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ACID POLICE posted:But none of those are a X68000 Getting any software for it is going to be pretty tricky too, though not quite as hard as the hardware. The X68000 is a great machine and if you're looking for a classic Japanese PC game, if there's an X68000 version, it's probably the best one. BUT! In terms of sheer bang-for-your-buck it really isn't as good as the NEC PC-98, which has a much larger library of games, and most of the X68000 games are available for it too. Or at least a very large chunk of them. The PC-98 was so big in Japan that when it died, the entire PC game industry outside of porn games pretty much died along with it.
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Jan 19, 2014 22:20
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Captain Rufus posted:In general for US 8 bit micro collecting the Atari 8 bit is in the middle with the C64 on top and the Apple 2 at the bottom. Every other micro was basically a joke. A8s just didn't have the success the 64 or Apple 2 did so they have a bit less software to choose from so it tends to go for more. You know, I'd disagree with this sentiment. I can't see any reason at all to pick an Atari 8-bit over an Apple 2. Not only is its library tiny in comparison, I can't think of a single game it had that was substantially better--or even markedly different--from the Apple version. C64 yeah, but not the Atari 8-bit. Atari ST, sure. Actually, come to think of it, if you're primarily looking to play adventure, RPG, or strategy titles, you might even want to pick the Apple over the C64. A lot of good adventures or RPGs either didn't make it to the C64 (like the Kings Quest/Space Quest games) or were vastly inferior ports. A big reason for this is that a lot of those titles required 128k, which was relatively common on Apples (IIcs came with it, IIes were easily expandable to it) wasn't effectively doable on a C64. (and C128-only software was rare)
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Feb 1, 2014 20:59
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Captain Rufus posted:Apple 2s were usually 5 uggo colors. And composite artifacting from hell. The only thing I'll really agree with is the graphics and sound. And price, which is irrelevant nowadays. Apple II's graphics were usually bad, no two ways around it. But that's pretty much it. And it's really only the titles until ~1985 or so that really looked bad. Commodore 64 always had better graphics and a wider color palette. Better sound too. Atari 8-bit's titles almost always looked nearly identical to the Apple II's, though it did have better color selection. As for performance, C64 maybe beats an Apple out of the box. Expanded it's no contest, the Apple II is far better. My Apple IIe has a megabyte of RAM, a Mockingboard, and a Transwarp+ drive which doubles the running speed of the computer. My C64 is...a C64. Great machine, great games, but it's not ever going to perform better than it did when I first got it. Atari 8-bit, no way. Also the Apple IIe is the only computer amongst the above that had a keyboard that wasn't complete garbage. Especially if you were into action games I can see why you'd want to pick a Commodore 64 over an Apple. But if RPGs or strategy titles are your thing, not a chance. Commodore's RPG ports were almost universally terrible, especially Origin games. They might have looked nicer but were slower and often had AI/interface issues. (Just one example, but I'm currently re-playing Deathlord on my C64 and good god is it bad compared to the Apple II version, despite having a better color palette and presentation) And Atari 8-bit had almost nothing in the way of RPGs. It had the SSI RPGs and that's about it. No Gold Box, no Bard's Tale, no Wizardry, no Magic Candle, no Autoduel, no Knights of Legend, no...well, you get the point. (also all of the aforementioned games were better on Apple vs C64 except for Magic Candle and Bard's Tale 1) During the 80s the Apple II was the platform to own when it came to RPGs. Most RPGs were written on the Apple first (including both Ultima and Wizardry) and were the definitive versions. It all really depends on what you want to play.
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Feb 1, 2014 23:18
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Captain Rufus posted:But play what you love. Bonus points for sharing said love with us. And hopefully I didn't get too system warrior here. Yeah dude, you are getting awfully system warrior here. I had a IIe and a C64 growing up (IIe was the parents' computer, C64 was the kids) but played on both so it's not like a case of rose-colored glasses here. I'm not trying to be a dick in pointing this out, but you're kinda relying a lot on arguments to authority and non-sequitur arguments (Electronic Games magazine said Atari was better! Jobs wanted to kill the A2!) then actually focusing on the games. If you want to argue the Apple is inferior to the C64 and Atari in all cases that's fine but so far the only thing you've really offered is that the graphics are better. Which is true, but a silly thing to get hung up on when we're talking about 8-bit computers, since none of them have graphics to write home about. Let's get down to brass tacks here, the capabilities of the systems. Checking things out I realize I was wrong earlier--the Apple II was a more powerful computer than the C64, full stop. Even without expansions. The disk drives on the Apple were faster (good god I was trying to put my finger on why Deathlord on C64 is garbage compared to the A2--it's the excruciating load times). The clock speeds are the same but in practice the C64 was about 10% slower because of its architecture compared to the Apple. The Apple had an open architecture; you had the logic board, the RAM, and that's it, so everything ran direct to the metal. C64 lost a lot of cycles to OS wait states/hardware wait states. (Know how you can boot up a C64 without a disk in the drive and get that "READY" screen with Load"*",8,1 and all that? That's not free cycles-wise) Another thing interesting about the Apple II is that it had a built-in text generator the C64 lacked--you had to make weird calls to get text output on the C64 which made it more difficult to program applications that had a lot of text. To the end user it's not immediately visible, but it makes a difference in a lot of games. So what does this mean for games? On the C64 you had a dedicated graphics chip/sound chip allowing for better graphics (though ironically lower resolution) which was a big plus--though the Apple's artifacting could be used to great effect, look at Karateka or Prince of Persia for an example. (NTSC only though--the artifacting looked like hot garbage on PAL displays) But you also had a lot less power. For a lot of games, even the majority, this made no difference. For simple action games and the like, you load the game into memory, play and go. That's a huge library of 80s games, and where the C64 shines. Add the better graphics, and the C64 becomes the choice of computer if you mainly want to play these types of games, hands down. Once you get into games that are more complicated and/or games that have a lot of text, however, the C64 starts to lose out and lose out hard. With less memory to work with, a slower processor, and slower disk access, you have a problem--either you have to hit the much slower disk more often to load things into memory, impacting the performance of your game greatly, or you have to make sacrifices in terms of game complexity to make it work. Sometimes both! For this reason a lot of RPGs, strategy games, etc for the C64 had simplifed systems, AI, or even maps in a few cases to make up the slack. Who cares if they look better if they don't play better? Most RPGs and complex titles like this were programmed on the Apple for this reason--you had more resources to work with, could program straight to the metal, and didn't have to deal with hardware wait states gumming up cycles that could be used for more important things. As for expansions, that's not goalpost moving since that was one of the primary draws of the Apple II. The Apple II was