Discussion
Mmm. the 80's ......
Silica Shop, Atari 400 or ( WOW ) 800, BBC-B, Micro Power, Acornsoft, Elite ! Superior Systems, Gremlin, Just Micro, Level 9, Commodore, C&VG, Zap! 64, Frak, Twin Kingdom Valley, Bards Tale, Whizz Kids, Wargames, Tron, The Last Starfighter .... On and on and on.... Good memories.
Nothing and I mean NOTHING has captured my imagination like the early micro text only adventures with fantastic names like Planetfal, Voodoo Island,
Countdown to Doom etc.
That time, the 80's, was magical for me. I think it's spoilt our generation ( people in their 30's ). Who were 'into' computers.We were their when averything was fresh. It was new technology. Everything was a surprise.
Todays youngsters take it all for granted. I think for us oldies to feel like we did in the 80's their will have to be another staggering breakthrough in technology. Something that crosses the bounderies of
anything we know. Just like computers did in the 80's. It's sad but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.
Perhaps if I could come back in a couple hundred years ...... We could just plug ourselves into a machine and 'live' the game. Now that would really be
something !!
Silica Shop, Atari 400 or ( WOW ) 800, BBC-B, Micro Power, Acornsoft, Elite ! Superior Systems, Gremlin, Just Micro, Level 9, Commodore, C&VG, Zap! 64, Frak, Twin Kingdom Valley, Bards Tale, Whizz Kids, Wargames, Tron, The Last Starfighter .... On and on and on.... Good memories.
Nothing and I mean NOTHING has captured my imagination like the early micro text only adventures with fantastic names like Planetfal, Voodoo Island,
Countdown to Doom etc.
That time, the 80's, was magical for me. I think it's spoilt our generation ( people in their 30's ). Who were 'into' computers.We were their when averything was fresh. It was new technology. Everything was a surprise.
Todays youngsters take it all for granted. I think for us oldies to feel like we did in the 80's their will have to be another staggering breakthrough in technology. Something that crosses the bounderies of
anything we know. Just like computers did in the 80's. It's sad but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.
Perhaps if I could come back in a couple hundred years ...... We could just plug ourselves into a machine and 'live' the game. Now that would really be
something !!
jmorgan said:
I have the Infocom text adventures on the Mac. Good fun. Cup of brownian motion anyone? Still have the Amiga and Amstrad.
I remember the infocom adventures.... fantastic!
Also remember the text only adventure I once got hooked on the Apple II... called Softporn..... highly amusing!
nick heppinstall said:
Magnetic Scrolls ! The Pawn, Jinxter ? Guild of Thieves, Fish ! Fantastic !
That's them. All original and boxed upstairs, all except Fish. Mind you they are on the Amstrad and due to limited funds I bought the one with the green screen monitor. So some of the games were a tad awful to play. A bouncing ball and paint type comes to mind. Can't remember what it was called....Wizard or sommit?
I added a 51/4 inch drive to the Amstrad. Soldering iron came in handy.Stack of games handy on one disk. And the 3 inch disks that were to take over the world
?
Really enjoyed the Amiga operating system. Probably why I went down the Mac route as Windoze 3 was out at the time, with work etc. Pity Amiga didn't continue as fast. There was a company that would re build a 1200 into a tower, sort of 4000 on steroids and using the latest motorola chips etc. iMac was less fuss.
? Really enjoyed the Amiga operating system. Probably why I went down the Mac route as Windoze 3 was out at the time, with work etc. Pity Amiga didn't continue as fast. There was a company that would re build a 1200 into a tower, sort of 4000 on steroids and using the latest motorola chips etc. iMac was less fuss.
jmorgan said:
jmorgan said:
Oh, and I fitted a massive 1Gb drive to the Amiga
Bloody hell. My '030 powered A1200 had a 80mb internal HD, and it cost me a fortune....
....she still goes quite well....
My upgrade, to 030 that is, with an FPU and MMU as well. And 8 Mb of memory.
