Old computing and nostalgia!
Posted by: Jonathan Gorse on 28 October 2004
Stumbled across a rather nice nostalgic magazine the other day in WH Smith called 'Retro Gamer' all about old computer games of the 1970's and 80's. I ended up buying it and it certainly made for an entertaining read and reminded me of the old days of taking 20 mins to load 'Elite' on my Commodore 64 off cassette and playing it until the early hours of the morning. I must have spent countless hours hunched over my old 14 inch portable TV in the bedroom with the lights out so my parents didn't know how late I was awake on a school night!!
I seem to recall being somewhat addicted to 'Defender' in the arcades too but happilly bought a copy of Williams Arcade classics some years ago which actually runs the original arcade machine code on a Windows PC emulator. It's still a really playable game even if I chuckle to think an old pal and I used to be in awe of the 'graphics'
Interesting to read about the decline of Commodore and hard to believe they went from selling 30 million C64's (the best selling home computer of all time) to bankruptcy in only a few short years. Sadly my old 64 eventually died when I was at University but I must confess I wish I'd kept it for sentimental reasons- it seems there's quite a buoyant trade in these things nowadays.
Anyone else remember the old computing days with fondness???
Jonathan
I seem to recall being somewhat addicted to 'Defender' in the arcades too but happilly bought a copy of Williams Arcade classics some years ago which actually runs the original arcade machine code on a Windows PC emulator. It's still a really playable game even if I chuckle to think an old pal and I used to be in awe of the 'graphics'
Interesting to read about the decline of Commodore and hard to believe they went from selling 30 million C64's (the best selling home computer of all time) to bankruptcy in only a few short years. Sadly my old 64 eventually died when I was at University but I must confess I wish I'd kept it for sentimental reasons- it seems there's quite a buoyant trade in these things nowadays.
Anyone else remember the old computing days with fondness???
Jonathan
quote:
Anyone else remember the old computing days with fondness???
<misty-eyed mode on>
Those were the days...standing in Dixons as a kid on a Saturday morning trying to hack the demo programs and
writing crap like: -
10 Print "Mindless Banal Text"
20 Goto 10
on Spectrums, Dragons, Orics (alas poor Oric, remember him?) Ataris etc.
I started with the classic Atari VCS console, moving to an Atari 400, C64, 800XL, ST and then into the realms of the PC.
Hours spent typing magazine listings, in hexadecimal, into the machine to try what often ended up as a total crap game!
The playability was the key though the great thing about modern PC's is their speed allows perfect emulation of many of those highly playable arcade games, check out the MAME arcade emulator (http://www.mame.net/) to play those wonderful arcade games like my all time favourite game of Galaga. There was a great version of this for the BBC's, called Zalaga and I spent many a weekend hammering the f**k out of my friends keyboard playing it.
They all inseperable from those early home computers, since they are inextricably linked to my youth along with the real characters that were around at the time, like the fabulous and hairy Yak himself, Jeff Minter
(http://www.yakyak.org/index.php), whose Attack of the Mutant camels would no doubt be a highly playable game still today.
I must confess a re-visit to some of those games has left them dated, but others are equally playable.
Technology is fascinating too, that early VCS machine complete with it's mock-wood edging and massive collection of cartridges (costing hundreds of pounds for the unit alone) is now contained in a playstation-like controller that plugs into the TV and has several hundred games built in, all for less than 30 quid. Looking at the dodgy block sprites that represent cars etc. makes me wonder how we were remotely convinced at the time, but my 5 year old son, who's no stranger to the photo-realistic 3D rendering of modern games, found it all instantly recongnisable and playable. Me, I can still remember the competitions that Dad and i had trying to better each others score on Missile Command or the invisible version of Space Invaders! Of course, I always won, as all kids should
It's classic content over presentation stuff though and John Channing is so right about the playability thing.
The other issue for me is I don't really have time to play a game for hours on end, so a quick shoot 'em up or racing game still holds appeal, but there's less of the former around these days, no-one seems to have truly harnessed the power of the modern PC to produce the ultimate shoot 'em up.
Andy.
P.S. Rasher - Leisure Suit Larry, that was a funny game!
P.P.S. One of the most fun things I did a while back was build an interface for my old Atari 5 1/4" floppy drives to the PC parallel port which allowed me to load games directly from floppy to a PC emulator, great stuff! if you have any old hardware it's worth a hunt around the web, it's surprising what some enterprising individuals have done to ressurect the glory days.