built with expansions right out the gate, with internal slots and everything. And they were common and robust! The aforementioned Transwarp essentially offloaded all of the Apple's logic processing into an overclocked chip inside the Transwarp itself. I can't stress how awesome that was for RPGs in the age of slow 8-bit computers. The C64 was a very slow machine, but the Apple wasn't that fast either! Remember the Apple II was built primarily as a hobbyist computer, and came with charts detailing processor architecture and PEEK/POKE listings. There was a thriving market for expansions, given the demographic that primarily bought Apples. It's dumb to bring up the IIc in this context since that model was specifically marketed as a "portable" (*snicker*) computer and was not the same way as the rest of the line. Though it did have more memory out the gate than the IIe, which was the model everyone owned. The C64 was more of a so-called "toy computer" on the other hand, made on the cheap for the mass-market rather than the enthusiast, and that allowed their larger marketshare/game library. But they couldn't do as much, both out of the box and with expansions. For a lot of games that's perfectly sufficient. But if you want to play wargames, RPGs, strategy games, and that sort of thing then the Apple II is your best choice. Or if you want to play the Bilestoad.  And honestly there's zero reason to own an Atari 400/800 when the C64/Apple are available--it doesn't have the library of the C64 or the power of an Apple.Again, it boils down to what type of game you want to play. If you're an RPG/Strategy enthusiast like me, the Apple II will be your best choice among 8-bit computers. If you're more of an action/arcade guy, then the C64 beats the Apple hands down. ed: Oh! I forgot to mention one thing. Star Raiders. That game alone practically justifies the purchase of an Atari 8-bit. That was an amazing game, though I only got to play it at a friend's house. Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 15:56
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d0s posted:You are probably right but in that guy's defense I just google image searched "apple II games" and then "C64 games" and the latter's games just look better. If I was purely into games in the 80's I'd want a C64. If I wanted a more versatile computer I'd want an Apple. I know that's unscientific, I know next to nothing about these machines because I'm more of a Japanese retro computer guy Fair enough, but it's kinda different once you play them. C64 games look nice but they generally play slow as molasses in January for any kind of game with an even minor degree of complexity. Having played both in their heyday, I can't tell you how annoying it is in an RPG to wait 5 minutes to load a dungeon, then load 30 seconds for each battle, then wait another 5 minutes when you leave the dungeon, and another 5 minutes to load a town...it got really old, really quick. For a quick action game fix, the C64 is really good, but the pretty graphics don't make up for the constant loading, sluggish gameplay as the C64 struggles to calculate AI decisions, etc. for the more complicated games. As a kid, I couldn't really articulate why my Apple RPGs seemed better at the time, but the difference is palpable if you spend any decent amount of time with both. Action games, especially arcade ports, are almost universally better on the C64 though, there's no comparison. I'm a Japanese retro computer guy too BTW. PC-98 mostly. Though I have a non-functional PC-88 in box, with a boxed copy of Ishin no Arashi I can't play.  (With original receipt! 9800 yen in 1988! drat Koei games were expensive...)
Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 17:20
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but that's just a layman's impression.
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Bing the Noize posted:I grew up with an Apple IIc (still have it). I had a friend who had a C64 and I wanted one for myself really bad, but as much as I loved the Apple II it looks so loving bad. Yeah, most of that is due to the fact that the Apple doesn't have a dedicated graphics chip the same way the C64 did. Apple's display also did graphics in a really, really weird way, as I remember from programming on it as a kid. Lo-res mode was great because you could use all sorts of colors but it was, well, lo-res. Hi-res mode broke the screen into "blocks" of 7 pixels each, with the first bit indicating what colors would be used. It also had really weird stuff like only being able to output certain colors on even or odd pixels. Later version of the Apple, like the IIe/IIc, etc, allowed for double hi-res graphics which circumvented a lot of this. You could get really great graphics this way--a lot of the Sierra games used this to good effect, so they looked almost as good as the EGA versions! Check out a screenshot of Space Quest Apple II for example. Or Maniac Mansion. The problem though is that the older versions of the Apple (II, II+, etc) didn't support that without expansions, so a lot of software was written with backward compatibility in mind. Something that's going to work on an Apple II+ just isn't going to look nice as something made for the later model versions. A lot of the later Apple games looked really nice for this reason, but they're the exception, rather than the rule. Also the Apple II supported double-buffering which a lot of its contemporaries couldn't. (Don't remember if the C64 had it, I think it might have) So even with the crappy graphics, there was smoother motion and less screen tearing than a lot of other platforms. ed: Another thing that was interesting about the Apple II is that early on they supported 80-column modes, which was really great if you wanted to play terminal-type/text-based games. Most other platforms only had 40 columns. I had David Ahl's big books of Basic Computer games and spent copious amounts of time banging them into both the Apple and C64, but it was always nice to be able to play some of them in 80-column mode. Also it had a really unusual split-screen mode that used the top 80% or so of the screen for hi-res graphics and the bottom 20% for text. A lot of the really early graphic adventures with a text parser (like Demon's Forge, Brian Fargo's first game) used this mode to really great effect. Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Feb 3, 2014 |
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Feb 3, 2014 17:44
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d0s posted:I used to be a MSX2 guy but I had to sell my entire setup at one point when I lost my job. I kept my nearly complete collection of Compile Disc Stations but I lost: Wow, that's a bummer. How far did you get in MSX Castlevania? Never played it, but from what I hear it's absolutely brutal. Maze of Galious is an awesome game too--I play it on my homebrewed Wii, often in MSX mode.My host family in Japan had an MSX2 but I didn't get to play with it much. Really liked it though. MSX was one of those weird computers that straddled the line between computer and console, but it had some really good games for it. MSX would have been a really great computer to have during the days of the NES. That said, I don't know whether I would have really liked the MSX as much if I grew up in Japan in the 80s. I've always been more of an RPG/sim/strategy guy, and the MSX always seemed like it was a little light on those sorts of titles. I've been really getting into the PC-98 games, especially Koei's re-releases of them on CD. (though seriously, slow DRM on a bundled PC-98 emulator? C'mon!) I had a real PC-98 at one point but sold it when I moved, and really regret it. Why I kept the PC-88 instead I'll never know. I think part of it was that Ishin no Arashi was the most complete game I had and didn't want to part with it. Also it was an early-model PC-98 so the games I really wanted to play ran like garbage. It kind of sucks the way the Japanese PC game industry has moved--in the 80s and 90s you had so much to choose from--MSX, PC-88/98, Sharp X68000, and so forth, then in the late 90s the market just sort of implodes and now there's nothing but crappy porn games.
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Feb 3, 2014 18:11
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d0s posted:I nearly beat Castlevania but it's a total pain in the rear end in later stages. I'm almost purely an action gamer who likes a handful of JRPGs as well so yeah the MSX2 was the system for me. PC-98 was THE system for the type of games you're into though (and all kinds of other games), jesus what a fantastic library that thing had. I've always found the success of the PC-98 really ironic considering how old the thing was. It came out in freaking 1982, just a year after the PC-88, and lasted nearly two decades! I don't think there's a computer platform in history outside of business mainframes that's lasted that long. Granted, a huge amount of that is that it ran 8086 processors out the gate which allowed it to be upgraded to 286/386/486 and so forth but that's still a giant lifespan for a platform. My pet theory is that the bottom fell out on the Japanese PC games industry because the PC-98 was so prevalent. After dominating the market for 20 years, it's the only thing people knew how to program for, and like is so common in Japanese companies, the culture/skillset ossified so when it died in the face of Pentiums and Windows, all of a sudden you had no programmers. Also if you see early Windows Japanese PC games, even from the heavyweights like Koei, they're really poorly programmed. In just a couple of years you've got games that are squeezing every bit of juice they can from the aging PC-98 platform to clunky and terribly-coded Windows software with bugs and bad UIs.
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Feb 3, 2014 18:24
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mod sassinator posted:Wow that Roland MT-32 stuff sounds great. How faithful is the emulated version (MUNT) to the original? Curious if it's worth trying to get the patched dosbox version working with it. If you can't get a real Roland MT-32, absolutely. MT-32s were so much better than Soundblasters for music and just about everything that uses them sounds great, even emulated. Even if it's not perfect it's still worth it. When I got Wing Commander and Darklands from GOG I switched them both over and it's such an improvement. Best way to get Roland MT-32 emulation working is with the SVM-Daum version of DosBox in my experience, since it's built right in. (with a lot of other nifty bells and whistles that stock DosBox lacks) Configure your game to run with MT-32, switch your Midi option in DosBox to MT-32, and you're good to go. No major effort needed at all.
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Feb 3, 2014 22:21
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Neo Rasa posted:Both C64 and the Apple II had that awesome Conan game that was like Prince of Persia but before Prince of Persia and with much smaller characters so they both own. Speaking of this, the Conan game was made by Datasoft, which made some stellar games for 8-bit computers. Not only Conan, but the Goonies, Bruce Lee, and the amazing Alternate Reality series. 221B Baker Street too, which I never played but I heard was a really good game. quote:I totally agree with this. It's especially true in the mid to late nineties. Like 99% of the stuff released for Windows in Japan at that time was "remake of a PC98 game but somehow with worse music and worse interface." And all the control limitations that would entail. You also see it in the quality stuff that does come out of Japan today. Like the Etrian Odyssey games on the DS/3DS have universally praised soundtracks for DS games. They were composed and arranged on a PC98 sound driver Yuzo Koshiro did in like 1989. The throwback stuff is always great. A lot of it was really poor ports of PS1 stuff as well. Like Even Koei and their Rekoeition games, which used to be have their definitive versions on the PC-98, suddenly had weird PS1 ports. (Ishin no Arashi 2 was a little different though I think--I think it might have been made for Windows first, though it was still poorly coded) Yuzo Koshiro might not be the best example though as he really incorporates the hardware into his music when he writes it, as in how it will sound. Even though Ys' soundtrack has been reproduced on a bazillion platforms, he still holds that the original on the PC-88 is the definitive version and the others "don't sound right."
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Feb 3, 2014 22:54
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Captain Rufus posted:I just personally can't stand the way PC x8 games look. That odd rear end dithered graphics thing they use just looks so bad most of the time. C'mon dude! Don't be so hung up on graphics. You're missing out on a lot of great classic games that way!  The dithering in PC-98 games is much more noticeable when you look at it in emulation. On the actual monitors they used to ship them with, the bleed made a world's worth of difference. A lot of old systems look funny like that since they were explicitly coded for specific types of displays. In the PC-98's case, games only had 16 colors until the very end of the computer's life cycle but the wizardry they did with dithering made it seem like much more. Take a look at games like Genpei Kassen or Sangokushi Eiketsuden on an actual PC-98 monitor and they look [i]amazing.[/] quote:But instead of fighting with Genpei (and me being too lazy to make a GBS thread where we can system warrior for shits and giggles) I want to know if you have played Origin's Omega which is like a tank AI game. I always wanted to play it but never did. I think you mean Ogre, and if so, I had it! It was a very interesting game, though frankly the SSI war games were better. It was interesting because of the way it was set up--one side had this one enormous juggernaut while the other had an array of defenders. It felt like a "defend against Godzilla" type of game only Godzilla is a tank. It was more of a board game though. Worth trying if you can find it!
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Feb 3, 2014 23:49
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d0s posted:WHAT HAVE I DONE  Goddamn it man, how much did that cost you? And where did you get it? Do you know how much I would kill for an X68000 like that? I know you said you're more of an action guy but you need to dip your toes into the RPG/strategy titles that are available for that thing now that you have it. If you don't have to deal with a language barrier I can give you a ton of recommendations.
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Feb 4, 2014 01:39
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d0s posted:It's the one from this auction http://www.ebay.com/itm/331115517792 That's some amazing dedication to retrogames to go to those lengths to get an X68000, I'd chicken out for sure given a price tag like that. I'm sure you're going to get a lot of great gaming time out of it though! Sorry about the language barrier. To be honest I don't know of any fan translations at all---I never really bothered with that scene since I don't have to deal with the language issue. My old housemate used to do some fan translating though, and from what he told me the Japanese computer hacking scene is pretty slim, because the types of games on Japanese PCs aren't the types of games that hackers like to work on. I remember him telling me he once found some guys willing to do PC-98 hacking, and when he gave them a list of games he'd be willing to translate they shot them all down because they were only interested in doing JRPGs and anime games. So if that's the trend I imagine there's not going to be much to choose from, as JRPGs and the like were never that big on Japanese PCs.Bieeardo posted:Omega was set in the same universe, only instead of being a port of a miniatures/board game it was a cybertank programming and construction simulator. Really neat stuff, came with a programming reference about the width and twice the height of one of those old paperback Gideon bibles, printed on the same kind of onion-skin paper. Ah, OK, that sounds really cool! Never heard of it though, hence the confusion.  Some of those mini-programming games they used to have were pretty cool. I remember spending hours in Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker trying to learn its code.
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Feb 4, 2014 02:47
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d0s posted:I'm pretty tired of writing all these words, my next post will be all about the X68K's games! If you don't mind, once you're finished that I can chip in with some suggestions of my own about X68K games. Some of them are really, really, good, but easily overlooked because of the language barrier.
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Feb 5, 2014 19:51
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Quarex posted:Captain Rufus, did you not say you wanted a boxed copy of Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan? 25 Euro, buy it now! What version is that? That was one of my all-time favorite game on my C64. ed: No it's not, never mind. I'm thinking of Trolls and Tribulations.
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Feb 5, 2014 20:19
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Hey retrocomputer goons, thought I'd share a really interesting game I dug up going through my old software archives. If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably had a bunch of Apple IIs in your school's computer lab, since they pretty much dominated the educational market in the 1980s (and even into the early 90s!) As a result a bunch of educational games got made for it, the most famous of course being Oregon Trail, with Number Munchers and Odell Lake being runners-up. And there were the Microzines as well. Well, this game, which came out in 1985, is one such educational game but is less well-known.   Wilderness is a survival sim, possibly the first ever. It's remarkably detailed and complicated for a game that came out in 1985, and it's actually astonishing that it could run with a mere 48k of RAM considering what it did. In addition to the Apple II version, there's a DOS version, but I've never seen it. The idea behind Wilderness is as follows--you crash land in a plane in the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and have to find your way to a ranger station somewhere in the 6000+ square mile game area. There's also a second scenario where you start at the ranger station and have to find the Lost City of Gold somewhere in the wilderness. (I never did) There were also apparently expansion disks made for different areas like the Amazon (I think) but I never played them.    One of the really cool things about Wilderness is its extremely extensive manual. The manual not only went over the commands and techniques needed to win the game, but also included diagrams of real-life survival techniques. Now, for the game itself--it's mostly a sim in the vein of old-school text adventures, with commands typed to move around the game. DROP FOOD, PITCH TENT, LOOK UP, that sort of thing.  There are actually several options for the game--this is the "first journey" option, which puts you in an ideal situation for starting the game--you start out in excellent health, with decent weather/climate, and tons of equipment easily available. The custom game allows you to enter your own physical characteristics (height, weight, body size, pulse rate, etc) but isn't always as advantageous--you might start out injured from the crash, or in a worst-case scenario, with a broken arm or leg. Also you might be missing critical pieces of equipment, like a compass or altimeter.  This is the "default" map of the game--it can be zoomed in and you can move a pointer around to find the elevation at any given spot of the map. However you're not limited to this map--with a spare blank floppy, you could randomly generate an entirely new set of terrain, which made for some interesting scenarios.  Your Status screen. All of these are important, but aren't necessarily available--if you have no altimeter you're not seeing what your altitude, and without a thermometer you won't know the temperature, for example. There are any number of injuries and illnesses you can sustain--broken limbs, cuts, snowblindness, giardia, hypothermia, fevers, etc. In addition to finding and reaching the ranger station/lost city you have to balance your health, which can be tricky at times.  The "View" screen. This is actually quite an accomplishment for a game that was made in 1985--the terrain here is dynamically generated depending on where you are in the map, and you can make a panoramic scroll 360 degrees to see where you are, look up at the stars at night for guidance, etc. Granted, on an early-80s 1mhz computer with 48k of memory, it was really slow generating and loading this in, but was still really impressive for the time. (Note: this screen doesn't look quite right since it's in an emulator--on an actual Apple color monitor it looks more like the screenshots on the back of the box--for example the rivers in this shot would look a lot more prominent on a real monitor)  The "Inventory" screen. This is for the beginning scenario at the plane and is fairly generous. (There's an additional screen and a half or so of more stuff) All of this stuff is useful, but you can't carry it all so have to pick and choose what you take. There are lots of different types of food--bologna, nuts, candy bars, tuna, that sort of thing, and each has its own nutritional value and spoilage information. Tuna will last forever for example until you open it--then you'd better eat it quickly or it will spoil. Even in the default scenario, there isn't really enough food to last you all the way to the ranger station, so you'll have to forage for it or if you're lucky, kill some wildlife and eat it. I usually ended up eating lots of insects. Water is even more valuable, but needs to be boiled/decontaminated or you'll possibly get giardia. Even the beginning scenario is pretty hard, to say nothing of attempting to win with a 5'6" 280-pound neckbeard with a broken ankle. Winning requires being able to figure out exactly where you are on the map using a combination of your tools and the panoramic view, and charting a course to the station while picking the right combination of equipment, as even in an ideal situation it'll take an in-game week or so to get there. Overall it's a really good game, though it has a very steep learning curve. It's pretty impressive overall for a the time it came out.
