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The Obsolete Non-PC/Mac Computer Thread

 
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ApM
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 12:10 pm    Post subject: The Obsolete Non-PC/Mac Computer Thread Reply with quote

So, I've finally developed a system of organizing my computers such that they are accessible and playable at a moment's notice. They've been sitting unused in a box in a closet for like four years, so I'm pretty stoked to have them playable again. I've been geeking out on Apple IIgs nostalgia almost exclusively for weeks. (Surprisingly, most of the titles that are actually still kind of fun are edutainment. Robot Odyssey is incredible, for example.)

Lately I've had a desire to check out what my Amiga 500 can do for me. Unfortunately, as I never owned one growing up, I can't rely on nostalgia to tell me what's interesting. This is where you come in!

I don't care so much if the games you talk about are objectively good by your current standards, or anything like that. I want to hear about anything that you once thought was interesting; games you sunk hours into without having any idea why, games that you played to death with your friends, games you could never figure out, games you still think are genius. If you never had an Amiga, talk about the Atari ST or the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64 or something. Chances are that if your family owned a non-IBM computer in the 80s, you had a large library of mostly-pirated games that you didn't really know anything about before sitting down to play them. Tell me about that library.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 12:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i'm going to take this thread as a reminder to buy that a/v cable for my st.
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 12:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd like to see a picture of your setup.
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ApM
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 9:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Setup, in the long view.
A closer look at my computers.
A few more computers, a bunch of software, and puppets.
The ten consoles hooked up to my television. Videophiles laugh at my setup, which includes daisy-chaining 5 RF switches.
Console games.

I swiped a Compact Flash card from work to take pictures just for you, HarveyJames! Actually I've had pictures on my shitty-ass digital camera for weeks, but had no way to get them off because the USB cable that fits the camera I have is in Nova Scotia with my wife, who is using it for her decent digital camera.

Hey guys if someone suggests an Amiga game that I should try I promise to post at length about Space Taxi. I'm OK with this being a list thread if it has to be; it's pretty much the same thing as copying a bunch of disks from a friend sight-unseen.

I just recorded Jeff Minter's Psychedelia for the Vic 20 onto an audio cassette, which is loading AS I TYPE
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 8:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nice pics. I like the descriptions, it's like playing a point-n-click adventure game.

Ok, Amiga Games. I used to really like an Amiga Game called Gravity Power, which was comissioned by and given away free with Amiga Power Magazine, but was widely bootlegged so shouldn't be impossible to find. Also, there was an awesome Bomberman clone called Master Blaster which is the yardstick by which I measure all Bomberman games. None match up!

Knockout was like Destruction Derby but with the twist that the ring, the edge of which you could fall off, gradually shrunk as the match progressed. Genius!

Silly Putty/Putty is a game I have a lot of fond memories of... it just had a really charming and idiosyncratic sense of humour to it, and felt like a lot of care and attention had been lavished on it. It was really a cut above most of the other stuff out there. It's basically Kirby if Kirby had been invented by the English and not the Japanese. It's really quintessentially English in it's sense of humour, too, which is something you don't get so much in games these days.

Wizkid was another surreal English game. It's insane. I definitely recommend you play this game to the end. The last level is D-:

I rememeber really wanting to like Alien Breed Tower Assault, too, but being ultimately frustrated by it. I really admired the scope of its ambition more than anything. It's basically an attempt to recreate the film Aliens in a top-down gauntlet style. The colony is massive and can be explored in a non-linear fashion. I think I saw like 2% of the game the whole time I played it.

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ApM
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 8:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes! Excellent! Thank you!

(I can't believe that the very first game suggested in this thread does not appear in the 17.5 gigs of Amiga disk images I just downloaded I mean jeez.)

(Also why haven't I recently cracked open that issue of Amiga Power that I got in a thrift store a few years ago?)

(Dammit, none of the awesome-looking public domain stuff they mention is in this stupid archive either argh. Also this magazine is making me want a hard drive and a RAM expansion. EDIT: Hey, I think I've already got a RAM expansion. Also: Hell Yes.)

I tried to get Sensible Soccer going because Rev. Stuart Campbell threatened to beat me up if I didn't. (Well, I'm sure he would if I had ever spoken to him.) Unfortunately it seems to be PAL-only? OH, THE CRUEL IRONY. If anyone knows if there was a release that plays nice with NTSC, I would love to hear about it.
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Cycle
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 10:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey guys, you should check out these 100 games! videos, especially the Amiga and C64 ones. They are pretty awesome to the max. Any game I'd mention is probably in these videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/laffer35

Wait, does anyone know of an old Amiga game, where you were this scientist that travelled through time? It was single screen, moving to the edge would move to the next screen and I think they eventually looped around. You could move up and down and left and right like in a beat'em up. I remember you had some kind of zapper thing, and the first area you went to was prehistoric. I remember if you zapped a dinosaur egg, a pterydactel (or whatever) would pick you up and drop you somewhere else. Also there was a lava river I could never jump over. I've been trying to remember this game for literally 20 years. Well, almost.
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 3:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Time Machine?


