The first code manipulation I ever did was hacking Temple of Apshai to multiply the treasure reward functions so that it had to display my gold hoard in scientific notation.
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Well it did say âsecond-most eliteâ.
I do agree, pre-XVGA gamers, even though most of my early gaming was during the early to mid 90s era.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why Temple of Apshai drew the map in such a weird way, drawing walls, erasing them, redrawing themâŚ
It never occurred to me to go in and multiply the treasure. Brilliant!
(also, how could I possibly have left Zork out of my previous list??)
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i remember typing in the WHOLE âLunar LEM Rocketâ game from âBasic Computer Gamesâ on my TRS 80 (model 1, level II) saving it on the cassette drive, only to learn there was a difference between O and 0. http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/
my old man chastised me for buying a book on games, then sat and made me write a program to find/replace.
I seriously remember when Zero Wing came out in 91, I downloaded it from âthe Dinerâ one of the GREAT BBSâs out of Austin, Texas.
and now, for the life of me? I cannot play first person shooters, I get some weird reverse vertigo motion-sickness from them.
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A small percentage of the population canât.
Iâm one of them too unfortunately. I canât, sticking to the theme, play Doom/Quake for long periods.
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Thatâs what I thought, until my son forced me, at gunpoint, to play Minecraft. Ruthlessly, ruthlessly!
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Not only did I play DOS games (Bardstale 1 ftw, Kingâs Quest, Ancient Art of War, Pirates were also pretty sweet) I even wrote my own choose-your-own-adventure text game in BASIC that inevitably led to death, with âYOU"RE DEAD ASSHOLE!â being displayed in green monochrome type on screen.
I remember setting up 4 player DOOM deathmatches using daisy chained serial cables (including one pair going through our ROLMphone to another dorm room) with a crazy hack. It was glorious.
I even had a pair of serial AB switches that were wired up such that my roommate could either use the phone directly, or connect to my machine (and use SLIRP to get out to the internet) while my machine was connected to the phone. Those were the days.
Of course DOOM had this crazy feature where deathmatches were framelocked to the slowest guy. So you would have a buttery smooth deathmatch going. Then you would restart and the troll with the slow 486 would make it a slideshow for everybody.
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I felt so elite with my real IBM and PC-DOS. There wasnât really much to it except that it was a tiny touch smarter about memory management and I basically never had to build custom autoexec.bat or config.sys files to get a game to work. Also, it was stuck with Windows 3.1 instead of 3.11 because Microsoft was trying to kill off competitors to MSDOS using Windows. I even got a copy of OS/2 Warp 3.0, which ran so slowly that I could outrun the cursor in its notepad app by a whole line at a time.
Loading Pool of Radiance used to take up huge hours of my lifeâŚ8086 with 640k RAM and two low density 5.25" disk drives. CGA baby!
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DOS games were one thing; games on my old Tandy CoCo were something else. Iâd get my copy of âThe Rainbowâ every month and start typing away at whatever BASIC game was in that monthâs issue, Disk drives? Ha! Everything got saved on cassette tape. âColor Computerâ but hooked up to a 13" black-and-white TV.
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Hexen?
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Multiplying the treasure was a consolation prize - the whole reason I got into the code was frustration that I never could find the treasure room pictured in a screen shot on the back of the box, and finally went looking for it in the code. Alas, it did not exist.
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DOS, huh? The video drivers (?) for DOOM were shareware⌠and the company making them were on the wrong side of the Atlantic and wanted dollars. Problematic. But they were free to use for two weeks. So⌠I added a line into autoexec.bat to reset the system date every time the system booted.
A couple of years later, my friends started to complain that they were missing my emails⌠because they all had the same dateâŚ
Before that, Amiga 1200. (Still have it, still working⌠but half the floppies have died from old age).
Before that, Amiga 500.
Before that, BBC Model B. (Oh Elite, how I loved theeâŚ)
Before that, Sinclair ZX81. (My current PC has 8,388,608 times as much memory as that did). Loading games from cassette tapes⌠and occasionally singing along with the random warbling soundsâŚ
Before that, time on schoolâs Research Machines 380Z.
So yeah, not sure how that makes DOS gaming the second-most eliteâŚ
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I worked at a PC centric game store around the time of 3.3 to 5.0. We kept printouts with autoexec/config file settings for various popular games by the register, to give to customers new to the hobby. Which still didnât stop the phone calls which inevitably included the line âType edit autoexec dot bat. No, dot as in period. No, no spaces around the period.â Or you might have to explain what a mouse driver was, or the difference between extended and expanded memory.
And then suddenlyâŚ
âWhat does this dos/4gw do?â
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Bah. Kids.
All I gotta say is âxyzzyâ
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So many awesome memories⌠Secret of Monkey Island, Doom, Heretic, Dune 1 & 2, Waxworks, Lemmings, Warcraft, Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0, Maniac Mansion, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe⌠oh, so many good memories.
I still have all the 5Ÿ-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks!
My earliest computer memories were playing Apogee games! I was a huge fan of Cosmoâs Cosmic Adventures.
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