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It's funny reading all the back and forth in this thread over the Apple II and C64 because I had little to no exposure to them when I was a kid. One of my earliest memories was the summer day in 1981 when my dad had me tag along to Radio Shack when he bought the first Color Computer; I remember coming home and hanging out with him on the living room floor as he worked on it. On the weekends, my mom would send us out to the mall to get some item, and we'd spend 10 minutes buying that and two hours hanging out in Radio Shack and buying work programs (for him) and games (for me). Two years later, he got me a MC-10 because I was monopolizing the CoCo, but they only ever ended up making two games for it that Radio Shack sold, so a year after that he got me my own CoCo2 for Christmas. I spent hours poring over Rainbow Magazine and books on how to program in BASIC but I could never quite get the hang of it. I also remember the anticipation each month of waiting for the latest issue of Chromasette to arrive in the mail. As I got older, I grew vaguely aware that the CoCo was not even close to being the best computer gaming platform, but I didn't care. I remember a period in '85/'86 where I think the Nintendo had just come out, we were still three years or so away from buying our first IBM PC, and I was kind of bummed I didn't have more to play. One weekend, the local Radio Shack was having a clearance sale and my dad came home with a huge box of games and the enhanced sound/speech pack for super cheap. I spent another year or so playing games on that thing until I got a Nintendo. All our CoCo hardware is now long gone; about a year or two ago, I discovered this site and a few others, and I've spent a day or two with VCC playing some of this stuff. Some of my favorites include: Pyramid 2000 - my first IF game, I played the poo poo out of this on the original CoCo (and had no idea it was a partial rip-off of Colossal Cave, a game I wasn't aware of until years later). There's a great site here with a Java version and a complete breakdown of how the game was coded. Zaxxon - most arcade ports on the CoCo were rear end, but this was pretty amazing at the time and was officially sold through Radio Shack. Pegasus and the Phantom Riders - pretty nifty Joust clone. VARLOC - this blew my mind at the time. It's like Archon (everyone here is familiar with Archon I hope) except the battle portions were fought in a 3D wireframe playing field. Able Builders - Kaboom! clone I remember first playing on Chromasette. Downland - really tough platforming game taking place in a cave. Dungeons of Daggorath - probably the one CoCo exclusive that most people have actually heard of. I was never very good at it as a kid though. Fangman - Pac-Man clone, except you play as a vampire. Galactic Attack - Galaxian/Space Invaders clone, and I think the first CoCo game I ever played. Mega bug - Another Pac-Man clone with the gimmick that it takes place in a giant maze and the part you're in is magnified. I missed out on a lot of the big names (Ultima, Wizardry, etc.) since those were never ported to the CoCo, which is probably the only regret I have.
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Mar 11, 2014 19:53
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d0s posted:It's cool that you mention the Micro Color, one of those actually survived my purges along with a Model 100. Can't find any of the cables for them anymore though, and I will probably end up putting those on eBay along with a Timex Sinclair 1000 that I kept for some reason (certainly not out of any love for it, miserable system). Oh poo poo, I totally forgot my dad had one of those Model 100s! During the summers I used to tag along with him on consulting jobs he did and I'd sit somewhere and play games on that all day.
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Mar 12, 2014 00:09
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SubG posted:There weren't a lot of big-name titles from the day ported to the CoCo, but a substantial portion of the Infocom catalogue was (I might have issues of The New Zork Times/The Status Line in a box somewhere that list 'em). Retailers never carried them, but you could order them directly from Infocom. And as another commentary on the `this was another time' thing, ordering a game from Infocom meant waiting 6-8 weeks to get your game, because that's how long it took pretty much anything to ship in the pre-amazon-prime days. 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. quote:And you mentioned Rainbow magazine, which was always a loving brick of a magazine. There were also a couple smaller magazines, like Hot Coco, and a third whose name I can't recall but I assume it also sounded vaguely like a fetish mag. I used to write games for all of 'em. I remember one time submitting a text adventure where I'd written the text parser in assembly, and they sent it back with a note saying that they didn't want to require readers to use/have access to an assembler. I generated a scrap of BASIC that had the same code as a bunch of POKE and DATA statements, resubmitted it, and they accepted it. My dad tossed all the old Rainbows he had, but I found an archive for them here.
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Mar 15, 2014 02:41
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Captain Rufus posted:I have Mind Roll in Cart format. Eventually I will have a Coco3 to play it: I had ATOM for my CoCo when I was a kid, I didn't understand really what was going on and I was never very good at it 
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Jun 2, 2014 13:50
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Police Automaton posted:This was my first effort post about actual games and not hardware, I hope it was still interesting. I wanted to talk about some more unusual, non-action games that are rarely mentioned. I've heard of/played all of those except Starfleet 2 - that sounds like a neat game! Thanks for talking about that one. Speaking of Star Trek, Begin was a fixture in my household for a while. Unlike the other "Trek" games of the time that followed the "starmap, starbase, kill the enemies" model, this is a turn-based tactical simulator with a text parser input. You pick two sides (from Federation, Klingon, Romulan or Orion Pirates) and then set up a team of up to eight ships of various sizes against each other. You could do neat stuff like independently/manually aim phasers and torpedoes so you could destroy incoming projectiles, or detonate probes (large, slow homing weapons) before your enemies could destroy them. You can break down another ship's shields, target specific systems to damage, beam over boarding parties, and so on. I remember spending hours playing it in my dad's office or on his TRS 80 Model 100 when I'd go on business trips with him.
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Jul 30, 2014 01:05
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ShankyMcStabber posted:If you want a really detailed space combat simulator from the 80's you should look into The Cosmic Balance by SSI. It plays as close to the Star Fleet Battles hex-war game as was possible in 1982. Wow, another one I've never heard of - unsurprising since it looks like it was C64/Atari/Apple II only. I might have to check that out.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:01
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Hob_Gadling posted:I've spent most of this evening trying to google up a retro game. Deliver me from this uncertainty! Is it this? http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D1693 It has "AD" in the title, and the setting isn't a space station, but the screen is split into two levels, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdn8trj7M0E
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Feb 26, 2016 21:49
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So to get some inspiration and ideas for programming a small game in a contemporary engine, I've been messing around with Vice and C64 programming a little, especially after I found this utility for Windows that gives you an editor for Basic, assembly, sprites, etc. it hooks up to Vice so you can run stuff quickly. I'm looking for something similar to this for the Apple 2 and striking out. It looks like there are a few Windows-based IDEs that do assembly, but nothing that does graphics or also helps check Basic (in fact, most of what comes up when you google that is editors and utilities that run on the Apple 2/emulator itself). Any suggestions? Again, this isn't for any kind of serious work, it's more of a convenience and goofing around kind of thing.
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Jun 2, 2017 18:34
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Captain Rufus posted:
I've used XRoar for CoCo 1 and 2 emulation on the PC and it works well enough. There's an Android port available at it's website, but I've never used it before. XRoar also covers the UK CoCo Dragon clones and claims to support CoCo 3 and MC-10, but I just use other emulators for those (VCC for the CoCo 3 - that one does CoCo 2 but the last time I used it, it doesn't get the colors right for the machine). MAME also can emulate CoCo 1/2/3 (I believe it was originally through MESS) but I don't know if any Android port of MAME covers it.
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Jun 13, 2022 11:42
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I played through the original Doom with that classic two-button Flightstick by CH Products. I bought it for Wing Commander and it was great for that, Wing Commander 2, Jetfighter 2, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, etc but it sucked for a first person shooter. I didn't start using mouse and keyboard until Doom 2, when I started playing deathmatch on a local BBS and a total stranger taught me how to use it. I have vague memories of wrangling memory for DOS games. My dad was the expert, and he spent an hour or two messing with config and bat files to get the aforementioned Wing Commander games running for me. I remember having a 386 from 1990 to 1994, when I got a 486DX2-66 with 8mb ram and marveled at how that ran X-Wing.
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May 18, 2023 02:31
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drrockso20 posted:Rewatching the TRS-80 Color Computer video LGR did a couple years ago and on a whim decided to do a quick look on eBay and man those are some pretty low prices for a line of computers as old as they are, most of the time I look up old computers they tend to be really expensive, even for ones much newer, guess the "CoCo" must land in a perfect spot in the intersection of "they made a lot of them", "low demand", and "obscure in the modern day" to stay so relatively cheap CoCo 1s and 2s are pretty easy to get; the real tough one are the CoCo 3s, which tend to go for a lot more when they show up on eBay depending on the condition/extras to be had. I keep thinking I want to buy my childhood computer again (CoCo 2 64k) but I don't have the room for it, not to mention the extra money to spend on stuff to make it usable today.
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Oct 25, 2023 12:03
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