IBM PCjr, and we played the gently caress out of a two-player text adventure called Zyle. Google produces very little information about it, but I found this: quote:Zyle Text Adventure - A text adventure? From the IBM PCjr days? On a cartridge? Yes, yes, and yes. My reason for loving this game is not the story, the pacing, or really anything else except the memory of spending hours on end playing with my dad. Mapping the world on graph paper. Fighting side-by-side against creatures that were described to us in lines of text. Not every loved game is loved for the game itself… Well said. This morning I discovered that the lack of info about was due to a weird spelling of the name? I remember it as "Zyle", but I found a wikipedia entry for that calls it "Zyll" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyll Anyone else play this one? Lufiron posted:my first computer was an amiga, not the 2000 but the og one where either 32kb or 64kb of ram were these huge external boxes you slapped on the side of the computer case and the os was first loaded into ram on startup from a floppy. My Amiga was the A500, so I didn't need the OS disc, just the DOS disk. This was the peak era for Cinemaware, whose games looked best on the Amy. Starting with Defender of the Crown. Oddly enough, Cinemaware put out a really good football game, too, "TV Sports Football" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAEo4C5GhKQ I feel like the TV Sports series had a huge influence on the next generation of 16-bit console sports games. I also put a lot of hours into Dungeon Master and The Faerie Tale adventure, both of which saw multiple ports.
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Jan 15, 2016 14:01
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Jan 15, 2016 14:03
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killing people and stealing things in daggerfall and then the guards show up HALT HALT halt haLT HALT!!!!!!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18CGW9P5Y9M
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Jan 15, 2016 14:14
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 My first computer, the Compukit UK101. It had an amazing 1Mhz 6502 processor, and my dad paid a small fortune to double the standard 4K of RAM to 8K. They were mostly sold as kits, where you had to solder the individual components onto the PCB (including the keys). This photo is sourced from the net, but my parents still have the computer stored in the attic. fuctifino has a new favorite as of 15:54 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 15:51
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Humphreys posted:And drat I hate the term 'maker' for some reason. That's because "I'm a maker!" is what the guy in steampunk goggles says while he's 3d printing dog-dick dildos he downloaded from the Internet.
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Jan 15, 2016 16:18
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I was cleaning out a bunch of old stuff some time ago:          
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Jan 15, 2016 16:45
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This picture reminds me, I actually sold a working 360K TEAC floppy disk drive from my XT garbage heap for pretty good money a few years ago. The buyer deliberately wanted a TEAC drive because he was interested in drive's stepper motors and controller electronics - in order to be repurposed in some sort of homebrew robotics project. I must say that I was pretty amazed. 
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Jan 15, 2016 17:36
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GAY 4 ORGANS
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Microsoft's video marketing team and their unerring sense of the uncomfortable. I just showed this to a coworker; I know it's an old chestnut for most here, but how can I not post it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noEHHB6rnMI It never got much less tone-deaf over the years either.