Currently researching hardware switches to make my Amiga display in NTSC50 itt. Man, I hope my TV displays NTSC50.

Hey guys I said I was going to talk about Space Taxi but I think I want to talk about ROBOT ODYSSEY.

Imagine, if you will, what would happen if Warren Robinett, designer of the Atari 2600 classic Adventure, decided that there was actually a lot you could do with a square that wanders around a blocky maze and picks up one item at a time. Imagine he develops a similar engine for the Apple II, and then co-founds an educational software company. He decides to use this engine to teach kids about digital logic.

Well, the result of that chain of events is Rocky's Boots, and while I haven't played it in many years, I recall it being pretty interesting as a 10-year-old. You'd build up little chains of logic gates to accomplish various arbitrary tasks ("Build a machine to kick all the blue circles!").

After that, all the information I can find seems to say that Robinett moved on to do VR stuff at NASA without having much input in any other games at the Learning Company. But they were far from done with his engine.

Robot Odyssey is the next game that came out, and it basically takes Rocky's Boots and turns it into the glorious hardcore hardware-hacking game that Rocky's Boots secretly aspired to be. You solve puzzles by controlling robots by hooking up logic gates to their sensors and motors. There is a key that you press to turn your character into a soldering iron. You can burn microchips with other microchips nested inside for infinite complexity, and have robots with another robot nested inside, controIling the outer robot. I would not be surprised if someone had built a Turing machine inside this game.

You can grab the original Apple II version here, or else there's a remake with full level-editing capabilities written in Java which I have not tried here.

A few more -- generally much simpler -- games were put out using this engine: Think Quick!, Gertrude's Secrets, Gertrude's Puzzles. All, I think, have various levels of player editability. Think Quick! is built around opening doors that close off other pathways in the correct sequence, and it has a full-featured level designer. Every game built on this engine is a sort of educational, nonviolent proto-ZZT, and they fascinate the hell out of me.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i was all about gertrude's secrets back in the day.
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

st status up update: i have secured a television for the st, currently sitting on its desk. the a/v cables are in the mail. hopefully.
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ApM wrote:
Time Machine?


holy shit what the fuck, i so looked up that name but ne ver foudn it but that is the game i cant believe this holy crap apm i love you

also i love space taxi and would like to hear what you have to say
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 11:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Damn damn damn

I gave both of my broken C64s away 15 years ago, along with 3-4 shoeboxes full of games.
(To a guy that fixes this stuff.)

Time to look up some emulators.

I really want to play Starflight again.
Deathsword, M.U.L.E., Mail Order Monsters, Legacy of the Ancients, Space Taxi, Paradroids, Mars Saga, Wasteland, Neuromancer, Roadwar 2000, Archon...

[url=http://www.simple-media.co.uk/music/mp3/files/c64/Saul%20Cross%20-%20Master%20of%20Magic%20(faerytale%20mix%20WIP).mp3]I still remember the music from Master Of Magic. So creepy.[/url]
The link is for a soft MP3 remake.
I can't seem to find the original. (Which required a special player.)
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 1:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sweet pictures! You're like the only other person I know that has an American MSX machine. I've got the CX5M, but unfortunately with no disk drive and being on the bottom of the MSX world as far as system specs, there's not much I can do with it save for play the Dragon Warrior cart I got off of eBay. I hope to get one of the spiffy HitBit MSX2 units in Japan on my exchange program; while I'm at it I'd love to poke around with other Japanese computers like the X68000 but I hear those things are pretty monolithic and so pretty exorbitant to ship back to the states.

It's nice seeing the little ol' Mac SE on that shelf. I'm not too fond of Apple's current overly-fabricated look, but I love those first all-in-ones the company started with. I've got a working Classic II holding up my 13" TV in my room right now (no place to set it up otherwise. Those things were built tough so I know it will work just fine when I get it a spot) and I think I have a SE or two buried somewhere in the basement of my parents house, just waiting for me to get a larger apartment. The first SE I got was my highschool science teacher's college machine. It had the dual Double Density floppy drives, but then one of her hacker friends managed to install a 20MB hard drive in the machine as well. Near as I could tell when I was cleaning the thing out, he managed to bolt it to the underside of the monitor tube. Pretty nifty.

