VileRancour wrote:

re: "people pointing things out to me even when I don't ask" - gee, wonder what that refers to ;)

Quite often when someone submits a guess for the next episode, they include extra details about the game from their own experience and sometimes add information about getting the game working and everything... again, this is way before they even know I'm going to be covering said game. :B

This time around, I believe you were to blame for most of the extra info I had to go off of! ;D

In my view, Alley Cat almost fits the definition of "abandonware".

Very limited to virtually no physical copies of the DOS version at all, original developer died a long time ago, original publisher fizzled out a long time ago, and whatever rights or ownership the game originally had is now with IBM or whoever else. And IBM doesn't give two shits about an old game they didn't have much involvement developing for. Then there's the fact that most versions of Alley Cat floating around on the web are mostly pirated versions from probably long ago. It doesn't surprise me that it's a PC Booter game considering its age. BC's Quest for Tires is also a PC Booter game from around that same age too.

Personally i've never played or even seen Alley Cat anywhere back then either. I only saw it popping up in the later 90's due to that lamer "oldwarez" scene pushing themselves about, where the regurgitation begins to the point where now you can't even find the original rips they blatantly flipped even!

I don't have any nostalgia for Alley Cat. DONKEY.BAS, CENTIPEDE and PANGO, however.....

leileilol wrote:

I don't have any nostalgia for Alley Cat. DONKEY.BAS, CENTIPEDE and PANGO, however.....

I never played any of those, but I didn't get a PC until around 1986-7 and it came with DOS 3.21 or somesuch.

I have DOS 1.0 in its original binder (with manual but missing sleeve). I need to remember to image the disks.

We got a PC around 1987 as well, and for the whole of the 8088-286 era, any PC around me that had any games at all on it, had Alley Cat. Alongside Burger Time, Paratrooper, Digger, etc. The slightly less widespread booter games were mostly pirated in booter form, but at least those four were always the DOS rips.

There *was* a version of Centipede I used to play religiously, but now I can't even figure out which one it was, since there were so many clones of that game which were very much alike. 😀

The one I was fond of was the "IBM" one with the switching CGA palettes and the screeching cicada pixelblob spider.

As I recently replied to someone on YouTube, I'm not sure what my very first PC game was, as I know it was one of those indie titles running in either 80x25 or 40x25 text mode, but I do recall my first five graphical games in order: Test Drive, Grand Prix Circuit, King's Quest, HardBall! and Space Quest.

The odd thing is... I have virtually no nostalgia for any of the Accolade titles, and not that much for the Quest games either. Most of my PC nostalgia heads towards stuff I first played in the early 90s, even if it had come out in the 80s, whereas most of my gaming nostalgia for the 80s is rooted in consoles and arcade games.

I've definitely had the full version of Alleycat in DOS executable form since before I had internet access, so no idea when it got "freewared" and spread all over the place but it had to have been early on. I remember playing it on the family 386/16 around 1992~3 and at one point I brought it to school on a floppy and gave it to some of my friends. (Holy shit, does that make me an O.G. diskswapper? Oldskool yo!)

BTW the sounds & graphical effects in the Atari version are pretty cool (except the title music in that vid, but I think it might be broken) and lend an interesting new perspective to the game. Makes it much more frantic and arcade-y. I never knew it was a port until recently; always thought it was a PC original.

VileRancour wrote:

We got a PC around 1987 as well, and for the whole of the 8088-286 era, any PC around me that had any games at all on it, had Alley Cat. Alongside Burger Time, Paratrooper, Digger, etc. The slightly less widespread booter games were mostly pirated in booter form, but at least those four were always the DOS rips.

I definitely played Paratrooper and Digger, and I remember associating them with Sopwith for some reason. I got a lot of PC games in the late 80s via my dad's work colleagues.

leileilol wrote:

The one I was fond of was the "IBM" one with the switching CGA palettes and the screeching cicada pixelblob spider.

I watched a couple youtube videos earlier today, and I thought the Atari one did CGA palette switching, while the IBM one mostly used the cyan-magenta-white palette?

Gemini000 wrote:

The odd thing is... I have virtually no nostalgia for any of the Accolade titles, and not that much for the Quest games either. Most of my PC nostalgia heads towards stuff I first played in the early 90s, even if it had come out in the 80s, whereas most of my gaming nostalgia for the 80s is rooted in consoles and arcade games.

I got a batch of pirated Accolade titles around 1990, including Mean 18, Rack 'Em, and Test Drive II (loved the intro sequence/music at the time).

