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Live CD/USB seems like a different thing because most if not all of the reason you'd want to shuffle between disks and squeeze as much space as possible between them is because you don't have any HD space and need to keep on' computin'. Maybe if your modern PC had no hard drive, but that's weird given how an unremarkable/low capacity hard drive is more worthless than a spindle of CD-R's. For any C64 havers, I think I posted this in the Retrogames forum but not here. If you are a longtime C64ist, you may know a thing or two about the 1541 and how it is required to get certain software running on the C64 (namely if you're a fool who is into demos and things like that) then you should consider spending a little more than you would on a uIEC/SD or SD2IEC and get a 1541 Ultimate II. The 1541 Ultimate II comes in a nice looking shell, takes microSD, and is a beast compared to the uIEC or SD2IEC because it emulates a 1541 on a tiny little FPGA. The website layout is kind of confusing though, I didn't realize for a long time that if you pre-order one, that just is the equivalent of an "interest check", you can go straight from that to a normal order and pay him for one if you want, or wait for him to get a big batch of them in (which he does regularly). They're a little over $100 so given the extra support/less awkward form factor compared to a uIEC/SD I think it's well worth it, especially as the uIEC/SD's been creeping up in price steadily
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Nov 2, 2013 10:40
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A resource I don't think got mentioned: the High Voltage Sid Collection has pretty much every piece of music for the C64 ever made. You'll need something that can play SIDs, like XMPlay with it's SID plugin. Ocean Loader 3 is the best one. XMPlay with the Delix plugin is pretty much the only thing these days that will play the really weird Amiga music formats on Windows too.
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Nov 2, 2013 11:44
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Yeah XMPlay works pretty nice (also still looks 1999 as hell) but I think SIDPlay is the best for if you're just listening to SIDs. Nothing like putting some Ryo Kawasaki on loop for a good long while.
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Nov 2, 2013 12:21
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Winamp with the Chipamp plugins will play SIDs as well, plus it's also hella 90s. EDIT: Also, thank you for posting that SID collection link, these chiptunes are amazing. wafflemoose fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 14:18
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Starhawk64 posted:Winamp with the Chipamp plugins will play SIDs as well, plus it's also hella 90s. You fuckers are gonna make me do so much work Tuesday. I dunno if I personally consider SID players important for retro computer gaming but SID tunes are the greatest chiptunes ever. Whenever I think of chiptunes I want it SID or it just isn't right.  Amiga has good sound too but its more sampler like the SNES. I believe its the MOD format IIRC? But here is a gift of love. Amiga tunes done on a piano. With 2 albums worth of free dl to treasure in their links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m00V9RDLrk Also Acid or anyone else who wants to give me a write up of SD card or flash drive solutions for computers please do so. I know of PC C64 Atari 8 bit and Amiga 600/1200 (older pcmia cards thank to their options for internal hds) but not really enough. Or which ones to recommend so you aren't paypaling some Polish dude who may or may not ever send it to you. Also for Android folks there is even a program to use your device as a C64 tape drive. The guy mentioned future Atari 8 bit support too but I haven't heard about it actually happening. So many older computers used tape drives which were the worst things ever. (And you Euro folks used them way too long after the US decided tapes were for listening to Master of Puppets..) Some people just convert poo poo to wavs or whatnot but a dedicated program is easier I think.
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Nov 2, 2013 22:02
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Kind of mindblowing to think that Softdisk thought there was enough of a market to justify publishing Apple II software in 1995. I mean, I'm sure there were Apple II hobbyist users back then; but that there were enough who would be interested in a subscription, and who made up a market big enough to justify paying at least one someone's salary to compile a new disk on a regular basis, is just surprising as heck to consider as a thing that happened. I had to look this up to make sure, but they were still selling IIe's until OCTOBER 1993. That's insane. That was around the time I boxed up my IIGS and got a Packard Bell 486dx2/50. It was literally 18 times faster than the II, and had a hard drive and CD-ROM and all that, but it just didn't have the charm or the magic of the GS. Speaking of boxing it up, I still have it, and all the peripherals and accessories, in their original boxes, stored in my mother's basement. 
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Nov 2, 2013 22:26
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Captain Rufus posted:Sinclair Spectrum: Being in the UK, I had and still have one of these machines. Though my version was the +2A, where to me the only difference was that the case is Black and not Grey. You mentioned Emulation well from my experience I have always preferred Spectaculator. It is one you pay for after a month, but it does work very well.
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Nov 2, 2013 22:39
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Welp, I ordered the Commodore. Let's hope it still works when it gets here. It tested fine originally.
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Nov 3, 2013 00:15
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Whoa this is an awesome motherlode of information, and as somebody who grew up with Atari 800s and Atari STs, I'm glad to see this thread. Even though these days I'm more interested in emulation, simply because I already have enough clutter to navigate. A correction from your first post, though: trackballs (and mice) are digital, not analog. An analog controller (like a flight stick) contains a potentiometer (aka a variable resistor) on each axis, which transmits a variable amount of voltage over a discrete range. That is, it has a hard-wired minimum and maximum value, and the controller physically cannot move beyond those limits. Trackballs have a sensor mechanism on each axis, usually a rotating disc that simply sends digital pulses of "+1" or "-1" as the ball is rolled in that direction. A mechanical (ball) mouse works the same way, it is exactly like if you flipped a trackball upside down and rolled it around by the ball part. These mechanisms are broadly known as rotary encoders, and have the advantage there is no "stopping point", you can roll or spin them an unlimited amount in one direction. Paddles are a little tricky because most paddles (like the Atari 2600 and old PONG games) are analog, but there are some "paddles" like the Tempest spinner which are free-spinning digital encoders.