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Feb 14, 2014 16:29
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d0s posted:Isn't the whole point of having cracked ones so they'll run without having the original disks though? If I write pristine images surely whatever copy protection there is will notice? Depends on what copier you're using. If you are, in fact, capable of doing a 1:1 copy it should run fine. Most really old-school copy protection revolved around putting the start/end of disk tracks in funny locations that normal copiers couldn't handle, and doing weird things with loaders, since old-school computers usually had drives running off software on the floppy rather than hardware/firmware routines. Can't remember if the Amiga was one of those though. Anyhow, a full 1:1 copy will contain whatever copy protection came with it intact, so it in theory should work fine.
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Feb 17, 2014 02:20
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How can you have an Amiga megapost without mentioning Lemmings? (Though even without a mouse, the SNES version is probably better) Also the Cinemaware titles are worth taking a look at if you've got an Amiga. Defender of the Crown, It Came from the Desert, The King of Chicago, Lords of the Rising Sun, etc. The Elvira adventure games were pretty good too, and had better music than the DOS version.
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Feb 23, 2014 20:19
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TheRedEye posted:It wasn't "find" so much as "freak out when one finally popped up on eBay and spend a couple month's worth of disposable income in a brutal bidding war." This was by far the most I ever spent on a game, outside of unreleased prototypes... Wait, Labyrinth is worth a lot of money? I have a copy somewhere, though I don't remember if it's C64 or Apple. Doubt I have anything more than a disk though...
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Feb 26, 2014 03:28
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Angrymog posted:Goons and Goonettes, allow me to present the most retro of all retro computing. Whoa, that brings back memories--my dad's office had those back in the late 70s and early 80s. I also did the most retroiest gaming ever at that office--gaming on a computer without a screen. I think it was some sort of maze game, and every time you pressed a key to move, the current state of the maze would be printed out on a giant spool of paper attached to the thing, as that's the only output method it had. Come to think of it, playing games on printer paper was something of A Thing back then--even the old Infocom games had commands that would output the game to the printer as you were playing it.
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Mar 2, 2014 23:16
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d0s posted:I know this system has an absolutely huge library, some of it's best titles like Turrican and Armalyte are PAL-only, and I'll have to find NTSCfixed versions. I'm wondering what the retro thread's favorite NTSC C64 games are? I'm so new to this system and there is just so much to look through. I think my old C64 was an NTSC machine so here are some favorites. IIRC you're more into the action games, right? Those were my favorites on the C64 anyway. So here are some recommendations: Drol by Broderbund is amazing. Drol was the first video game I ever owned myself, and it still plays really well. Karateka and Lode Runner, also both by Broderbund, are really good too. The Datasoft movie games, like Conan and The Goonies are pretty good. They were really popular back in the day. Nearly anything by Electronic arts in the early-mid 80s is really good. Archon, Skyfox, Hard Hat Mack, The Last Gladiator, to name a few. Skyfox was particularly good. The Eidolon was a lot of fun, and possibly is one of the earliest (if not the first) FPS games. Brutally hard though. Trolls and Tribulations was a fun action/platformer. Impossible Mission is a must-get. Impossible Mission II I didn't like as much. (I never was able to finish it) The Epyx Games (World Games, Winter Games, etc) were really good as well. Most of Epyx's catalog is worth looking at as well. I think the Spy vs. Spy games might have been Epyx too? Either way they're worth looking at. Epyx's GI Joe is one of the few decent licensed games from the era.
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Mar 11, 2014 03:20
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d0s posted:Yeah but if you have games from other genres to recommend please do! Well, I had a few RPG/Strategy games on the C64 growing up but due to its poor performance and slow disk speed on that front, even with a fast loader (and god help you if you don't have one) it's kind of a poor platform for those sorts of games, especially since you already have an Amiga. If you want to play those sorts of games stick with your Amiga or DOS versions and don't look back. But here are a few games worth looking at regardless: Test Drive is really good. Except you probably want the Amiga version.  Little Computer People is a weird-rear end but amusing game, kind of like a tamagotchi with a virtual person. Every disk had a different "LCP" on it hardcoded. I had a petulant little snot named Will who would get really mad/upset every time he played a game with me and ended up losing. Going to be hard to find a copy of this game that's pristine though, since your name gets recorded when you first start up and never changes. The Amiga version is apparently the definitive version but I never played it. Hacker and Hacker II are good. Hacker II I found pretty impenetrable though. Labyrinth, if you can find it. I had the Apple II version but the C64 verison has an extra area (though there's nothing particulary essential about it) Crush, Crumble & Chomp is a really fun simulation game where you play a Godzilla-like movie monster and destroy a city. You can even make your own. I liked making giant robots since they don't starve. On a similar note, Mail Order Monsters allows you to create your own monsters and send them to battle against each other. Nothing like a flamethrower-packing worm! Seven Cities of Gold is great. Everyone should play it. Again you probably want the Amiga version though. Oh, also another really good action game worth looking at is Dino Eggs. Forgot about that one.
