Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/09/play-bubble-bobble-wolfenstei.html
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Oooh I hope that’s a better emulation of Mail Order Monsters than the one I have.
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Tried playing Bard’s Tale, Choplifter, Boulder Dash, Uridium, none of them work.
ETA: got Uridium to work…
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Does it have the clacking drive noise? I need the clacking drive noise.
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Sorry, why is the second instance on the first row a picture of a naked lady?
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Because in 1987 some teenage hackers thought it made a fine picture for illustrating their ability to hack the video modes of the c-64 to show high res greyscale photos. It’s called 1903 demo ii, by 1903 crew.
I have no idea what view of the library of titles caused it to appear second - there’s a ton more titles starting with numbers in the archive than appear in that image.
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I sorted the archive based on number of views. At the time of my screenshot, that’s where “1903 demo ii” fell.
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It’s nice that they’re still expanding their content, but there’s got to be a better alternative to these randomly-staggered grids.
I also came here hoping for news about emulated drive head sounds. It’d really miss the nostalgia mark without that distinctive 1541 drive sound.
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There was a C-64 game I played as a teen that involved a chopper. You started by attacking stuff on the surface, then you turned so your chopper faced outward and the fire button dropped bombs that you would use to dig downward to caverns, which you would fly through in order to blow up a power generator. I’m positive I’m forgetting other aspects of the game, apart from that it was hard as heck. And I don’t remember the name.
With 13,000+ games to look through, there’s a good chance it’s there. But I doubt I’ll be able to locate that needle in that haystack.
Any chance a fellow bb’er with a better memory/Google skills might know what it was called?
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Sounds like Fort Apocalypse: https://www.mobygames.com/game/fort-apocalypse
Very, very difficult game. It’s been years since I’ve played it, but I doubt I’d be any better at it now than at 8 years old.
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games , but no languages or text editors which i can find - - - sometimes , i really miss forth on a cartridge on a c=64 , although , i suppose that it is all still around here , somewhere - - -
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There’s at least one game that used the 1541 for sound effects during gameplay. I can’t seem to find the name of it, though – a flight simulator, I think it was.
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That’s it! Thank you!
One of my favorite games of all time.
I have the original disks at home still.
I love how the re-use of sprites led to accidental world continuity (at least to my 12 year old mind). MoM world is CLEARLY the late stage capitalism future of IRATA from M.U.L.E.
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Don’t recall FS on the C=64 using the drive heads for sound effects. Possible, though, since I firmly recall a porn demo that did: while a very low-res F on M oral scene ran in a very short loop (one loop per cycle), the drive heads were slide back any forth in time with the graphic loop. Eventually it sped up, with the drive heads keeping in sync.
At the climax, the drive heads were slammed into the end stop repeatedly and randomly, simulating the intense excitement at the ending.
This rattling sound was well-known to 1541 (and others?) drives; since it didn’t have a “home” or “end of travel” switch, so on startup, or on command, the heads would be stepped something like 45 steps towards “home”; if the head was at step 38, there would be 7 knocks against the end stop. Worst was when the head was very close to “home”… could get up to 45 knocks against the end stop. It was a fairly low frequency, perhaps 30 hz. This lead to having to re-align drives every so often…
Note: the specifics of the previous are much less certain no that I re-read them. But I’m close on the numbers and concept.
C=64 power supplies were my college desk space heater.
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Interesting. I guess that explains why so many disk drives I owned eventually became a proprietary format? They could only read/write disks that they’d created.
Nice! I’ll be checking this out now.
Yup! Once the heads were out alignment enough, you’d get lots of read errors on commercial disks, disks you formatted some time ago, and disks formatted on other drives. Then you’d either re-align or replace the drive.
BUT, if you needed to read disks recently formatted on the original drive, you’d keep it, using if for older disks. The disks would be sorted into two piles, according to which drive they worked in reliably. I used white circular stickers labelled “1”, “2”, etc. to know which drive to use it in. But this was often problematic due to how drives were allocated on the C=64. Details fuzzy.
And of course, important disks would immediately be copied to new disks formatted on the new drive, and the old disk stored with the eventually retired drive. Hopefully before it died completely of over-use as I tried to get the data off the old disk.
The mechanism was butt-simple: a goodly size stepper motor, ~3/4" pulled with a single threaded locking screw, Phillips head, and a thin steel band. I supe’d mine up by replacing the Phillips screw with a hex head cap screw from my RC hobbiest brother, and I learned about Locktite.
Sniff. I miss floppy disks.
No don’t.
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God, did I love M.U.L.E. So weird, but so fun, that game was. Sadly, I probably couldn’t remember how to play it today. Perhaps M.U.L.E. is one of the 13,000?