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Nov 3, 2013 00:49
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I will do my best to update with this new knowledge Tuesday. Ish. But until then I give the gift of Fort Apocalypse, which is kind of like original Choplifter only more awesome. In the form of two youtube videos showing this game I had never heard of and then me beating it. Done in an emulator because I could only get the tape to load once and you know no capture device. http://tinyurl.com/mslk3kz And if my voice didn't annoy y'all here is me completing it. http://tinyurl.com/l77g9sc (drat doing simple tasks on the Kindle fire can suck sometimes.) If this little bit of game doesn't blow minds know there is a fan mod for the C64 version that nearly doubles if not triples the size of the game. I saw it on some German website I think... Anyone with info on that ought to share.
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Nov 4, 2013 11:51
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Fort Apocalypse is a great game. It was inspired heavily by both Choplifter and the Konami arcade game Super Cobra (which was itself a sequel to Konami's "Scramble"; Scramble was also the direct predecessor of the Gradius series). Fort Apocalypse was published by Synapse (aka SynSoft) who I think were one of the very best game publishers of the 8-bit era. Like the early days of Electronic Arts and Brøderbund, pretty much every game they released was something special. If you like Fort Apocalypse, I would encourage you to have a look at Zeppelin, which is another huge (and hard) scrolling shooter with exploration elements. Necromancer is another must-play, which is a little difficult to describe. You're a druid, and in the first part of the game (shown in the linked video), you have to plant trees and protect them from monsters until they grow to maturity. Then you go on to explore the necromancer's castle, using the trees you've cultivated as animated servitors who walk around and tear through floors with their roots to unearth treasure. Finally there's a big climactic battle with the titular necromancer. Shamus: Case 2 is a weird mix of platformer and shooter, and if you like Metroid-y poo poo you should play it because it's great. The original Shamus is great too, it's basically a proto-Zelda, in 1982. Pharaoh's Curse has some pretty janky physics and collisions by modern standards but was pretty cool and innovate in its day (all these years later I still remember the password for the highest level is SYNISTOPS). Finally, I guess Alley Cat is fairly well known? It's still pretty impressive, the art design is still awesome and the movement physics are super fun.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:12
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I came across something interesting that users of this thread would greatly enjoy http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html It's a device that plugs into the floppy drive of a *ton* of older systems with proprietary drives i.e x68k, msx2, atari st, etc and lets you run floppies off of a SDHC card! Wooha! Just take a gander at the massive list of supported systems http://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_drive_emulator/support.htm
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Nov 5, 2013 06:17
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flyboi posted:I came across something interesting that users of this thread would greatly enjoy If that thing works as claimed it is a seriously awesome thing! Anyone own one who can say one way or the other? But while we wait for someone to tell us I shall regale you all with my loud and monotone voice as I play MOTHER loving DRUID on the C64. It is also available on the Atari 8 bits and the Famicom Disk System. (And those two UK computers Retro Gamer Stockholm Syndrome believes were good...) It is like Gauntlet only a lot better in spite of being an abusive UK game from the 80s. An emulator with multiple button mapped game pad and start of level save stating basically fix what would be an otherwise almost impossibly hard game. I had some youtube commentator get mad at me for actually complaining about the parts of the game that annoyed me. I like Druid a lot and loving adore the theme song but.. the game has a couple problems that take it down from greatness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OHAvYSBZvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-LvjA8Vpsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4SYjq1n5DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7SqceNaiVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qurSJU0mK90 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-P73bGjFfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmwxxtQLbhg It is a game that really needs to be played. Like a number of Speccie and C64 games you can even buy them legal to play on your iStuff. No idea if it works completely with the iCade given the silly number of keyboard commands the game requires while being beset on all sides by critters. (I wonder if anyone completed it legit back in the day? I had to use scans of old UK mag maps and have a start of level save state It still took me quite a while to get through it even when I had maps for the later sections.) But there are other reasons why sometimes emulation is better. Like having a map open while playing. Here is a classic in a similar gameplay style to the above you can buy on the GOG. This is a in game map I screencapped while playing:  This comes from a game where there are limited ammo and keys, 1 way doors, stuff that keeps you from going back exactly the way you came, and many many time limits to complete a stage once you do THING X while playing it. Like Druid however it is fun as hell even though it is hard and does not like you as a player and a human being.
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Nov 5, 2013 08:19
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I'm curious if anyone knows what I'm talking about, I saw an ad in comic form for an old console trying to compete with other consoles. At one point a kid is suckered by suits into buying an expensive one and "console man" (not actually his name) saves the day. I don't think it was the Turbo Grafx (though I wouldn't rule it out) or the 3D0. Wondering if anyone knows what I'm talking about. drat wish we hadn't thrown out all our old EGM mags
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Nov 5, 2013 08:33
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Captain Rufus posted:If that thing works as claimed it is a seriously awesome thing! Well I don't own one myself (yet), but I plan to get one to share between a 68k mac and my Atari STe. That dude (hxc2001.free.fr or whatever) is the exact same person that runs Lotharek's store I posted last page, at lotharek.pl. I don't own any of his devices personally but know plenty of people who use them in their old synthesizers and computers and absolutely love them. It'd make my trying-to-make-music-with-a-ST thing a poo poo ton easier. As for C64, it's well worth it to drop cash on a uIEC/SD or a 1541 Ultimate II, depending how C64 crazy you are (if it's "Very Crazy", buy a loving C64 and a Ultimate II what are you doing.) Also the 1541 Ultimate II shipped to the USA is about ~$70 more than a uIEC/SD shipped, but it obviously has a ton more features to back it up. Also that sounds awfully Johnny Turbo-esque.
