When did he change his name and move to London?
/IdéeFixeChicken
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Early to mid 90s? We were DOS gaming in the 80’s son. The OS was a decade old by the time you 90’s kids rolled in.
Geez, did no one else play the Quest for Glory games?
QUEST games. Space Quest (II, most especially), Hero Quest I, King’s Quest VI, Quest for Glory…
Oh, and the age-verification system on the Leisure Suit Larry games. I’d keep coming down to the kitchen to ask my mom “who was Prime Minister of England in 1975?” and other questions.
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128x48 black (or green) & white, with sound through a cassette recorder or a battery-powered external speaker.
I modified Volcano Hunter to let me walk through walls or, if not careful, fall through certain types of floors.
I hated that invisible guillotine in Deathmaze.
I liked Twilight 2000. I didn’t appreciate the fact that you could create well rounded characters replete with skills that would not actually be used by the computer game.
I had Space Quest 4 on our old Mac LC when I was a kid. It looked beautiful compared to the DOS screenshots on the back of the box, but ran like a dog. There were puzzles (quicktime events really) where you were supposed to hit a button before something went across the screen, and they were trivially easy on our underpowered budget mac. I also discovered my first completely reproducible bug in a piece of commercial software. I could crash the game every time by taking a specific action at a specific point. I remember calling Sierra and talking with the tech support, walking them through how to reproduce it, and then being told “Well, that’s not what you’re supposed to do there, I can’t tell you what you are supposed to do, but that’s not it.” Those were the days of $1/minute “tip lines” that thankfully went the way of the dodo once the Internet went mainstream and especially once GameFAQs appeared.
I remember getting Wolfenstein working on it, in a tiny postage stamp window.
That is the same game that came to my mind. Solar Winds was such a fantastic darn game! That one and Sentinel Worlds.
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Ah, dos games on the mac–all those crisp pixels were for naught.
In case you haven’t see the MC Frontalot ode to Zork:
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Yeah, very much so. However I recall teaching new hires at the business I worked at to re-order and hand modify punch cards to do various interesting things. I wrote an entire game in z-80 machine language after initially coding it in assembly. Do any of you recall peeking and poking on the old trs-80s? The trs-80s is where I developed my love of computer gaming. I remember spending countless hours on the early Scott Adams text adventures as well as reading a LOT of Softside!
SO many memories of sitting at the local Radio Shack and learning to code on the model 1s they had setup on display with 4k of RAM and a cassette tape to save and load software. I learned about this from a friends dad whom had built his two previous System-80’s and owned a expanded model 1 with 16k RAM!
Thank you guys for the trip down memory lane to some really wonderful memories!
4k of RAM. It’s almost unthinkable how constrained those early machines were. That’s about 3 pages of text.
I totally get this. I played Lemmings on Amiga, and adored it. At the native resolution of an A500, those little guys were too cute for words.
When I later saw the game on PC, I was really disappointed. It seems the graphics port consisted of nothing but doubling the pixel mapping. The little critters seemed unbearably blocky and clunky.
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If you looked on the back of the box for a major computer game back in those days, they almost always included screenshots from every platform, even though only one platform was in the box (box art being expensive I guess they just printed up a ton of identical ones and slapped stickers on for the version).
The DOS screenshots were always by far the worst, with Mac and Amiga ones generally looking way way nicer. Normally I don’t mind retro graphics, but some of those earlyish DOS games are almost unplayable because they are so ugly. I tried getting into the original X-Com after picking it up on a Steam sale (there was never a Mac version sadly) and it’s just so awful looking that I couldn’t get into it.
At least there’s no Atari ST tragics here, clinging to their precious MIDI port.
I had a Apple IIGS. I was insanely jealous of the Amiga because it tended to get better ports
Here’s Sid Meier’s Pirates
Amiga
Atari ST-- same graphics as the IIGS
DOS was horrible:
and Macintosh was charming in it’s own sort of way.
CGA was just about the lowest possible thing you could get away with calling “color” and “graphics”. 320x200 with 4 colors (from a palate of 16). It was really an insult.
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