The Apple ][e was my real love before the PC moved in. We had a whole lab of them in elementary school, and those were the days when the educational software was actually fun, though Word Munchers still had nothing on Conan the Barbarian. I was entering my second year of high school when the elementary finally received a grant to replace the Apples with extremely shitty refurbished Pentium IIs. For $15, I went home with an Apple ][e, color monitor, ImageWriter II printer and a few ribbons, all of my beloved childhood games, 2 disk drives, and a box of blank 5 1/2" floppies. The whole shebang waits along with the SE for the day when I can finally set it up and use it. I'm a little worried about the floppies demagnetizing, but I'm also sort of intrigued at the idea of tracking down an old 5 1/2" drive for a PC and seeing if I can't use it to write disk images back to the blank floppies

It's funny: looking back on it, I don't think my elementary school had a single legit copy of Oregon Trail, AppleWorks, Word Munchers, or any of the other programs we had. In fact, what I thought were neat credit screens at the start of Conan and Diamond Mine were actually from the warez groups that cracked the games. I'd like to know how the school got a hold of those; the thing is that none of the teachers in charge of the lab new a darn thing about the computers, so it had to be completely accidental.
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 3:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Greatsaintlouis wrote:


The Apple ][e was my real love before the PC moved in. We had a whole lab of them in elementary school, and those were the days when the educational software was actually fun, though Word Munchers still had nothing on Conan the Barbarian. I was entering my second year of high school when the elementary finally received a grant to re
It's funny: looking back on it, I don't think my elementary school had a single legit copy of Oregon Trail, AppleWorks, Word Munchers, or any of the other programs we had. In fact, what I thought were neat credit screens at the start of Conan and Diamond Mine were actually from the warez groups that cracked the games. I'd like to know how the school got a hold of those; the thing is that none of the teachers in charge of the lab new a darn thing about the computers, so it had to be completely accidental.


I remember the total uselessness of "computer education" in the 80s.
The teachers for the most part knew nothing.
We typed in programs in BASIC. Verbatim, with minimal explanation of syntax, program structure, etc. (On Atari 800s)

Why? Some idiotic idea that being a user meant writing code?
Just to get us used to using computers?

In High School I learned WordStar and WordPerfect on early IBM PCs.
Keyboard only.

We only had a few mice; a novelty.

My C64 at home had games. Vastly more meaningful to me than the worthless nonsense I was being fed at school.

The only educational software I ever cared for was Space Shuttle Simulator.
Which I had at home.

Stupid geography/etc. quiz software was just crap.
Inferior to books or blackboards or lecture.

The only reason that crap had any appeal was the fast-fading novelty of "doing it on a computer".

bleh
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 1:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, I've got no disk drive for the MSX either, so it's pretty much just a curiosity. I've only got one of the tiny cartridges that came with it, too -- "FM Voicing Program II". Still, when I was paring down my collection, I couldn't bear the thought of getting rid of it.

One of these days I'm going to scrounge up the software to use my Mac SE as an AppleTalk bridge to my IIgs, and get the IIgs on the internet.

You can't write Apple II disks with a PC's 5.25" disk drive -- PC floppy drives are crippled to hell and generally can't be made to interoperate with anything else. I use ADTPro through the IIgs' serial port, but it works with a IIe super serial card if you've got it, or through a direct audio connection to the cassette port if you don't. It's pretty slick.

I've actually been kind of impressed at how well my old floppies have held up. Especially compared to how quickly they seemed to die when I was actually using them in the 80s. My old 3.5" disks seem to die a lot more easily over time, which I wouldn't have guessed by looking at them.

My middle school somehow had a legitimate copy of Space Quest II kicking around that no one knew the origins of. Generally the educational stuff everyone remembers (Number Munchers, Oregon Trail) was written by MECC, who sold yearly MECC memberships to schools so that they could make as many copies of as many MECC games as they felt like. So that stuff may have been legit.

Redeye, it's kind of a shame that your school had Ataris, because most of the educational software available for the Apple II puts most of the stuff being made today to shame. (See Robot Odyssey post above.)
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 4:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Redeye wrote:
Greatsaintlouis wrote:


The Apple ][e was my real love before the PC moved in. We had a whole lab of them in elementary school, and those were the days when the educational software was actually fun, though Word Munchers still had nothing on Conan the Barbarian. I was entering my second year of high school when the elementary finally received a grant to re
It's funny: looking back on it, I don't think my elementary school had a single legit copy of Oregon Trail, AppleWorks, Word Munchers, or any of the other programs we had. In fact, what I thought were neat credit screens at the start of Conan and Diamond Mine were actually from the warez groups that cracked the games. I'd like to know how the school got a hold of those; the thing is that none of the teachers in charge of the lab new a darn thing about the computers, so it had to be completely accidental.


I remember the total uselessness of "computer education" in the 80s.
The teachers for the most part knew nothing.
We typed in programs in BASIC. Verbatim, with minimal explanation of syntax, program structure, etc. (On Atari 800s)


Yeah, I remember taking computer studies class and getting told off for improvising on the program we were told to type into our computers. Instead of being rewarded or encouraged. I was like, 'fuck this noise'
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 4:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I remember Robot Odyssey totally kicking my ass. That was TOUGH.

I think my Apple II based education was a little better. I remember having some time and space to tool around with the systems. (I also remember my multiple choice quiz program was a big heap of fail at the history project fair.)

I feel like there's 1,000 things I could throw out into this thread, so I'll just leave it at:
EA (when it was more ECA, with that Cube, Sphere, Pyramid logo) kicked so much ass back in the day it's not even funny.
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