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Nov 5, 2013 09:15
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ACID POLICE posted:Also that sounds awfully Johnny Turbo-esque. You weren't even quoting me so for all I know this was meant for someone else which makes it even more amazing that YOU GOT IT
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Nov 5, 2013 09:18
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Druid looks pretty awesome, and I was surprised I didn't know about its existence on the Atari 800, since it looks like it would have been exactly my sort of thing. Then I looked it up and noticed it came out in 1987, which is pretty late in the 8-bit lifecycle; the Atari ST and Amiga came out in 1985, and it was tough for Atari 800 / C-64 games to get as much exposure after that.
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Nov 6, 2013 05:19
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h_double posted:Druid looks pretty awesome, and I was surprised I didn't know about its existence on the Atari 800, since it looks like it would have been exactly my sort of thing. Then I looked it up and noticed it came out in 1987, which is pretty late in the 8-bit lifecycle; the Atari ST and Amiga came out in 1985, and it was tough for Atari 800 / C-64 games to get as much exposure after that. The C64 was still the premier gaming platform until around 1991, when the Amiga dropped to £299 with bundled games. Up until then £400 for a home computer and an average £25 for a game had put them out of reach of most kids, who were the main buying market for games.
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Nov 6, 2013 10:04
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The amiga was cool. There was a really good game on it that was sponsored by mcdonalds iirc, something like mick and mac's adventure I think.
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Nov 6, 2013 12:39
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Jedit posted:The C64 was still the premier gaming platform until around 1991, when the Amiga dropped to £299 with bundled games. Up until then £400 for a home computer and an average £25 for a game had put them out of reach of most kids, who were the main buying market for games. I figured it might have been partly a US/Euro thing. In the states, consoles (especially the NES) caught on huge by 86-87. Consoles became the default gaming option for more casual players, while the more dedicated people (BBS users and such) mostly moved to the ST or Amiga.
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Nov 6, 2013 16:32
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Although we'd had computers in our home for a while, the Atari ST was the first that was "mine" and I'm still nostalgically attached to it in some ways, even though it wasn't without it's flaws Here's the model I've had for about the last twelve years:   A quick look round the back...  Note stereo RCA outputs below the power switch. This is one of the features added in the STE, but typically was rarely taken advantage of, except by demo coders. Still, it's nice to have even just the ordinary mono sound coming out through a hi-fi, as opposed to a tiny TV speaker.  I use a monitor-to-SCART adaptor from The Sinclair Shop which works nicely with my old 14" CRT TV, although it doesn't look too bad on an LCD screen either. For some reason the standard UHF output is total dogshit, although I suspect that may just be a fault with this particular machine. Not pictured: stupidly placed joystick/mouse ports on the underside of the keyboard that are a massive pain to get anything into even when you can actually see what you're doing.   And here it is actually working! The game is Eliminator, an early rail shooter that I used to play obsessively as a kid. I still think the 3D effect looks pretty cool, and is quite an achievement considering the ST had no sprite scaling capabilities whatsoever. It frequently used to come bundled with Nebulus, a brilliant but insanely difficult puzzle/platformer, where you have to get a frog-like thing to the top of a series of towers while loads of obnoxious bouncing balls and airborne spindle things constantly try to push you off My original STFM succumbed to a common problem with some models of ST, which was that the on/off switch gradually got stiffer and stiffer until something went "snap", and it never worked again(although it did manage to trip the power in our house the couple of times we tried to get it going). A few years later, I was lucky enough to stumble on an abandoned STE(the "Enhanced" version) in the basement of a shop I was working in at the time, complete with colour monitor. The monitor was kaput, but the machine still ran and they let me take it home. It still works for the most part, although sometimes it refuses to boot and I have to jump start it by holding down the reset button until it comes back to life again. It's actually pretty hard recommending games for the ST, as particularly later on there weren't many available that you couldn't point to as being better on the Amiga (one of the factors that pretty much finished the ST as a gaming platform). It did have a handful of titles that never made it to the Amiga for some reason, including Oids(which was like a really neat cross between Thrust and Defender), and the space-trading RPG Sundog: Frozen Legacy(which I've not played, but seems to be fondly regarded by those that have). The ST also had a healthy Public Domain scene(what the kids would call "homebrew" these days), including a fair number of decent non-commercial games that weren't available on any other systems. The ST's high res(640x400) monochrome mode ran at 70hz, and looked amazing. The original version of Oxyd looks particularly nice in this mode. Unfortunately, it's also pretty much impossible to emulate accurately on LCD screens. I had to get rid of my mono monitor due to a lack of a space, a decision I sorely regret. In terms of emulators, I'd suggest either Steem or SainT. Neither is completely perfect, but between them they can pretty much run anything on the system.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:29
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Speaking of the Atari ecosystem, has anybody went deep enough down the rabbit hole to tangle with ACP? http://acp.atari.org/ It is by all rights a thing that shouldn't exist---a thing made manifest the likes of which Amiga folks have been scuttling away at in the shadows for years...yet it can be had for a mere nearly a thousand dollars, give or take a hundred.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:54
