Retro-Game Discussion

[jlv]

Funny that the turbo button lasted as long as it did. Did anything actually need to run with turbo off at 8 MHz?

[TeamHavocRacing]

Loved it when I would show that button to someone and they didn't know it was real! "Turbo?!?!? Really???!!?! I thought it was just a joke!" Did you ever get cover disks full of demos etc. that came with mags? Full programs sometimes. I wonder how many 1.44mb disks/sec it is on a fast download these days. Web based eliminates the need, I guess. There's a hack for ya, a d/l meter that can read in floppies/sec! You could select between 5-1/4" SD or DD and same with 3-1/2". What about the 8" floppy? In '87, my boss programmed his lathes with a Nova with a 10mb HDD that clacked like a Harley gearbox and also used those giant floppies. Almost round green-screen too. Wow.

[Shadow]

Oh man the nostalgia trip from this thread is endless! Used to play Stunts! and 4D sports boxing countless hours when I was a little kid.
Remember the turbo button as well, I think my parents have the PC/case that has the button still in the garage somewhere.

[cpt_Slow]

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jlv, check out Super Scramble if you emulate. Until MXS, it was the nit's tits. My only floppy of it corrupted! Had to wait to emulate to get into it any further.
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I still have my ZX Spectrum version (Tape is clearly superior to floppy since when I last checked it still works perfectly ) I have no idea how this person makes it look so easy, I remember it being impossible to not get a penalty "You went too fast", "You went too slow" etc.

[jlv]

I remember reading the dead tree version of this article 20 years ago! How can it be 20 years already?

[TeamHavocRacing]

I remember that moment when I saw my bro-in-law playing Wolfenstein for the first time... "What IS that?!?!?"

[jlv]

My thoughts were, "How do they DO that?" After I saw those games all I could think about was how texture mapping worked. I eventually wrote a pretty fast texture mapping engine but never made anything out of it.

[TeamHavocRacing]

That was a quantum leap. I just learned that was the good old wizardry of assembly language. The number of platforms that could run on smoothly is amazing. I was a late adopter, Quake II is where I first fragged/gib'd. id created great games that also doubled as benchmarks. If you could crank their titles, you were pimpin'. The first real lighting.

[jlv]

For me at least, it was more that backward mapping (stepping along screen pixels) instead of forward mapping (stepping along texels) hadn't occurred to me. Assembly helps too, but Carmack was actually one of the first game programmers to code mostly in C rather than assembly.

[TeamHavocRacing]

You left me in a cloud of heffer-dust back there. I stopped at gamer and any coding I do is only done in G-code. I was once able to get a C-64 to get some cool patterns by typing some lines followed by print\ or sumpin. I have trouble even making tracks. I am Captain Distracto. Just a playa i guess. I just remembered playing Hangman on a Compaq "suitcase" computer with the 5 or 6 inch green screen and 5-1/4" floppies. Still in novelty mode back then.

[Pumaxcs]

As much as I want to be a part of this I am no where near this old.

My earliest memory of a PC game was Jazzy JackRabbit, loved 1 and 2 insanely. Beat these games repeatedly.

[TeamHavocRacing]

A buddy of mine was talking about playing a flight-sim on a Sinclair. That name was being blocked out of my memory by the name Altair.

Check out the rad joystick!

I loved this era of computing, when it was fun to hang out at a Radio Shack.

My neighbor had one of these..."what do you DO with it?!?!?"

[jlv]

It'd be a pretty tight squeeze to fit a flight sim in 1k!

There's a pretty good article on the 'speccy' here. (That whole blog is pretty cool if you're into adventure game history.)

[TeamHavocRacing]

FREE ON ORIGIN!
Now I can see what the hubbub was about. All-star cast of B listers.

[Shadow]

http://www.myabandonware.com/

Knock yourselves out guys!
They don't go older than 1980 though.