PC games made a huge impression on me because I was stuck with an Atari 2600 as my only console until the early 90s, but we had a Heathkit H89 in the early 80s, and Color Computer 2 (aka Dragon) and Wyse 286 clone in the mid-to-late 80s.

Starflight was the first boxed commercial PC game that I owned, and I liked it so much that I still have the box: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BwvZz … sp=sharing#grid

xjas wrote:

BTW the sounds & graphical effects in the Atari version are pretty cool (except the title music in that vid, but I think it might be broken) and lend an interesting new perspective to the game. Makes it much more frantic and arcade-y. I never knew it was a port until recently; always thought it was a PC original.

The arcade version of Centipede was actually the most recent game I've played on a real arcade machine. Went to Scott's Dairy Freeze in North Bend, WA (where I grew up, later famous for being home of Nintendo's western US production/distribution facility) on a nostalgia trip with my brother for the first time in probably 20 years, and they had Centipede and Ms. Pac-Man in cocktail cabinet form.

I first played Alley Cat in the late 90s, but I didn't know anything about Bill Williams until I read this article a few weeks ago from the Digital Antiquarian. A pretty amazing life!

RadioPoultry wrote:

I first played Alley Cat in the late 90s, but I didn't know anything about Bill Williams until I read this article a few weeks ago from the Digital Antiquarian. A pretty amazing life!

Thanks for linking that article. It was a great read. So much more to him than computer games...

That said, he happened to write a favorite of mine--Necromancer. My brother had an Atari 8-bit and I would always sneak on and play this game! The sounds and the frenzied pace were quite appealing to my 13 year old self. 😀
Game play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHlrmEW6NFo

switchblade wrote:

In my view, Alley Cat almost fits the definition of "abandonware".

Very limited to virtually no physical copies of the DOS version at all, original developer died a long time ago, original publisher fizzled out a long time ago, and whatever rights or ownership the game originally had is now with IBM or whoever else. And IBM doesn't give two shits about an old game they didn't have much involvement developing for. Then there's the fact that most versions of Alley Cat floating around on the web are mostly pirated versions from probably long ago. It doesn't surprise me that it's a PC Booter game considering its age. BC's Quest for Tires is also a PC Booter game from around that same age too.

This definition describes an "orphan work" pretty well. I had covered some of the ground that Gemini did back in December on my blog entry on the game. Such a fun game, even on the PC.

Oh you(tube)!

Ancient DOS Games Episode 184 - Operation Neptune is online!

This game surprised me... I knew it was made by The Learning Company so I expected something about as difficult as Treasure Mountain, as that's the only Learning Company game I'd ever played up to this point and wow... This game is DEFINITELY not intended for young kids given the level of math going on! :O

I ultimately sourced some pictures of cover art suggesting an age range of 9~14 so... yeah... very much not intended for young kids. :B

Gemini000 wrote:

Ancient DOS Games Episode 184 - Operation Neptune is online!

This game surprised me... I knew it was made by The Learning Company so I expected something about as difficult as Treasure Mountain, as that's the only Learning Company game I'd ever played up to this point and wow... This game is DEFINITELY not intended for young kids given the level of math going on! 😳

I ultimately sourced some pictures of cover art suggesting an age range of 9~14 so... yeah... very much not intended for young kids. :B

If it wasn't edutainment month, I absolutely would have guessed In Search of Dr. Riptide!

Interpretentious Entertainment is guilty of that too, lumping in violent shooter game footage with their steam Math Rescue/ Word Rescue store trailers

I was kinda thinking to myself earlier this week what an M-rated math game might play like...

Hey, we got Typing of the Dead, didn't we? ;D

Well, to be fair, you are technically committing violence against monsters in Math Rescue/Word Rescue by throwing slime all over them that's impossible to escape from; causing a rather slow and painful death.

Not exactly "family-friendly" the more you think about it. 😈

Thanks Kris for Operation Neptune.

You've inspired me to give math a try again. I downloaded and installed Dosbox (Daum SVN), but the pipefish monsters come up and down very fast from the ground, and I have cycles set to auto. If I decrease the cycles to where the speed of the pipe worms are acceptable, the overall game speed is extremely slow.

I uploaded a video to Youtube demonstrating the excessive speed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXIX8oWU3Vw

Any advice, aside from downloading the old Dosbox?

Thanks

mockingbird wrote:

Any advice, aside from downloading the old Dosbox?

...umm... download the old DOSBox? :P

No seriously, having multiple versions of DOSBox is pretty much REQUIRED. As a couple of my prior episodes have pointed out, sometimes newer versions end up breaking things with certain games. It's rare, but not impossible.