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Great post Castle Radium. The ST basically bombed in the US. Like near N Gage levels of NOBODY WANTS IT. Except much like the infamous Taco Phone (and its vastly improved QD version) it has a lot to offer, and not just for 80s MIDI heads. For the mid-late 80s until the Amiga and VGA PCs took over the ST had some of the best looking and possibly best playing versions of a ton of games. A number of RPGs look the best on the ST. Origin, SSI, and Epyx gave it some decent love back then. And speaking of RPGs, some good classic PC RPG news here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/posts/653968 That's right, Wasteland's minor remake edition is soon for Steam and GOG. According to those lovely RPGCodex folks (lovely in a similar way to 2.1 right now in you cannot quite tell if they are being ironic or not when they bring out douche..) it will have some redrawn graphics and all those data saving.. (no, bullshit! Manual paragraphs were COPY PROTECTION Still beats modern DRM though.) paragraphs will now be in game so you don't have to read a booklet while fighting that goddamned Scorpion Robot who will gently caress your poo poo up depending on when you decide to take it on. http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/wasteland-2-kickstarter-update-37-on-wasteland-survival-and-wasteland.87184/ Scroll about halfway through that post if you want to see what was in the cards as of a monthish ago. But I want to properly introduce the thread to a good buddy of mine, my pal, my amigo, my sanity saving machine, Frankenstein!  I got this machine from Radio Shack when I was in Fire Control School (a year long experience that left me semi crazy and absolutely terrified of tests for nearly a decade afterwards.) in 1993 for 1500 bucks. I got a 13" SVGA monitor (not this one), 2 button mouse, keyboard (also not these), 2400 baud modem, a pair of eh DOS games, Windows 3.1, MS DOS 5.0, two whole MEGABYTES of RAM, a 486 25mhz CPU, and a teeny even for that timeframe 130 megabyte hard drive. (And while it is an SVGA capable machine it has like.. 256 kilobytes of Video RAM. I never could even find more of that chip type to bring it up further!) Over the years this machine got its' name. Multiple RAM upgrades. A couple modem updates. A joystick card. 3 different sound cards. A double then this late OCTUPLE speed CDROM. Two different CPU "Overdrive" chips. A used 210 megabyte hard drive as the secondary one. 2-3 different 3.5" 1.44 meg floppy disk drives as they kept dying on me. It is kind of kludged together piece of kit. It still works mostly. I even have a CH Flightstick for it. Sadly I don't know where my Gravis Gamepad went. Thanks to Ebay whenever something died on it and I wanted to use it I could cheaply replace it. My Sound Blaster CD setup was like a 500 or so dollar megabox back in the day. I got it a couple years back for.. 30. Frank's current specs: 486sx motherboard with a Cyrix P5 133 Overdrive chip. 16 Megabytes of RAM. Soundblaster 32 with 8X CDROM. 3 Button Mouse. 256 Kilobyes of VRAM for the onboard SVGA. A modem of some kind. (Irrelevant) 130 megabyte C drive with MS DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. 210 megabyte D drive. CH Products Flightstick. (2 button with Throttle Wheel) Now this machine was probably the ONLY thing that saved my sanity in said Naval school. Once I got a Pentium Pro 150 machine I sold this one off to my uncle. About 6 years ago he sold off his house and left a TON of stuff down in my basement. Which he has never come back to collect. (Instead he just collects DUIs. I haven't heard from him in about 5 years or more.) About 2-3 years ago I decided I was gonna make use of it. Took it out, saw what worked and didn't and replaced parts. (And sort of screwed up the CDROM/Sound Blaster Pro compatible hence the new one. Was easier than figuring out what I screwed up!) Thankfully I had that Microsoft keyboard lying around so I cleaned it up a bit and added it along with that monitor above. A 15" flat glass. I saw the aforementioned thread and early Monday morning decided to get the machine back up and plugged in. The CMOS battery is dead now. So for the future until I decide to replace it (only took 17 odd years to die out!) I have to set up everything before I can use it in the BIOS Setup Menu. No big.  This is nothing to worry about. Just hit F1 and move on.  With my D: Drive which is only kind of connected properly inside the machine I see what I am taking up on it. Most of this is from my 2 years ago use of it.  The machine never came with a DOS manual and I am lazy and can't be bothered to deal with command line silliness now. Dosshell lets me do a lot of file stuff almost as useful as if I was in DOS. Here I am copying Wizardry 7 from my CDROM collection over to it's new home on the C Drive as this collection had a Windows 9x environment for installing.  A massive 250 files for Wizardry 7! Almost 5 and a half Megabytes for an amazingly huge adventure! Half my C Drive taken up already!  I learned a few DOS commands by heart. Because deleting Doom 2 (Since I have it on so many other platforms that it plays better on anyhow. Doomsday Project is the BEST Project. Since Blair Witch anyhow..) would be a bit slower to do in Dosshell. I get about 25 megs back even after installing a couple Windows game packs....  Solitaire. The best thing in Windows 3.1. And it came with it. I spent a good hour or so playing it in the process of taking these pictures.  And two more packs I installed. Microsoft Arcade and Verbatim Sampler. Windows 3.1 while it moves swiftly on my machine is very.. clunky nowadays. Especially to someone used to OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and Windows 7. Besides, Macs and Amigas were doing GUIs back in the mid 80s.  MS-DOS 6.22 takes up almost 9 megabytes of space and Windows 3.1 is like another 6. Back then this was a LOT of space. Nowadays its adorable how small and compact the TWO OSes the machine runs are. And they still do what they need to. Bloat much Microsoft?  One thing later versions of DOS came with was a built in disk defragmenter program to put all your hard drive files together and not scattered about the drive, speeding things up. Here we are cleaning up C. No bad sectors. None on the D drive either. And since I took out Doom 2 we have a ton of space to put things back in order.  I shall be a Human Samurai. And it only took a couple rolls for a massive 24 bonus points here in Wizardry 7. Human. It's the part I was born to play baby!  Where Frank is now. Some speakers that themselves require a power outlet came with the Sound Blaster 32. But I guess I have stairs in my DOS as it is protected by another bit I nicked from all the crap my uncle probably doesn't care is in my basement (or remember at this point...), a Belkin power strip thingie. Due to its design and the speaker plug's design it had to be placed awkwardly with the monitor so they don't bump into each other and the lovely half height PC case. (I love this style of PC case. Tower designs just.. they aren't RIGHT man.) It is even chilling around some time appropriate things. My Dougram Soltic Roundfacer model (also known as the Griffin in Battletech, and something else in Robotech Defenders), WAZZZPINATOR, and my kickin rad Hordak statue. Also note I keep rolling till I get at least 18 points for all my Wizardry team. I do also like how I can hit multiple power buttons for what I want to give power to. And the machine itself can have one plug going into my strip outlet. (My living room desk corner thingie is a mess of cables and wires. I really must organize with some tie wraps and some sticky things saying what plug is what.)  Stunning VGA graphics. 256 colors of rad.  The quest begins! 4 humans, a gnome, and a pixie. The barely dressed alien on a jetbike is in motion hence the blur. You know this isn't a Japanese game because otherwise only her boobs would be blurry. (And she would probably look 14. GODDAMNIT JAPAN.)   Speaking of messed up people with underaged and boob fetishes, here is John "I got into programming as a job because my girlfriend wouldn't have an abortion" Romero's great little EGA title Dangerous Dave. It only needs gamepad support and a save/password system. Great platformer though. (I wished I remembered exactly what magazine he said this in. It might have been Retro Gamer.)  What Wolfenstein 3D says my machine has to work with. I have all the EMS and XMS memory I will ever need. More than a game from 92 knows what to do with.  Bitmap Brothers goodness on DOS? Into the Wonderful sounding surprisingly good on a Sound Blaster 32? Nice!  And our last picture shows one of the greatest games ever made, WARLORDS 2. Sadly mine is the disk version whose disks and the expansion pack are dead. But I have the manuals so the Internet and a CD Burner are at hand to save those poor dead floppies. I can still do the copy protection since I have the docs and wheels and stuff so let's get gaming! (If anyone knows where I can get a reasonably priced copy of the CD version of Warlords 2 (Warlords 2 Deluxe IIRC) that looks like a website made in the last 10 years I would appreciate it. Or a site that sells any of the other old stuff I need.) This machine and I had so much fun together. It has been to Illinois. Virginia. Connecticut. The middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A ton of airplane flights. It helped me break Naval rules via me opening it up to put things in it because a couple screw twists and plugging in a card was too much or something. (I am generally a super goody goody by the rules kind of guy. But only if the rule isn't stupid. Like my mother telling me NO DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. Yeah broke that one too.) And we still have fun today! It has a place of honor where the machine I am typing this from used to be before I got annoyed at WiFi connections being shoddy and just put it on the kitchen table where it could be directly connected to the router by those magical wires. I need to get myself that Gravis Gamepad/Pro, some VRAM, and maybe upgrade to a Flightstick Pro but otherwise this machine is basically what it needs to be. Maybe it will inspire yall to take out your old computers and give em a play? Or some classic games through DOSBox? Hmm.. I wonder if I can find an IDE 1-2 gigabyte HD for this machine? Maybe a complete Diamond Stealth videocard? Some of yall might have seen this in the previous GBS Turn On Old Computer thread. Given the new GBS and the point of this thread it is appropriate to share the wonder and majesty of actually gaming on an ancient assfuck computer.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:55
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Holy poo poo you have a Cyrix chip in your machine. I'm immensely jealous. I want one 
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Nov 7, 2013 05:48
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ACID POLICE posted:Holy poo poo you have a Cyrix chip in your machine. I'm immensely jealous. I want one I was using a Cyrix M2 (233MHz) until.. 2004. When I upgraded to a Pentium 4. I used that Cyrix and a Voodoo 4 to beat Quake 3 on Nightmare, at like.. 10fps, 320x240. I was a determined one, back then.
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Nov 7, 2013 11:32
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The 90's were glorious if you gave no fucks about everything becoming more than twice as powerful every year and ran that old hardware hard as it'd go until you absolutely had to upgrade. 68k strictly until '98. The day we upgraded from 9600 baud to 56k was amazing  Still want to get a Cyrix replacement chip one of these days. They can't be that much, i oughta slap one where the 486DX2 is, make that DOS Compatible even more hosed up.
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Nov 7, 2013 11:55
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A quick heads up. Tonight at 9pm est in Mumble there shall be some Goon Netmech Mechwarrior 2 action going. Check the MWO thread on the last few pages for setup info. Some Marauder IIC heat up in this sumbitch if I can follow instructions It will be like early 96 again but more fps and higher resolutions. Frankenstein could only handle so much.
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Nov 8, 2013 01:03
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Atari ST had a small but dedicated following in the states; I used one as my main computer (first an ST-FM, than an STe) from about 1987 until getting a 486 in 1996. They were especially popular with electronic musicians because of the built in MIDI ports (the stability and tight timing of the MIDI hardware is incredibly good). The ST definitely had some good games. Time Bandit is a huge gauntlet clone with RPG levels of variety; there are a bunch of themed worlds like old west, haunted house, fantasy castle, starship bridge, etc. with an overworld to tie it together. Very impressive for its time. Castle Radium mentioned Sundog: Frozen Legacy and Oids, which are both great games though I don't think either are technically exclusives; I'm pretty sure Oids first appeared on the (monochrome) Mac, and Sundog was on Apple II. Sundog was a pretty cool open ended space trader type game (a little bit like Elite, except the space combat wasn't as fancy, and there were overworld on foot segments where you traveled around starbases). It's a hard game! Mostly I remember getting strung out on a drug called Peptab and getting beaten down by street gangs before I made it far enough to get taken down by space pirates.
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Nov 8, 2013 01:41
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That's a classy DOS Rig you got there Rufus.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:11
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Starhawk64 posted:That's a classy DOS Rig you got there Rufus. It is. I need more vram for it though. And I have to figure out what sort of flash memory ide interface is compatible with an ancient computer. But slowly here and there Frankenstein will continue to get huffed. Honestly if I could get a cheap Pentium Pro 200 and make it dual boot it would be even better but that would require more money and effort. I suppose I could see if that persnickety Athlon 3200 I still have would be ok with it though... Would be overkill for most DOS games that didn't have frame limiters. But Mechwarrior 2 and Wing Commander 3 would be happy as hell. poo poo, 800 by 600 or 1084 res in Duke 3d and System Shock CD... Sadly this then means I need a 286 class Tandy 1000 for older titles. Luckily time, money, and space are all limited enough to keep me from doing such stupid things.
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Nov 9, 2013 12:15
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This is a great thread, Captain Rufus. Well done. I'm a huge retrocomputing enthusiast - when I was a kid growing up in Australia, I had absolutely no interest in consoles, which I thought were for kids. I had the Vic-20, the C64, the Amstrad 6128, the MSX, and later, 8088XT PC's and beyond. I always feel kind of annoyed that 'retro gaming' tends to revolve around Nintendo and Sega, when they just weren't a fixture in everybody's lives. Something I'd like to add to the OP, though - regarding the Amstrad. You haven't listed any notable games, but I'd argue that there were quite a few. Firstly, the Roland series - Roland In Time, Roland In Space, etc. - were certainly significant platform games. Roland In Space, in particular, did full side-scrolling platform adventuring a full year before Super Mario Brothers, and in Roland, Amstrad had one of computer gaming's first mascots (after Miner Willy, naturally). http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Roland_in_Space Much of the 8bit computer scene was multiplat between the C64, the Spectrum, and the Amstrad - with the C64 generally winning, but the Amstrad was certainly a contender. The Amstrad version of 'Bomb Jack', for instance, is generally considered to be far more faithful than the oddly oversized C64 version. Also, the serious retro computing enthusiast would surely find the magazine scene of the time to be utterly invaluable. I wonder if some links could be added to the OP. https://archive.org/details/computermagazines - this is a pretty amazing archive of long OOP gaming magazines from the 1980's. The Amstrad had AMTIX: https://archive.org/details/amtix-magazine The Spectrum had CRASH: https://archive.org/details/crash-magazine And, the C64 had what I'd regard as THE greatest computing publication of all time - ZZAP!: https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine And, for generalist computing - Compute! and Compute!'s Gazzette: https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine & https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette Essential reading, which will rip the nostalgia tears out of your head...
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Nov 10, 2013 14:08
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Snakedance posted:The Spectrum had CRASH: https://archive.org/details/crash-magazine There were also a couple of other magazines around at the time. Sinclair User Your Sinclair Sinclair user was a bit more serious. Your Sinclair was a bit more off the wall and my particular favorite. I remember when there was a bit of a covertape war going on with each magazine seeing how many games they could get on their tape to beat out the other magazines. It was getting up to around 10 full games per issue at the height of it.
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Nov 10, 2013 15:16
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Snakedance posted:https://archive.org/details/computermagazines - this is a pretty amazing archive of long OOP gaming magazines from the 1980's. Those are just the Newsfield mags. Amtix was pretty shortlived, lasting only 18 issues, and is generally considered inferior to Future Publishing's Amstrad Action, which ran for 117 issues and was the second-last 8-bit magazine in publication (the last being sister magazine Commodore Format, which folded 4 months later). E: Cinemaware just rebooted their Kickstarter for a HD remake of Wings. Find it here. Jedit fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Nov 10, 2013 |
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Nov 10, 2013 17:10
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Jedit posted:Those are just the Newsfield mags. Amtix was pretty shortlived, lasting only 18 issues, and is generally considered inferior to Future Publishing's Amstrad Action, which ran for 117 issues and was the second-last 8-bit magazine in publication (the last being sister magazine Commodore Format, which folded 4 months later). Oh, sure. Archive.org also includes mags like C+VG, Ahoy!, and RUN that were equally important.
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Nov 11, 2013 02:01
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I shall try to update with all yalls new info sometime Tuesday evening. And I will even have a content post of my own covering an Atari 8 bit game I have that is behaving ... strangely. I mean it is weird. (And some fun pictures of what I played instead. One would think needing to go to sleep and being irritated would have made me play badly. But not so.) The computer mag I read the most was Commodore Magazine. Followed by quarterly PC game mags and this general computer games mag I got from Shop Rite all the time. Their first issue has a single NES review and I think it was Double Dragon. This mag was the first time I heard of Tetris like a year or two before the NES port. I remember salivating over Flight Simulator 4 and Falcon AT. Wish I could remember the names of them. I remember Questbusters and Game Players and Videogames & Computer Entertainment but not these. (I didn't even see Computer Gaming World till their issue previewing XWing. So I missed their multiformat days. When I read Compute! my beloved C64 was already on the way out by 89-90 so it was seeing the writing on the wall...)
