This may bring forth a wave of nostalgia for some of you guys although they're before my time . Internet wise that is.
Antiques they are. I never got into DOS games, but some of those look like something off the original Nintendo from the mid-1980s.
Wow! Thanks for the trip in the Wayback Machine, Mr. Peabody! (If you know what television show that's from, then you have some idea how old I am.)
I remember the first personal computer I ever laid eyes on. It was a Commodore 64 that belonged to a friend of my mother. And lay eyes on it was all I got to do. I remember reaching out to touch it and my mother gave me an elbow to the ribs and said "Don't Touch!" (I was in my thirties a the time, but that's just how my mom was. How embarrassing!)
The first personal computer I actually got to use was an Apple IIe. It belonged to a friend of mine who didn't buy it but acquired it through bartering. Two applications came with it, a very simple word processing program and one game, F-15 Strike Eagle by Microprose. Each program booted from a floppy disk. And I remember just how primitive it was. A blue panel on top representing the sky and a green panel in the middle representing the ground. No terrain features at all. If you saw nothing but green, you were flying nose down, nothing but blue, you were flying nose up. At the bottom was a small cockpit panel with a radar screen in the middle, altimeter, airspeed and fuel gauge to the left, and a display on the right showing how many bombs and rockets you had. The enemy planes looked like crude stick figures, and ground targets were a simple "x" on he ground.
But the really primitive thing was just how slow the refresh rate was. It seemed that instead of being measured in frames per second, it was more like seconds per frame. Actually, it was probably about three or four frames per second, but it just seemed much, much slower when you were playing. If you were following an enemy plane, it seemed to jerk all over the sky, going from one side of the screen to the other in each frame. You constantly over corrected trying to stay on his tail. And if it came at you head-on, you saw a very small dot, then a small stick figure, and next a very large stick figure that was right on top of you. Air to air collisions were avoided by simply having the plane fly right through you!
You ended a mission by flying toward a "B" on the radar screen and seeing a black rectangle, representing the airstrip, on the solid green panel representing the ground. You approached it from one end, throttled back, lost altitude, and aimed at the closest end. But try as we might, no one could land the stupid thing! Every mission ended in a crash, resulting in no credit for the first mission, and no chance to advance to the second. A frustrating game, to say the least.
Thanks for the trip to nostalgia-land Dennis, I'll talk to you soon. Take care.
I used to play the DOS Duke Nukem games when I was younger. They came on a disc (that I still have somewhere..) of 300 Games for DOS
My first experience of games was my sons 48K Spectrum (the BIG memory version, not the piddly 16K), and I have fond memories of doing the garden, stopping for tea, finishing the garden and then maybe decorating the kitchen while waiting for one of his games to load via cassette.
I spent so long listening to those machine gun beeps, I used to go to sleep with them in my head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW2oAaU6YwY
It really gets going at 27secs. What a wonderful sound. Music to my ears.
...It really gets going at 27secs. What a wonderful sound. Music to my ears.
Good grief. I was looking at another ie tab when that sound started. Scared the daylights out of me.
Nice post, though. How far computers have come.
I spent so long listening to those machine gun beeps, I used to go to sleep with them in my head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW2oAaU6YwY
It really gets going at 27secs. What a wonderful sound. Music to my ears.
With those colours in the video people prone to seizures be warned.