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Jan 15, 2016 18:42
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This was so mindblowing back in the day. Used to leave this intro running on my A500 all the time. Speaking of the A500, I had one of these bad boys:  GVP A530 expansion for the A500. Added a fast 40 processor, 8mb ram upgrade, 3.5" scsi HD bay, and an optional 286PC emulator card (which I never got). It literally made the stock Amiga 500 about 10x faster. Still kicking myself that I sold the whole setup back in the 90s.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:43
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Enos Cabell posted:This was so mindblowing back in the day. Used to leave this intro running on my A500 all the time.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:50
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The Kins posted:They look and sound great, but gameplay was typically pretty spotty, especially since the most widely-supported controller on the platform was a one-button joystick. (Hope you like pressing "up" to jump!) Most of the big name fun games were eventually ported to the PC or consoles. I had an huge issue with controllers for the longest time because I was used to the joysticks. Then I got used to the controllers and now I have an huge issue with the joysticks.  It's possible to connect a controller to an Amiga.Mak0rz posted:Being a gamer from the Amiga era must have really been something. A lot of the games I see look fantastic and have pretty amazing soundtracks for the era. They were pretty fantastic but I'd say only a handful aged well. It's easy to sit down in 2016 and be bored by many of the games but back then they were great and they were also some serious eyecandy, which yes, also back then was sometimes the only reason to really play something. I guess this never really changed, there are a lot of games still nowadays which basically only have the graphics and overall composition going for them, while the gameplay is pretty meh. What's kinda annoying and sad is that all these "retro-style pixel art games" usually just use these words as code for bad graphics, while the style they claim to copy never really existed that way.  This is from Defender of the Crown on the Amiga, a 1986 game. This picture has only 30 different colors. The amiga is interesting because it has a pretty different hardware architecture from the IBM clones. It's not really much about the CPU which already back when the Amiga released was nothing *that* special (Motorola 68000@7 Mhz, a '79-Design which had mostly a great price-to-performance ratio going for it, roughly comparable to your average 286 in performance) it's mostly about the pretty advanced chipset which was quite capable for it's time and quite accessible to programmers which could pull off neat tricks with it with some serious low-level programming while basically completly bypassing the OS. This also had a lot of downsides later on but that's a whole different story. Also:  This is my alltime favorite game and I still play it nowadays sometimes. It's Airhockey. (Yes, I know they made a remake. No, I don't really care)  Also liked this one a lot. 1990. It was an isometric strategy/action game where you'd command a fleet of spaceships against an opposing fleet of spaceships of an alien race which would turn suns into black holes for energy. Game was lost if Earth's sun was turned into a black hole. Not only did it have a working model of gravity affecting the ships and covering things like inertia, but the ship you were controlling (you could switch between all ships in your fleet which would work on AI or your orders if you didn't control them) also had four programmable drones you could program with kind of a drag-and-drop programming language. Even though it has quite a few problems and maybe isn't even all that what you would consider playable with modern tastes, the scope was positively vast and it's complexity really drew me in at the time. There was also Midwinter, a game I think it's wikipedia page explains quite well, as there was also Balance of Power. So no, it wasn't really all Jump 'n Runs, there were quite a few creative gems. Enos Cabell posted:GVP A530 expansion for the A500. Added a fast 40 processor, 8mb ram upgrade, 3.5" scsi HD bay, and an optional 286PC emulator card (which I never got). It literally made the stock Amiga 500 about 10x faster. Still kicking myself that I sold the whole setup back in the 90s. I got an Blizzard 2060 68060 Accelerator Card for very cheap when this whole retro thing wasn't as in as it now is and I'm laughing all the way to the bank. Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 20:53 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 20:50
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Police Automaton posted:Also: Can I play shufflepuck cafe anywhere online?
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Jan 15, 2016 20:59
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SaNChEzZ posted:Can I play shufflepuck cafe anywhere online? They did a remake I know
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Jan 15, 2016 21:21
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Shufflepuck Cafe owns, used to play it on an old black and white Macintosh at a friend of mine's grandma's house.
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Jan 15, 2016 21:24
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I used to play the poo poo out of this game back in university: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paof1PY_baw A lot of players didn't know that you could stack as many orders into one line as you wanted as long as the syntax was correct. code:code:code:Humphreys has a new favorite as of 03:02 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 02:58
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i had a copy of the incredible toon machine i played the poo poo out of  once i felt i was too old for it, i put it in the microwave. because the internet told me that was a good thing to do.
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Jan 16, 2016 03:05
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slidebite posted:I still kick myself because I had a C64 with an elusive Spartan Apple II add-on box. That thing would probably be worth a loving fortune now to "collectors" *raises paw* Ever since I heard about this thing's existence, I've wanted one, even though I could never, ever justify how much a working one would go for, and it serves absolutely no practical purpose to me at all. Would still buy it, though, don't get me wrong. Practicality is for people without crippling addictions to 30+ year old tech. 