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Nov 11, 2013 09:32
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Well it is time for another effort post from me. But not the one I planned on. This just means I have more content until y'all bring your own retrocomputing heat to the thread. In case y'all haven't heard those suck...err lucky people like myself who hopped on the Kickstarter for Wasteland 2 got a free bonus I believe everyone else can probably buy now if not soon. WASTELAND 1. Except now with some graphical mod options and voiced narration for the now built in copy protection paragraphs masquerading as a way to save disk space in the late 80s. (Also see Wasteland's sibling, Dragon Wars.  Dragon Wars at game start. I am using TEAM GOOBER who are all made up of comic relief cartoon characters that live in infamy. But now everyone can replay yet again or for the first time the game that was both a spiritual sequel to The Bard's Tale Trilogy, and the spiritual prequel to both Dragon Wars AND the legendary Fallout games. (Except Brotherhood of Steel. Fallout fans don't like to talk about that. It is to them what Liberals are to AM radio hosts.) However unlike our classic Wizardry inspired adventures of a singing alcoholic and his or her more impressive wizards (OMG CASTER SUPREMACY DON'T LET TRAD GAMES KNOW!!) this one is top down, adds in a ton of stuff to do besides just hack n slash, adds in skills to help said hacking and slashing, plus GUNS AND STUFF.  You could also get Bard's Tale Trilogy (plus that 3d hack n slash with the same name but an Action RPG) for free on Steam but the original trilogy is buggy. But I had already bought the Android port so I can play BT while taking a dump. Hilariously however this game that ran on my 64 kilobytes of ram, 1 mhz Commodore 64 on a couple sides of a 360k 5 1/4 floppy now requires/recommends a 1.4 ghz PC with 300+ megabytes of hard disk space. (This should tell anyone a little about how while computer tech has numerically shot into orbit compared to the 80s that actual live performance isn't exactly hundreds of times better. And we cannot blame it entirely on lazy programmers, modern OSes, or modern CPUs requiring more RAM to do stuff. Maybe all of it together though...)  Here we are at my first game start with my brand new party of four. (You can recruit 3 more NPCs later on.) I have turned smoothing off so the text and graphics and interface don't have that weirdo look a lot of smoothing options give you. I have however left on the redrawn art graphics in the upper left window. The little pink hand is a mouse cursor if you wish to use mouse controls. I tend to mix it up between keyboard AND mouse.  Here is Beef after a single level up. You have to roll for stats D&D style. SKP (Skill Points) are the all important thingie that let your party DO STUFF in this game.  There are ways to learn and improve skills later on, but your initial INT (Intelligence) gives you your starting points to assign to skills. Advancing a skill with points doubles from the previous cost and you need varying levels of INT or points just to grab the skill to begin with. In general using your skills will with time improve them. You can learn 27 different skills at the start of the game. I recommend writing down them all and build your party based on rolls (reroll till you are happy enough with your character) and check off the skills you want to have. Pretty much every skill in the game has at least one use, many lots more. The question mark is in game information so you can read up on what various things actually DO. This is an oldschool game. No tutorial kids!  Every now and then RADIO back to the Ranger Center and you will see if anyone in the party has earned enough XP to level up, something I cannot seem to actually see on the character pages. You get a whopping two points to spend on attributes each level plus two more HPs. (Shown in game as Max/Con)  The little book icon lets you know you have a paragraph to read by clicking that icon. Or you could get a copy of the original manual and paragraphs book and just look it up. I honestly recommend the latter.  With DISBAND you can split up your party to maybe send your close in fighters to engage while the snipers stay behind, or in this case so Sneakycheeks can go into the Ladies' Room.  You can also talk to various NPCs and the like when they let you. If you have a good keyword to enter you do so. It is like a primitive version of Ultima 4's chat system. Made harder as the game doesn't exactly go out of it's way to tell you what words to keep note of. You gotta figure it out yourself.  In combat you can run towards or away from enemies, use stuff, try to have them join you with HIRE, try to avoid being hit, attack with your equipped weapon, swap weapons, or load/unjam a firearm. Unlike Bard's Tale Armor Class goes UP in this game and it actually reduces if not outright PREVENTS combat damage. (Veteran players will note the redrawn graphics which you can just choose the original versions are now no longer animated at all, and seem more or less like an artist took some pixel smoothing and manually tweaked it. I kind of like it as someone obviously didn't just let a render option do all the work which makes the effect work when normal smoothing in old games makes me unhappy and I run back to the sweet embrace of 20+ year old pixels.)  Here we have a nasty clan of Topekans all out to kill us. (The Phelps Clan must have moved out towards Vegas after the bombs dropped.) Close combat guys like Beef are limited to around 15' range and guns go further than that with accuracy based on range, weapon, and skill. (Pistols are basically close combat range at 1-2 skill points.) If you have ever played Bard's Tale the combat is just like that except now you have an actual on screen slider to speed up or slow down the text. And enemies can explode into BLOOD SAUSAGE!!! Damage heals over time and up to Unconcious will heal over time as well (hold down ESCAPE in a safe place out of combat to slowly heal up) though if you take enough damage to go into SERIOUS or worse categories you need the medical skills or a doctor to bring you out of it otherwise you eventually die. (One irritation is sometimes your party can be entirely knocked out. Monsters usually won't kill you, merely wait till someone wakes up and then knock em back down meaning a clearly lost fight takes 5 minutes to resolve or you need to shut down the game and restart it.)  Here is my party getting ready to run towards some critters. You also use this basic interface for skill or attribute usage outside of combat. Sometimes it is odd how exactly to make a skill properly interact. Even moreso when things like a secret cave isn't shown on the screen, you merely have to know to look for it and then make all your button presses. I hope this has given y'all a little inspiration and idea if buying Wasteland off Steam or GOG.com is for you. I would say YES, though probably GOG over Steam. (It practically isn't Steam at all. No achievements, screenshotting, or anything. I haven't encountered any major bugs other than a single lock up and one or two bits of oddness that never repeated themselves.) But adding to the above here are a few more hints to get you going: 1: Trade items from the four pregenerated PCs to each other then remove the empty handed one, make your character, and trade them goodies. This will give you a ton of extra starting ammo and some stuff to sell for early money. GIVE EVERYONE CLIMB AND SWIM SKILLS. I recommend one PC be your close combat type early on. Make sure they have two points in Brawling so they get an extra close combat attack. They can also be your pack mule. 2: Leave the Ranger Center and head west to the Campground. Make sure to use Perception a little bit south of the river and in the buildings. Picklock comes in handy. You can also ENGAGE in manual combat to fight the blueshirt people who won't engage with you otherwise. There is a shop to sell a few basic goodies but nothing major. 