VOGONS


First post, by DaveDDS

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I know this's is kinda outside Vogons orientation toward gaming on old rigs
-- but if you want to experience computer gaming from the 70s and early 80s
.. it does have some very early games on it!

I've just passed on my "Mits Altair 8800" - this is a very historic system from
the 70s - it is:
First Personal Computer (long before IBM PC)
First S100 buss system
First system Bill Gates wrote code for (long before Microsoft)

I did write a pretty decent emulator for my exact Altair system a while back.
And with recent interest in the system, I've just updated it with a few minor
improvements and a "cleaned up" edition of the software I created to bootstrap
a hardware front-panel based system (no on-board ROM) via a serial port card
- requiring you to enter only 18 bytes through the front panel

So .. if you'd like to experience what it was like to use a system from the
70s - here's some of the things you can do:

Bootstrap it cold

Run NorthStar DOS (one of the first commercial DOSes)

Run DMF (Device Management Facility) - a DOS I created for it
- can you tell that at the time I was working on an IBM mainframe ... my OS
- name sounds a lot like various IBM mainframe packages at the time.

A few other software setups (for example there's a stand-alone bootable FORTH)

Has Editors, Assemblers, BASIC and other tools from the era.
and a few games - some written by yours truly - some very early commercial
offerings (like "Cranston Manor Adventure", or "Valdez")

Note: My Altair emulator was created under DOS and is a 16 bit program!
It does work very well with DosBox (I recommend the one on my site)

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal