Retro-Game Discussion

[Mikey]

Were the 80s fun? I it would of been the tits.

[Mikey]

*I reckon it

[TeamHavocRacing]

Funny thing is, when you're in the time, you don't realize the significance. I did like the gadget boom and MTV and shit. I look back and miss some things and am glad to move on to others. However, I do realize that we are in the golden age of sim gaming. I was desperately waiting for gaming to get to this level of realism and my wishes have come true as far as certain things being modeled, like Nordschleife and Pikes Peak and other long tracks too big to model before. Now we just need Isle of Man to be fully modeled and the Holy Trinity will be complete.

[jlv]

Hey Havoc, have you seen the new Elite game? I swear it looks exactly like the original Elite looked in my imagination when I was 12 years old. They're doing such a fantastic job on the remake.

This was state of the art in 1984 Mikey:


Here's the remake:

[TeamHavocRacing]

Gordon Moore leans back in smug satisfaction while giggling when he sees this. I never heard of Elite, of course. I was an arcader until the very late '80's and could've spent that 15 to 20 grand in quarters on a real nice setup with a math co-processor and a 80 meg hard drive and an AdLib card. Bought an Amiga 500(expanded to 1 Meg RAM!) in summer of '90 for $850 so I could play F-16 Combat Pilot and eventually null-modem 2 of them together for head-to-head F-16 and Stunt Car Racer along with D-Paint 4 and Octo-Med music tracker. A local store called Software Pipeline rented titles for a lot of platforms and they had the first Thrustmaster joy, replete with Pop-Rivets and aluminum plate!. Ah, the heady days of floppy-swapping! Thanks for your perspective Josh, I'm a helpless nostalgia freak. That Hackers book got me re-invigorated. You should peel your post off into "Retro-Game Discussion" topic, lol.
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The second version with a plastic base and those DAMN DIP-Switches, IRQ interrupts?!?!!?!

[jlv]

Can't believe you missed that one! There's a pretty good write up on Elite here. Of course, an Amiga 500 was like a supercomputer compared with the 8-bit systems that Elite ran on.

The funny thing is, while I'd have a hard time thinking of anything from the 80's that wasn't improved by huge margins in the 90's, the same isn't true for the 90's vs 2000's. Feels like Moore's law died sometime around 2000. Even motorcycles stopped getting better. Not that there aren't incremental improvements now, but in the 90's you'd buy a computer and the next year everything would be twice as fast.

[TeamHavocRacing]

Hey thanks JLV! Fortunately, I couldn't afford a PC during the VESA local bus turning to PCI then the Voodoo/Rendition battle for supremacy. The hair pulling that must've gone on during all that rapid change! In '98 I got a Celeron 466 OC'ed to 583mhz with 2 12meg Voodoo 2's SLI'ed together. I was playing Grand Prix Legends and Quake II mostly. I think the first computing I did was a Telex teletype in Junior High library. lol. Some kid who lived close to school would circumvent the front office's strict phone policy and use the dailer to call home. When his mom would answer and hear the buzz, she'd know it was him and start talking about whether lunch was ready or to buy one. He didn't even know he was a hacker! The Amiga was my fave. What was your first computer? Was it an Altair?

[Mikey]

Did any of you guys play the very early car racing games?

[Mikey]

Woah, so that was 30 years ago huh. Crazy. I kinda feel like what we have now should of taken a little less time, I dunno how off base I am with that thought.

So it was Space Invaders than Elite, What was the gaming sensation after that?

My User-centered Design professor had some cool stories about gaming and programming when he was growing up in the UK, presumably smack bang in the 80s. I'll have to dig up the lectures about it.

[jlv]

My first computer was a Vic-20. One thing about those old 8-bit BASIC computers was they did make it easy to start programming. Learned BASIC on the Vic, then learned C on an Amiga. I had a C64 too but I just played games on that.

Mikey, Ferrari Formula One by Electronic Arts was the first decent racing game as far as I know.


I'm not sure I'd say Elite was a sensation. There was too much going on for one game to be the only big thing. After that period Id Software pretty much owned the 90's with Wolf3d, Doom and Quake.

[TeamHavocRacing]

YES! The mouse driving in Ferarri F1 was a first, and the graphics were a leap too. Mario Andretti's Racing Challenge stood apart because it had a development structure where you worked up through the bigger series to F1. Microprose made Grand Prix Circuit or just Grand Prix for Europe, it had the first decent elevation change that felt like anything. There were some lofty aspirations back then, jamming all you could into one title. Chuck Yeager's Air Combat also comes to mind. It makes marketing departments of today shudder to think of putting ALL of your content into the initial release. Links 386 was a fave because they had some of the first photo-realistic graphics, albeit static until you hit the golf ball and they released different courses over time starting todays nickel-and-dime payment structure. Thanks for being old-school JLV! Some folks don't realize how lucky we have it with MXS, yet they still bitch about stuff.
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Look at the detail!!! He had to turn it down, more buildings than that were modeled.

[FnF_greg]

Did any of you guys play the very early car racing games?

i guess this can't really be considered very early but i remember this as one of the first racing games i ever played

for the rest i just remember allot of the ID software & Apogee games to be really good even to this day

[jlv]

I had never seen F1GP before. Must have been too much in love with my RM at the time. Looks so good I almost want to try it out in an emulator!

[TeamHavocRacing]

4D Sports Driving! Greg is totally on-track with that one! 4D Sports Boxing was the best sim of it's day, before the driving sim. If you could run it cranked, you
It's detail reduction setup was ahead of it's time. Check it out...and find an emulator!

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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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[TeamHavocRacing]

"If you could run it cranked, you"...had a badass 486 100mhz with the turbo button pushed!