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Jan 16, 2016 03:12
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Not computer/internet, but my family had something like this, but it was a VHS cassette, to clean your VCR obviously. Did they actually do anything useful? Or were they just a gimmick? I remember that our VHS one didn't really do anything noticable, but then again our VCR was old and on its way out at the time. E: linked wrong image 1000 Brown M and Ms has a new favorite as of 03:51 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 03:48
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:My family had something like this, but it was a VHS cassette, to clean your VCR obviously. Did they actually do anything useful? Or were they just a gimmick? I remember that our VHS one didn't really do anything noticable, but then again our VCR was old and on its way out at the time. Did you quote the wrong picture? That looks like an Ethernet transceiver with AUI cable attached. edit: welp
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Jan 16, 2016 03:52
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Not computer/internet, but my family had something like this, but it was a VHS cassette, to clean your VCR obviously. Did they actually do anything useful? Or were they just a gimmick? I remember that our VHS one didn't really do anything noticable, but then again our VCR was old and on its way out at the time. Head cleaner. They actually did do something, but 99% of the time it was unnecessary. Say your kid spilled their apple juice into a VHS tape, and later that night you put that tape in the player. The gunk all over the magnetic tape would get smeared onto the VCR's read heads, and suddenly you'd find that not only did the gunked-up tape not play clearly, NOTHING would play clearly. A head cleaner tape would take care of that in short order, often in just a few seconds -- put it in, press play, and wait for the test-pattern picture to clear. The other way to deal with it was to put in any old tape, like a blank or something, press play, and leave it for a couple hours to let the gunk gradually get worn off the heads. Regular tape wasn't as efficient as a special head cleaner, but it'd eventually work, and the tiny amount of gunk spread over a huge length of tape wouldn't make any visible difference in its quality. My first job in high school was at a video rental store, and every now and then someone would come in furious that a tape they'd rented had "broken" their machine. We'd apologize profusely, mark the dirty tape for replacement, and offer them free use of a head cleaner. Worked every time. There was no reason to use a head cleaner unless your VCR had visibly gunked-up read heads.
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Jan 16, 2016 04:07
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slidebite posted:I still kick myself because I had a C64 with an elusive Spartan Apple II add-on box. That thing would probably be worth a loving fortune now to "collectors" Brent Marykuca posted:The Spartan actually shipped to customers some time in late 85-early 86, if I recall correctly. Apart from the technical challenges, the whole Mimic Systems story was pretty sordid, characterized by weekly changes to the design by the president of the company (he would typically change it back the following week), frequent unmotivated firings of technical staff (he fired three in one day I remember, one guy because he was watching the plotter draw a circuit board design rather than working), and a draconian management style (we were paid by the hour and required to 'clock out' to go to the bathroom). The saga ended for me in early 1986 when I quit shortly after the president of the company wrote himself a big cheque from the payroll account and took off for South America -- according to legend, anyhow. Here's an oddity I always get a bit of a kick out of when I remember it:  An Amiga tool that lets you connect up a VCR to backup data to videotape, with a claimed storage of 85mb (uncompressed) per hour of tape. The things people resorted to before CD burners became mainstream...
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Jan 16, 2016 04:30
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqrftlCAic0
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Jan 16, 2016 05:16
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Powered Descent posted:There was no reason to use a head cleaner unless your VCR had visibly gunked-up read heads. As someone who used to repair VHS VCRs they weren't really even good for this. If the head clog was due to tape shedding, the right way to clear it (like you mentioned) would just be to play a normal tape until it remedied itself. If the gunk on the heads was of a sufficient composition, dragging a rough cleaning tape across the rotating drum could either gunk up the works worse (requiring disassembly to clean) or just damage the head. The dry-type cleaning tapes in particular would also gradually wear down and widen the head gap, ruining what little picture quality you were already getting out of VHS. They probably worked for people who didn't want to open their deck up or take it to someone, but really if someone had a problem that needed a head-cleaning tape, they needed to service it properly. You know "poppers" and how they used to be labeled as video head cleaners? They really were, you used them in combination with head cleaning sticks. I wonder if the first person to figure out the recreational use of them was a tape-head.