Same as mine, but fitted into a dodgy tower case (remember those iffy conversions?), 120mb Hard Disk and 2 floppy drives. Oh it was the gaming station of its day. Wings of fury anyone or stunt car racer, Walker, Cannon Fodder (okay that was a bit later but I can still remember the theme tune LOL). Class pure Class (who incidently a group with a similar name ran a quality BBS for amiga warez)
5 1/4'S I date to 8-Inch floppies, PC's that ran DOS but You couldn't get it to run on another PC cos the Chipset was different. 10Mb hard drives were new and really expensive. I've been in the business for 25 years and maybe I should hav ehad the sense to get out by now except I can still do dos commands.
Ah, what an absolutely bloody brilliant post.
Started off with a Philips G7000, then moved to my first real computer - a BBC B. It was the usual upgrade path from there, adding a 2nd CPU to it, DDFS, a Cumana 5.25" floppy (phwoooar), loads of ROMs and rom kits, before moving to a Master 128. That got upgraded to a Turbo, then eventually moved to an Archie A440 before finally making the switch to PC more out of necessity than desire.
And you know what my overriding feeling is? The technology and specifications might have lept forward an incredible amount but I feel the operating systems and software has done nothing but fall to the f**king weeds.
Anyone remember a game called Exile, on the beeb? Wasn't it amazing that they squeezed that into 32 Kb of resident memory!?
The master version had digitized speech squeezed into the 128K it had!!
I don't ever - ONCE - remember any of those early games crashing constantly with GPF equivalents, and we certainly weren't rolled out half-arsed efforts of development and then expected to download 44 patches over the following 12 months to fix all the bugs.
It was that generation of coding in raw assembler that made some of the most stringent, accurate, *good* coders the gaming scene ever saw. Geoff Crammond; what a star.
I know games and operating systems are vastly more complicated these days but there's nothing to say that our skills and the tools we use to write those complicated system shouldn't have moved with the times. People are sloppy these days. It will never be the same.
For me, I'm sooo glad I was there to see the start of it all - I'm going to be such a sad, annoying old grandad
"256 terrabytes? 256 TERRABYTES? Pfaa, I remember the day when we had to squeeze our operating system into an 8Kb ROM. I bet you don't even know what a kilobyte is, do ya, sonny?"
hehehe
>> Edited by brumster on Friday 23 April 08:39
>> Edited by brumster on Friday 23 April 08:40
Started off with a Philips G7000, then moved to my first real computer - a BBC B. It was the usual upgrade path from there, adding a 2nd CPU to it, DDFS, a Cumana 5.25" floppy (phwoooar), loads of ROMs and rom kits, before moving to a Master 128. That got upgraded to a Turbo, then eventually moved to an Archie A440 before finally making the switch to PC more out of necessity than desire.
And you know what my overriding feeling is? The technology and specifications might have lept forward an incredible amount but I feel the operating systems and software has done nothing but fall to the f**king weeds.
Anyone remember a game called Exile, on the beeb? Wasn't it amazing that they squeezed that into 32 Kb of resident memory!?
The master version had digitized speech squeezed into the 128K it had!! I don't ever - ONCE - remember any of those early games crashing constantly with GPF equivalents, and we certainly weren't rolled out half-arsed efforts of development and then expected to download 44 patches over the following 12 months to fix all the bugs.
It was that generation of coding in raw assembler that made some of the most stringent, accurate, *good* coders the gaming scene ever saw. Geoff Crammond; what a star.
I know games and operating systems are vastly more complicated these days but there's nothing to say that our skills and the tools we use to write those complicated system shouldn't have moved with the times. People are sloppy these days. It will never be the same.
For me, I'm sooo glad I was there to see the start of it all - I'm going to be such a sad, annoying old grandad
"256 terrabytes? 256 TERRABYTES? Pfaa, I remember the day when we had to squeeze our operating system into an 8Kb ROM. I bet you don't even know what a kilobyte is, do ya, sonny?"
hehehe >> Edited by brumster on Friday 23 April 08:39
>> Edited by brumster on Friday 23 April 08:40
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