[dave]

Prompted by this article, lets reminisce about 1980's home computers:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7303288.stm

I remember there being a lot of BBCs around at school when i was a yoot. We also had an Acorn Electron at home. Nice. Nothing beats the excitement of loading a 90minute audo cassette into a Dixon's cassette player and watching pages and pages of basic code scroll past your eyes for hours in order to play a basic platform game on a old black&white TV.

[andy_e]

We had a Dragon (I think it was made by Spectrum) which had a game where you had to count how many balls a kangaroo had kicked into a bucket. Oh, the memories...

[Jaspersharpe]

Or waiting hours while said cassette of "Horace Goes Skiing" loads only for it to crash 10 seconds before the end. 

I had a ZX Spectrum 48k and then one Christmas I got the spanking new 128k version with a disk drive! It was still shit but it cut out the tape annoyance.

[Houdini]

Yup, I lost interest in gaming when the platform-style became obsolete-ish (?).  Though I guess someone will pipe up w/ a modern example.

I liked Horace the Skier and other retard mush of the day.

What was that platform arcade/home game w/ a knight who had to collect wotsits in a haunted castle?  I loved that.

I see Jasp beat me w/ Horace... 

[dave]

I remember by dad buying "Electron User Magazine", which always featured pages upon pages of code which you could sit for hours and hours typing in yourself and then saving to tape instead of buying commercially produced games. We actually did this too!

[Jaspersharpe]

I did that once too. Once was enough.

[Bubba]

yay! Chuckie Egg was a great game

[SA Chris]

We had a ZX81 spectrum. remember playing football manager and waiting for the cutting edge graphics of the goals being scored. Also Leisure Suit Larry and The Hobbit.

[Jaspersharpe]

Like this Chris...........



Kevin Toms Football manager was top.

[Bubba]

Yup, I lost interest in gaming when the platform-style became obsolete-ish (?).  Though I guess someone will pipe up w/ a modern example.

The Ratchet & Clank series are top notch platform games. It's the one game I would like a PS3 for when the latest offering is released. Gameplay clip from the upcoming game here:

[dave]

has there ever been a more classic game than this though?

[Jaspersharpe]

Ah Frogger!

My favourite Spectrum game was Matchday.......



Spent plenty of time on most of the others listed here too....

http://zxgoldenyears.net/sport.html

Daley Thompson's Decathlon was another quality game. Trying desperately to run faster by furiously battering the little rubber keys. 

[Bubba]

Earliest game i remember was "3D Monster Maze" for the ZX81 - a forerunner for things like Doom i guess, and could be quite scary when it flashed up "Rex is behind you!"

Here's somebody playing it on an emulator:

[SA Chris]

Like this Chris...........

Quality! Although I think we used to play it on an old B&W telly. No colour graphics

[SteveM]

I could never get near the BBCs at school, but wrote my own version of horace goes skiing on the Spectrum 48k which had a bug in it so I could escape through the trees and ski down the side of the screen without fear of obstacles. Whipped my little brother's high score everytime 

But who came up with the idea for all the games? Must have been an interesting brainstorming session... http://www.cracked.com/video_16019_video-game-pitch-meeting-1979.html

[Houdini]

That modern platform looks mental.


Ghouls n ghosts was my fave, but a bit more advance than BBC/Acorn

[dave]

fucking hell don't get me started on Doom (its not 80's so probably not fair game for this thread), probably my all time best game, i played on that for hours, you really got into it, and it was quite freaky. remember having this one a 486 or something like that, it was amazing, proper absorbing. Also had Heretic which was similar (probably touch more advanced) but not as good really.

similarly their predescesor Wolfenstein 3D played on a 386 was fucking well brown too - fighting robo-nazis in a castle with a luger. dynamite.

[Bubba]

I wrote my own version of Pacman for our school's North Star Horizon



The maze, ghosts and player were all held in one 2D text array and the screen refreshed about every second to show the updated positions of everything. It actually worked pretty well.