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Jan 16, 2016 05:27
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The Kins posted:An Amiga tool that lets you connect up a VCR to backup data to videotape, with a claimed storage of 85mb (uncompressed) per hour of tape. The things people resorted to before CD burners became mainstream... Also weird but clever, the Alesis ADAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oScIGyHHIc let you do digital recordings on SVHS tapes much the same way as the old "back up to a VHS" systems.
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Jan 16, 2016 05:30
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gently caress this game so hard (Aztec Challenge, C64) Do you guys remember the name of the US catalog that sold C64 and Amiga software/games? I was a poor with only a C64 and I remember lusting over all of the cool Amiga games
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Jan 16, 2016 05:34
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powerofrecall posted:Also weird but clever, the Alesis ADAT Back in 94-95, the band I was in recorded our demo album at a studio that used these. You could chain them together and they'd sync up to however many tracks you wanted. The particular studio we recorded at had 3 of them for 24-track digital recording. It was really amazing at the time, and full-on DAWs for home use were still a few years off. The sound was incredible considering how amateur we were.
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Jan 16, 2016 05:35
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Anyone post this poo poo yet?
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Jan 16, 2016 05:46
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I did this for a lark. 
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Jan 16, 2016 06:01
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I remember wistfully checking this out in stores in 1980:
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Jan 16, 2016 06:03
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Ah carmageddon. I got it from a friend who went to Bali and brought back a bunch of pirated games. The CD-ROM was also Redbook compliant and all the soundtrack could be played using a normal CD Player. I used to play the poo poo out of the audio more than the game (I had a lovely Ipex P75 at the time). It took maybe 5-10 years after finding a metal band and buying their back catalog to discover that the sountrack was literally this without lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-RdsIst6p4
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Jan 16, 2016 08:18
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Humphreys posted:The CD-ROM was also Redbook compliant and all the soundtrack could be played using a normal CD Player. I used to play the poo poo out of the audio more than the game (I had a lovely Ipex P75 at the time). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaBVDVr_IDc E: whoops thought this was the videogame chat thread oh well Mak0rz has a new favorite as of 09:33 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 08:21
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My first PC joystick was one of these, a Kraft KC3: Worked fine for light use in things like MS Flight Simulator. Then I got Wing Commander and the poor thing only stood up to the abuse for a few days, tops. I replaced it with a CH Flightstick:  That lasted a LOT longer.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:36
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Police Automaton posted:I had an huge issue with controllers for the longest time because I was used to the joysticks. Then I got used to the controllers and now I have an huge issue with the joysticks. I hosed more than one amiga 500 mouse playing defender of the crown. From memory there's a repeating sword duel sequence when you capture a castle that basically amounts to click as fast as you can and the left button didn't hold up under prolonged abuse
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Jan 16, 2016 08:38
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powerofrecall posted:Also weird but clever, the Alesis ADAT Lovely. I had a Panasonic VHS with a nice stereo hifi long play audio-only mode that I used for 9-hour "mixtapes". I swear it sounded just as good as the CDs I ripped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zpYTrUxXbk
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Jan 16, 2016 08:47
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Humphreys posted:Ah carmageddon. I got it from a friend who went to Bali and brought back a bunch of pirated games. It's okay! It was perfectly safe! He stuffed some corrugated cardboard up his jumper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDGmb3wwvE0 Batwick posted:At this point a police car turned up. The car park was overlooked by some houses a few hundred yards away, and somebody had called the police to report “There’s a car in the car park running somebody over! Again and again!”. The police, who of course in 1997 knew about as much about the existence of video games as they did about general relativity and the struggle for convergence with quantum theory, really didn’t know how to handle it. But the camera on a tripod seemed to placate them – as well as the ‘victim’ insisting that he was absolutely fine with continuing to be run over. So off they crept in their jam sandwich to try to find one of the Isle of Wight’s five black men to frame for cow molesting or something.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:56
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The Kins posted:The best part of Carmageddon was how the developers were headcases. For example, their artists were having trouble trying to figure out how people would realistically react to being hit by a car... so they asked a friend if he'd politely volunteer to do some stuntwork for them out in the car park. And Tony was the face in the 'prat cam'!
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Jan 16, 2016 09:45
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