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Mar 11, 2014 14:16
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Jedit posted:Not strictly true. Zzap 64 published a listing for a program called the Little Computer Person Eviction Kit, which would reset all your game variables and create a new LCP. Was the new LCP any different than the previous one and/or did it work on a non-pirated version of the game? From what I remember the variables were hardcoded into the game in the factory. I guess back then it was fairly trivial to write to most disks, but most copy protection prevented you from doing things to the master copy. Can't remember what LCP was like though, given that I haven't played it in 25 years.
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Mar 11, 2014 19:02
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flyboi posted:While not as old as most of the computers in here I got a new computer for retrogaming today! Old-school Macs from the 90s are really great gaming machines. No, seriously! Obviously having a PC at the time was (and is) still better, but there are plenty of great Mac-exclusive games, and some of the shareware from the period is spectacular. Plus a lot of the handful of cross-platform games that got released usually have the better versions on the Mac due to its better graphics and sound at the time. See: Prince of Persia/2, Comanche, Mechwarrior 2, etc. Plus Mac games were extremely easy to hack with use of ResEdit. I remember using that to hack joke sound files into all the sounds in Marathon. I have my beige G3 that I used in grad school and it still works great after more than 15 years. I still fire it up occasionally to play Marathon, Pathways Into Darkness, or Prince of Persia 2. Unfortunately there are a few games it doesn't run well, like Maniac, which really needs a System 7 Mac to work properly. Bruteman posted:Ah, you're right about Infocom - as a matter of fact, one of the last games I played on a CoCo in the '80s was SeaStalker. Granted, it was one of those "introductory" level games, but I thought the whole submarine portion of the game was neat. Infocom games were really great, even though they were full of dead-ends. Finishing Deadline and Infidel with no hints was one of my crowning game achievements as a kid. (I think those are the only Infocom games I managed that feat with though) I'm really happy they brought out the Lost Treasures of Infocom on iOS, it's been great trying all the ones I never got to. The only one I really don't like so far has been Suspended. It's a great concept but the whole execution is extremely frustrating.
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Mar 15, 2014 04:31
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flyboi posted:Yeah, I know compared to say x86, Atari, C64, Amiga, x68k etc it's not a defacto gaming platform but there are a few games from my childhood that I absolutely adore. The ones you mentioned plus Escape Velocity, Harry the Handsom Executive and a shitton of Apple IIe stuff that I can run in an emulator makes me Holy crap I completely forgot about the Oscar trash can extension, that just brought a flood of memories back. Though mention of extensions make me shudder with the thought of Extension Managers and whatnot--oldschool Macs were not the most stable of platforms. Also worth mentioning about old-school Macs is that everything from the glory days of Bungie are available on it. A lot of people don't realize that to start with Bungie was a Mac-exclusive developer. If you wanted to play Marathon, Pathways into Darkness or the like you needed to do it on a Mac. Even later, like when Myth came out, the Mac was still the place to play it. (Myth was freaking amazing) Bungie also licensed its Mac Marathon 2 engine to a bunch of other companies, which produced a lot of good games, like the supremely weird Prime Target where you shoot politicians and cops in the Capitol building to stop a political conspiracy. SubG posted:Suspended came with a map of the facility and tokens that you could use to keep track of all the robots on it. I don't know how you've been approaching it, but I often ended up doing the reconnaissance-by-death thing (as much a part of playing games of this era as keeping a pencil and graph paper handy) to figure out what I needed to be doing, and then working out how to accomplish it with the map. Oh, I have the map and used it and all and eventually finished it. My beef with Suspended is the less the concept or the puzzles but the execution of the game, which I thought was really poor in a lot of ways. And it's not just from the clunkiness of switching from robot to robot. Just for those reading that aren't familiar with Suspended, it's a text adventure where you mentally operate a number of robots from within a cryogenic tank, moving them around to fix the facility you're in, which maintains the environment of the planet you're on. The longer you take to fix the place the more people die. Each robot has a different task (one can see, one can hear, one can detect energy fluctuations, one speaks in riddles, etc) and you have to juggle them around and use them in the right places. What's dumb, though, is that in order to actually win the game, you have to have absolute foreknowledge of everything that's going to happen in the facility. This requires moving robots to places that make no sense to send them otherwise, just so they can be in the right spot when event X happens. If you don't do this, everyone on the planet's surface dies. You can't waste time gathering information about what the source of the problem is, you just have to go and fix it as if you magically knew in advance what it was. Compare this, to say, Deadline. (another hard Infocom game, a murder mystery) You can't just run to the rooms with critical evidence, take it, walk up to the culprit(s) and arrest them without properly tracing the right set of clues and watching the behavior of the right witnesses first. If it did things the same way as Suspended, it would be as if not only could you do that, but you had to in order to win the case. It just makes zero sense from a narrative perspective. I'm OK with text-adventure time limits and using a certain amount of foreknowledge to be able to beat the game, but in Suspended it's kind of ridiculous. It's not a bad game but it's definitely not up to the caliber of most of the other Infocom IF games IMO.
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Mar 16, 2014 00:05
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for os 9. Also the fact that every movie growing up used wallstreet/prismo macs gets the nostalgia raging using the system. Hell I had to install the oscar the grouch trash can extension because
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Hob_Gadling posted:And why hasn't Boulder Dash been successfully cloned? Boulder Dash was cloned a lot, actually. Probably the best incarnation was Supaplex, which was balls hard but really good. Probably the System 7 Mac version of that is the best. Also, I haven't seen Project:Firestart mentioned on the list of C64 games. It's...well, not that great, honestly, but is quite possibly the first survival horror game ever, even predating Alone in the Dark.
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Mar 21, 2014 01:26
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d0s posted:
Terrible RPG? Phantasie III? One of the first RPGs where you could break bones and amputate limbs (and heads) in battle? My triple-amputee minotaur warrior with one arm remaining would like to have words with you. 
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Apr 2, 2014 17:52
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Captain Rufus posted:
Whoa, Adventure Creator! That brings back memories. No ACS, but it was lots of fun. Can't remember whether or not I had the C64 or Apple version though. Spinnaker made some good stuff--the Snooper Troops games were pretty cool too. Also, my most recent acquisition:  Always wanted one of these as a kid, but never got the chance to have one. Any goon recommendations as to what I might want to get for this thing?
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Apr 26, 2014 01:53
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d0s posted:Holy poo poo man that is an awesome setup. I had a IIGS Woz for a while but one day I turned it on and something exploded inside and then I didn't have a IIGS I don't think we're joystick buddies since apparently my joystick buttons are in reverse to yours. Also the left face button is broken. It works, but sometimes the button just dives into the body of the joystick and doesn't want to come back out. quote:I've been reliving school memories with Car Builder and Print Shop, I have Dazzle Draw and Carmen Sandiego on the way. Still on the lookout for Oregon Trail and Lode Runner among other things. I'd like to get a mouse card and Super Serial card/ImageWriter II for printing out Print Shop stuff. Also still on the lookout for Wilderness, which seems to be impossible to find Early Broderbund stuff was really awesome. Lode Runner and Drol were my favorites. I wouldn't kill yourself looking for Wilderness, and if worse comes to worse I think it's on Underdogs in the DOS version. (though the CGA version looks worse since the trees are purple instead of green) It's also a very cerebral game; I don't really think it's for everyone. Being one of those education games, it's pretty rare.
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Apr 26, 2014 04:27
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d0s posted:Weird, is yours a Suncom TAC-1? It's a Suncom something. On further inspection there's a little switch on the bottom that lets you swap which buttons are 0 and 1 so maybe it is the same? Check yours, is that there? Also, for less fantasyish text adventures, Deadline, a mystery, is one of my favorites. Planetfall and Starcross are really good Sci-fi titles, and the aforementioned Suspended as well. I also have a fondness for Infidel, which is sort of an "archaeologist exploring buried pyramid" game. Captain Rufus posted:Both Bard's Tale ports are sweet though honestly Silversword on iOS is to old Bts what Tale of the Forsaken Land on the Ps2 is to the original 5 Wizardries. The dream PERFECTED. Almost. Heresy! Comparing that bastardized crossbreed of JRPG and Wizardry to the originals! I kid, sort of. Wizardry Busin and its prequel, Busin 0 (which is possibly my favorite PS2 RPG ever) are fantastic games but they're really different in formula from the classics. Also for some reason I just can't get into Silversword the same way I did with Bard's Tale. I dunno why though, since the only real complaints I have is that the gameplay is sluggish and the art is hilariously bad. Starhawk64 posted:An IIGS! I loved that computer and miss mine. I'd recommend Roadwar 2000 if you are into strategy games. I also recommend Tetris because well, it's Tetris. The Bard's Tale games get the best ports on IIGS, though the third game lacks an IIGS version and you'll have to settle for IIc version. I consider that a plus, since Bard's Tale 3 was a terrible game. I'll definitely look into Roadwar 2000 though.
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Apr 27, 2014 00:13
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d0s posted:I seriously would like to have been the C64 owning kid who unwrapped that action pack for christmas or whatever. I wouldn't have left the house for moths! The really great games here (IMO) are: "Rabbit Bodyguard?"  Sounds like one of those many Ninja-turtle knockoffs from the late 80s.
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May 8, 2014 19:28
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chairface posted:Yeah this, he's not a ripoff; he's another character in the same continuity who never made it as big. IIRC Usagi even had an action figure in the TMNT line, same as Rat King or a host of other minor characters. Huh, strange that I never heard of him. I used to read the original TMNT comics in the mid-80s as a kid before they were on TV (the TV show was heresy to the comic fans at the time, though in retrospect the comics were just as much if not more aggressively stupid) and never remembered seeing him. Then again, I stopped reading shortly after the Back to New York arc so there's a lot that I must have missed. Some of those comics were pretty messed up though for a preteen, like the one where Michaelangelo got torn in half and his heart ripped out (though IIRC it was just a fever dream or something)
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May 8, 2014 21:27
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Captain Rufus posted:I'm also trying to find a good Ultima 1-5 styled game to play but the Ultima Dragons haven't been too helpful so far. They keep saying Avernum and I just don't like Jeff Vogel games much. Avadon 2 is..ok but it is no Ultima styled title. Deathlord.  Also holy poo poo, the Ultima Dragons are still around?