[Johnny Brown]

featured pages upon pages of code which you could sit for hours and hours typing in yourself and then saving to tape

Yeah, and then the fucking thing didn't work! God I'm actually still annoyed about that!!! Damn you TRS-80!

[Jim]

That was back when floppy discs were actually floppy.
I wrote my own car driving game on the acorn electron, 3 lanes with cars randonly coming towards you and having to change lanes to avoid them. Was pretty lame but I was made up being only 10 or something.

Felix meets the evil weevils was a class game.

I play some of these games like ghosts and goblins on my mobile phone these days, they are still well good.

I spent alot of time playing games on my commodore amega like speedball2, rainbow islands, turrican2 etc...
They don't make em like they used to, now you have to learn a complex sequence of key commands before you can even begins modern games these days

[Johnny Brown]

I wrote my own car driving game on the acorn electron, 3 lanes with cars randonly coming towards you and having to change lanes to avoid them. Was pretty lame but I was made up being only 10 or something. I also wrote it myself.

Can you reiterate who wrote that Jim, its not really clear?

[Jim]

The same guy that went canoeing everyday

[slackline]

What was that platform arcade/home game w/ a knight who had to collect wotsits in a haunted castle?  I loved that.

Could it be Atic Atac?  Spent hours playing this myself, along with other gems such as Stop the Express, Manic Miner (absolute all-time classic!), its follow-up Jet Set Willy, JetPac, Underworlds, Jason's Gem amongst many others.

Full(ish) list of games at ZX Spectrum Games.

Had a 48k ourselves, and then the 128k with disk-drive.  I suspect my parents still have them lying in the loft too.  Might have to get some retro gaming on the flat-screen 

Used to buy some computing magazine religously that always came with a free tape with user written games on.  I expect they're still in the loft too.

[slackline]

But who came up with the idea for all the games? Must have been an interesting brainstorming session... http://www.cracked.com/video_16019_video-game-pitch-meeting-1979.html

Hilarious...

Acid tabs all round!

 

[SA Chris]

When I first got my PC i had an emultor with all the old arcade games on it; Xevious, Juno First, Scramble, Moon Cresta, etc. Played them for hours rather than the modern complicated ones. Probably because I knew what was going on.

[Houdini]

Could it be Atic Atac? 

Er non, Ghouls n ghosts it was, as said, a tad later that BBC et al.  Also had a great affection for a wartime flying game called 1944, I think.  Ace arcadism.  Sure it was home, too.

[Bubba]

Moon Cresta

I used to pwn on Moon Cresta

Clocked it 3 times on 1 10p coin

[Houdini]

No it was called 1942

[SA Chris]

There was a 1941 and a 1942? Similar but not the same.

[tommytwotone]

Was I the only one who used to have an Amstrad CPC?

Mine was the tape-drive version (464), and IIRC I even had a green screen monitor for the first year or so, until one of my mates upgraded to a PC (or mabe an Archimedes) and I got his colour one. Despite this, it had some awesome games like Renegade, Chase HQ, Switchblade and a load of decent movie tie-ins like Robocop and Batman - how come nowadays they can't make a decent movie tie-in game?

Question - in terms of control methods, were you an Q,A,O,P user, or did you favour the Z,X, ; and . buttons?

[Bubba]

Question - in terms of control methods, were you an Q,A,O,P user, or did you favour the Z,X, ; and . buttons?

The latter for me.

[Jim]

and me

[account_inactive]

If you haven't seen this before it brings back some of those old memories

http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

[dave]

ZX;. all the way.

[Jaspersharpe]

Can download emulators and lots of games here.........

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/

....although I've had a quick go and can't work out how to get em to work. I'm crap with this type of thing though and don't have time to read all the instructions.

[Paz]

FUCK YEAH!