3: West from there is the Agricultural Center. You can sell food to the clerk and get an early quest. Picklock comes in handy as the big area by the Shopkeep is a totally safe place to rest as opposed to most places where you can be engaged by random encounters. Make sure to use PERCEPTION skill on all the boxes in the storage bin after you kill the Bunny Dude. 4: Head south then north around the mountains till you see the multiblock town of Quartz. The west most block has a store right on the southwest corner there. Big white building. You can sell off all those extra guns and weapons you don't need (you probably have enough ammo to sell off the close combat weapons for everyone but your CCer) and get the 500 dollar bulletproof armor. You might want to do this before entering the southwestern mini cave from above. Or even getting a set or two of this armor before taking up the mission in 3. 5: In the southeasternish corner is the bar. It has a north and south entrance. The south one puts you right up on some baddies to fight. There are a few more in the men's room. Make note of the stuff written on the tables. Get up on the stage for a laugh if someone has Acrobatics or Sleight of Hand. 6: Go back out to the Agri Center and head north and a little west to the Nomad Camp. They have a mission for you to go back to Quartz and the Bar which will send you back here and you can get into a nice fight and get some more loot. 7: If you don't like your team's performance by this point don't feel bad, just reroll now that you know what the game is like and try again. My team last night took 2 odd hours to get to where my current one did in 45 minutes. 8: If repeating multiple keypresses for skills gets you down make macro keys for your gaming keyboard or mouse or something. If nothing else, make one for your character who uses Perception. If you need more help and advice, http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/downloads/ has a Wasteland solution and map suite in Quest for Clues 2, and the original manuals for us Steam folk can be downloaded from http://replacementdocs.com/news.php . I will note that my antivirus complains about the site but I have never actually had any issues with it. NOW GO GET SOME SQUEEZINS!
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Nov 13, 2013 05:43
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h_double posted:Atari ST had a small but dedicated following in the states; I used one as my main computer (first an ST-FM, than an STe) from about 1987 until getting a 486 in 1996. They were especially popular with electronic musicians because of the built in MIDI ports (the stability and tight timing of the MIDI hardware is incredibly good). Absolutely. Having that integrated MIDI support was still considered a selling point long after the ST had stopped being a viable games platform. quote:The ST definitely had some good games. Time Bandit is a huge gauntlet clone with RPG levels of variety; there are a bunch of themed worlds like old west, haunted house, fantasy castle, starship bridge, etc. with an overworld to tie it together. Very impressive for its time. Castle Radium mentioned Sundog: Frozen Legacy and Oids, which are both great games though I don't think either are technically exclusives; I'm pretty sure Oids first appeared on the (monochrome) Mac, and Sundog was on Apple II. Sundog was a pretty cool open ended space trader type game (a little bit like Elite, except the space combat wasn't as fancy, and there were overworld on foot segments where you traveled around starbases). It's a hard game! Mostly I remember getting strung out on a drug called Peptab and getting beaten down by street gangs before I made it far enough to get taken down by space pirates. Ahh, you're right. I could've sworn Sundog was an original, but I guess not. Good call on Time Bandit, I'd forgotten that. We also had a second hand Acorn Electron, the affordable home version of the BBC Micro(which were so expensive at the time even most schools could only afford one or two). It ran all the same software as the BBC, but with a lot of features taken out. The hi-res "Teletext" mode 7 was gone, and the sound output was cut down to a single channel from an internal speaker. It also didn't even have native joystick support, so using one involved hooking it up via the rear expansion slot and was basically more hassle than it was worth. Despite these shortcomings, it had some surprisingly fun games; Off the top of my head - Palace Of Magic, Citadel, Spycat, Bird Strike, Starship Command, the Repton series. There was also Perplexity, a puzzle game that re-used all the graphics from Pac-Mania, because the programmer still had them from an earlier port he'd worked on. I assume either Namco never found out, or they just weren't that bothered. Actually, I've just thought of another system that could be added to OP - Acorn's Archimedes series, which replaced the old BBC computers in classrooms. For anyone from the UK who grew up in the 90s, this would've been the first introduction most of us had to DTP, graphic editing, CAD and so on.  When I've got a bit of time, I might write something a bit more detailed, but suffice it to say they were really solid machines with surprising longevity, and were only just being phased out of general usage by the time I left school in 1998.
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Nov 13, 2013 13:21
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Captain Rufus posted:(Veteran players will note the redrawn graphics which you can just choose the original versions are now no longer animated at all, and seem more or less like an artist took some pixel smoothing and manually tweaked it. I kind of like it as someone obviously didn't just let a render option do all the work which makes the effect work when normal smoothing in old games makes me unhappy and I run back to the sweet embrace of 20+ year old pixels.)
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Nov 13, 2013 13:45
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Andrew Hewson is publishing a book about the 1980s software industry. It's about £1700 short with six days to go, so should scrape across the line. There's some unusual pledge levels, to say the least.
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Nov 13, 2013 19:18
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 12:09 |
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This is a beautiful thread, thanks for taking the time to put it together. Here's one for the links collection; if you're looking for a specific title - or even demo or coverdisk/tape - for a machine, the site planetemu.net tries to archive as much as humanly possible and is a great resource if you can stand an unobtrusive amount of french. There is an insane amount of content to wade through. Seriously, it's a goldmine. There are some slightly more borderline things in there (newer stuff) so please let me know if I ought to remove the link. I'm including it because it's even got everything that came out for, say, the TRS-80 (a cute little machine that could, that my best friend attempted to convince me was better than my C64 - pshaw).
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Nov 13, 2013 19:41
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