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May 8, 2014 21:33
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chairface posted:What exactly is incorrect? Here's the TMNT action figure: The action figure is from the TV show which is not what we were discussing, we were talking about the comics continuity, which Usagi Yojimbo never showed up in. I don't know much of the history behind Usagi Yojimbo but he could possibly be a TMNT ripoff, considering it sounds like both came out years before the show. The TV show was so radically different from the original comics continuity that the presence of the four turtles is almost the only thing the two have in common. Virtually every other character is either unique to the TV show or changed so much that they're basically unrecognizable. (April is a computer programmer turned curio shop proprietor, not a reporter, and the Shredder was killed in the very first issue when he fell off a rooftop after getting impaled through the chest by Leonardo, along with a live grenade which blew him to smithereens, and the turtles move out of the sewers in the third issue) There was a lot of animosity toward the show from the comics fans back in the day. (which is kind of funny since the comic was dumb as poo poo too) Anyhow, to steer back to Ultima-like RPG chat, I haven't seen 2400 AD mentioned yet--I thought that was decent. There's also Knights of Legend, which has some amazing tactical combat. However for that, you have to be careful which version you get because all three versions are super buggy. The C64 version is complete garbage. It has broken mechanics and a broken spell system. The Apple version is better--it has working mechanics and a broken spell system. The DOS version has broken mechanics and a working spell system. Personally I'd go with the DOS version since the broken mechanics is less of an issue than the broken magic system, but if you don't want to make any caster characters (reasonable, as magic isn't that great in KOL) go with the Apple version. ed: There are a couple of listings for Deathlord on eBay right now, BTW, both the C64 and the Apple version. I'd try to get the Apple version if you value your sanity--the C64 version looks only slightly nicer, but it doesn't work with a Fastloader and it accesses the disk so often to prevent savescumming that you will spend most of your playtime with it waiting for things to load/save. Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 14:59 on May 9, 2014 |
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May 9, 2014 14:32
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Bieeardo posted:Man, Legacy of the Ancients was the poo poo. I was always annoyed that we could never find a copy of Legend of Blacksilver's Apple II port, because we had so much fun with the first game. Yeah, that's absolutely the case. I ended up having all my dudes training in Scimitar or something since that's one of the only weapons that you can train really high. But since random encounters scale to your level it's not that huge of a deal to stay at low levels. I think the quest enemies didn't scale though so if you did level your guys high you could wreak havoc with them. The save system in Knights of Legend was REALLY bad though. Some of those quests could literally take hours to finish. As a kid I had the free time to do them but there's no chance I could find the time to do that now without an emulator and save states or something. (Or just leaving my computer on all the time)
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May 9, 2014 15:04
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Bob Loblaw posted:Are you looking for modern games similar or any time frame? Questron, Questron II, Legacy of the Ancients, and Legend of Blacksilver, in that chronological order, filled the gap for me nicely. Legacy is probably the best of the bunch, but Questron had for its time the best ending of any game I had played, and it was a tense experience too. These were all C64 titles, so no idea if your cup of tea, but I'm a huge fan of them all. Just a followup, and this may be totally off...I know you said you weren't interested in Spiderweb Software titles, but have you considered the original Exile games? Not Avadon, but the series that spawned it in the mid-90s. I've been playing it recently on my old G3 and it really is as close as you can get to Ultima 5 without being Ultima 5. It's top down, tile based, with an overworld containing towns/dungeons/etc. It has NPC interaction being keyword-based, with hints dropped you have to seek out people in other towns, etc. to find. It's got a separate combat screen when you get attacked on the overworld, with same party goes/enemies go mechanics (only difference is everyone gets more than one move instead of just one). And it's got a highly-customizable party you can make yourself while focusing on different stats and skills. It really feels like a love letter to the classic Ultima games, and substantially different than the isometric Spiderweb Software games.
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May 21, 2014 01:40
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d0s posted:I'm pretty sure the C64 was really popular here in the tiny market for games computers but I think if it had been marketed differently/had more of the excellent European games ported over to NTSC it could have become a lot more popular and expanded that market, a lot of the stuff I'm playing on it really gets almost NES-level in quality. I think Commodore US was really focusing on it's value as an educational/simple business machine because that's what the American computer market seemed to want. I did not even know the C64 existed until I was almost a teenager and getting into old computers as a hobby, and I was a very game-obsessed kid. C64 was really popular in general; it pretty much dominated the low-end computer market in the early to mid-80s. It was cheaper than the high-ends (Apple II, IBM PC) and more powerful than the other low-ends. (TRS-80, Atari 400/800) It was pretty much explicitly targeted as a low-end consumer machine though. For education Apple already had a stranglehold on the market. It had even less of a presence or marketing in the business sector--in addition to being markedly slower than the high-ends which already had a presence, it had a near complete lack of good productivity software. It didn't even have Visicalc, the killer business app that was mostly used on Apple II until Lotus 1-2-3 crushed it summarily and cemented the IBM PC as the business computer. The C64's low price point got it some hefty presence in the consumer market though, and since consumers are the ones that game, that's where the games went. But yeah in the 80s there was basically no platform wars in the schoolyard really. If you even had a computer it was pretty rare, and it was almost unheard of for the kids to have their own computer. (Me and my brother got lucky when we got a cheap C64 at a yard sale later in the 80s in that sense) I don't think it really started kicking into earnest until the 16-bit era when it was a competition between the 286/386 and the Amiga and computers became a little more commonplace.
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May 25, 2014 15:15
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Randalor posted:My parents had a Commodore 128 when I was growing up. I don't think we had that many legit games on it, mostly copies made with the Maverick program... which was a copied version. My dad was a terrible, terrible person. drat near everything back then was pirated, which is funny when you consider the decidedly low-tech methods of doing so. I never figured out where it came from myself at the time--most of the software that came with the C64 when we got it was pirated but besides that all my stuff was legit because I didn't know how to get it otherwise. In retrospect it was worth it though for the boxes and manuals alone.
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May 25, 2014 21:26
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Captain Rufus posted:In general everyone had Commodore 64/128s in my area. There were like 5-6 people I knew with them including me. Two assholes, my friend who was also kind of an rear end in a top hat, his friend who was creepy in hindsight but not really an rear end in a top hat, and a couple other people of largely douchey dispositions. Wait, seriously? Never? What kind of area did you grow up in that lots of people had computers but they were all C64s? Because while the C64 was the best computer in the 80s for gaming, it was really lackluster at everything else--even the Atari 8-bit beat it out in terms of productivity software and being programmable, to say nothing of the IBMs and Apples. Most of the time where I was growing up computers were a thing that parents bought to take their work home and maybe if the kids were lucky they got to play on it. For that reason the dominant computers were the IBM PC and Apple since that's what parents used at work, with Atari 8-bits and TRS-80s occasionally. I can only think of two other kids other than myself that had a C64. Though this is the mostly white-collar Philly burbs we're talking about so that will skew things--in more mixed and blue-collar areas I can definitely see the C64 dominating, but not to that extent. Macs though, those were definitely since they weren't big outside of any segment but the desktop publishing market, and the OS in the early models was too much of a resource hog. By the time they got competitive spec-wise it was too late, and the market was completely dominated by the 386/486. (outside of the aforementioned desktop publishing/high-end graphics stuff)
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May 27, 2014 16:05
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d0s posted:Please don't be mean rufus At least where I grew up, the kids with computers tended to be douches because they also tended to come from entitled rich families, given the absurd cost of the things in the 80s. The least douchey of the ones I knew had an Atari 8-bit and a C64. The biggest douche in class had an IBM.
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May 28, 2014 00:05
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