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Re: What is your age?

Posted on 2013-01-23, 03:16

in Milliways
A bit of both I think. I've been hit hard with nostalgia over the last couple of years I am always careful and restrained in that regard because I do not wish to become one of those deranged cane-waving "BACK IN MY DAY" old guys. I find those kind more sad than funny. and although I don't hang out …

Re: Do any other teenagers enjoy retrocomputing/old PC games?

Posted on 2013-01-22, 23:00

in Milliways
Yes... you're right.. I've never looked at it from that perspective before You have to look at the bigger picture of everything. Not just software, but repairability. It's much, much, much easier to fix a Commodore PET motherboard than a quad-core PC. I liken 8-bit hardware to the cockroach. It was …

Re: Do any other teenagers enjoy retrocomputing/old PC games?

Posted on 2013-01-22, 20:49

in Milliways
It's quite likely that a 10 yo kid today will have more sentimental attachment to gaming on a quad-core PC than an Atari 800. But. Modern electronics such as iPads and PCs are way more dependent on outside services than in the past. Analog cell phones aren't usable anymore, so those can never be …

Re: Sierra games - The great mystery

Posted on 2013-01-22, 02:35

in Milliways
Some european C64 fanboys love to claim how much better The Great Giana Sisters is over Super Mario Bros. As a C64 game goes, it is excellent. But Super Mario Bros is far superior. Some of that has to do with the console, with no cassette loading times and a D-pad with two buttons. Some of that has …

Re: Computer-use pet peeves

Posted on 2013-01-21, 00:37

in Milliways
PS2 has the advantage over USB in that it's interrupt-driven, thus you cannot lose keystrokes. On the other hand, it doesn't support light-up keyboards. As for my personal pet peeve, it's people who can't remember or be bothered to clean their browser cache. Akin to not wiping off a chalkboard when …

Re: dial-up modems

Posted on 2013-01-03, 16:12

in Milliways
I tried using my old Pentium 133 to surf the web in 2006 and it was too slow to be usable. And it's probably worse now. Of course you have these gimmicky videos on Youtube like "IBM XT BROWSES INTERNET" with a DOS browser like Arachne or something, but you can't do anything useful with it since only …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-31, 23:46

in Milliways
In addition to that, applications are in danger of being lost like for example the early versions of AutoCAD. Pirate groups generally didn't care about that stuff and many copies were sold to businesses who just threw them out when it became obsolete.

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-31, 14:04

in Milliways
When it comes to PC games of that era, I get the feeling that many remain unknown today just because they never got the attention of the two or three warez groups that existed on the PC scene at the time. That is true. PCs were rather inconsequential in the home/educational market pre-1986. I know …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-30, 20:41

in Milliways
check out page 4 - Pooyan is listed as "coming soon" for the PC/Pcjr (alongside some other "future projcets", of which at least a few did come out). Wouldn't surprise me if it was released, then barely sold at all and just became extremely rare over the years. I don't think it did get released. If …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-30, 15:14

in Milliways
I thought perhaps it would also be cool to make Pooyan or Donkey Kong Jr for PCs because they never got on it back then. You could rip the sprites and background graphics mostly from the arcade game since PCs do not have the color/resolution restrictions that 8-bit machines have. The only thing is …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-25, 20:10

in Milliways
Nice - it would probably be better to avoid the "stretched" look on the low-res sprites by sacrificing horizontal detail, though I'm not sure how much can really be improved (not that familiar with C64 hardware limitations) You have 8 sprites. These are either 24x21 (hires) or 12x21 (multicolor). …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-24, 20:29

in Milliways
Fun idea, I could take care of graphics and (probably) music - any C64 coders around here with some free time? A couple sprites I did in MS Paint (cherry is two hi-res ones as you can see). The background graphics...eh, hard to say whether they should be characters or bitmaps. Thinking the latter …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-24, 07:12

in Milliways
here's the original Lattice C source code for Digger: http://www.digger.org/digsrc_orig.zip Pretty fascinating to look at, though the compiler itself is not available... a curious peek into how things used to be done back in the day. The source code for Styx is available from the same site. It's …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-24, 05:27

in Milliways
I went looking for info on Lattice and bumped in to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD Hmm, now I just remembered that they had Aztec C on the Apple II as well. The Apples had a good amount of programming tools and even CAD programs which wasn't so much the case on the other 6502 machines. …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-24, 03:50

in Milliways
I thought TA was rather forward looking. It scales ridiculously well. You can run the little campaign missions on a P120 if you must, but you can also have really huge multiplayer battles that benefit from a Athlon 64. It also simulates a lot of things that other RTS games don't and certainly …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-23, 02:01

in Milliways
Assembly was key the 8088 era (and beyond), but high level languages weren't rare by any stretch. I believe Digger was written in C (the source is out there) Digger could not possibly have been written in C because there were no microcomputer C compilers before 1986 (it was still a mainframe/ …

Re: Well optimised PC games?

Posted on 2012-12-22, 11:05

in Milliways
My first machine was a ZX Spectrum in 1983 with 48K of RAM (which included the video RAM), only supported two colours per 8 x 8 pixel square, no extra hardware to support sprites/scrolling/bitmap block copying/etc, and it's only sound was a beeper built into the case of the machine, that stopped …

Re: Sierra games - The great mystery

Posted on 2012-12-18, 08:18

in Milliways
The amount of work to be done in converting NES to C64 games is not for the faint of heart. Although both systems use tile graphics, there are different resolutions and color limitations. They use the same style of sound generators, but there are many differences. Finally, the NES runs 75% faster …

Re: Copper Demo

Posted on 2012-12-14, 23:06

the performance of 16-bit graphics on the ISA bus would seem to be very slow Graphics modes above 640x480x16 were not widely used until the 486 era when better buses became commonplace. Although they'd had SVGA resolutions since the first IBM PS/2s, those were rarely seen outside the professional …

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