We had a tape drive, then got a disk drive, and even a speccy with hard plastic keys.  We were posh back then before Maggy axed British Coal's science/safety division, see.  Most of the good games have been mentioned, but I liked Turican 2.  And here's a picture of Manic Miner:

http://blog.soapyfrog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/manicminer.gif

Eugene's Lair, man eating toilets, The Alien Kong Beast (first crux) and the second to last one with the lightning (redpoint crux).  Happy Days. 

Actually on the BBC Micro, that I've only just found out is called The Beeb (I thought this was the BBC?) a really awesome game was Head and Tails, which was like a multi character 3D platform/puzzle game, and when Head and Tails met up they kicked ass. 

The only game I ever finished writing was Catch The Eggs (it didn't need a large user manual) for our Graphic Calculators, but I lost it when my battery ran out in the midddle of my A-level maths exam.  Dave or someone might still have a copy. 

[moose]

A friend had a ZX81 with the rubber keyboard, a mighty 15k RAM upgrade, and a printer that seemed to function by setting strips of foil on fire.

My own first computer though was an Acorn Electron.  Attempts to program comprised typing pages of code from the BBC magazine to be greeted with the inevitable "Syntax Error" (or at best a deeply unimpressive demonstration of pixel shuffling).  This invariably pressaged an enraged dash to the shops to splurge £2.99 on the latest Mastertronic effort.  

I then upgraded to the C64: no more text adventures for me.  Instead a veritable graphical wonderland, made all the more hallucinogenic by the 30 min softening-up period sat in front of the flickery, fit inducing loading screen (to this day all former 8bit computer owners are immune to epilepsy. FACT).  Incidentally did anyone else get incredibly angry when the first 10 minutes of loading was revealed to have been spent producing a hideously blocky recreation of the game's cover art?  The patience it took to play on those computers was absolutely bloody awesome.  At least half the time the game failed to load, betrayed only by a freeze in the flickering, and the dawning realisation that you had spent over an hour waiting for a quick game of IK+.  This failure always seemed to be blamed on "overheating".  The 80s was, for me, a decade of frustration permeated by the scent of red-hot Commodore powerpacks slowly turning into pools of molten grey plastic.  Christ, no wonder I am prone to sieging boulder problems with such single minded, obstinate stupidity.  "Playing" on that computer must have given me the steely focus of a zen master and patience of a long-distance tortoise racer.

By the way Z, X, *, ? for me on the old keyboards... I might have to chase up a copy of "Creatures" on one of the eumulators - just to see whether the torture-screen interludes were as sickly funny as I remember.

[Jim]

IK+ was amazing. I wasted a good deal of my life playing that

[GCW]

I had a Spectrum 48k+.
Manic Miner, JetSet Willy, SPyHunter.  Need I continue?

Horace goes skiing, never liked it.  And why was it always the fucking ambulances that ran you down??  Caring professionals my arse.  Touting for roadkill business more like.

[GCW]

Jet.  Set.  Willy.

[dave]

The only game I ever finished writing was Catch The Eggs (it didn't need a large user manual) for our Graphic Calculators, but I lost it when my battery ran out in the midddle of my A-level maths exam.  Dave or someone might still have a copy. 

fuck paz, catch the eggs was amazing.  it opitomised my maths a-level. that, jamiroquai cassettes, and star wars tazos out of quaver packets. If i can find my old casio calulator I will, though i suspect the batteries have gone.

[andy_e]

jamiroquai cassettes, and star wars tazos out of quaver packets

Shit man! that's my childhood!

[Houdini]

SHES BOOBLESS !

[lagerstarfish]

I still have a ZX81 with 16k velcro ram pack - took it for a spin 2 years ago and played the 1k version of chess - i lost.
I also have a BBC 32k - played Elite last year. Both are going to be skipped this weekend as I leave my house-of-many-bad-memories. Free to anyone who wants to pick them up in Sheff. PM me

[dave]

you're in luck paz, i've just found my calculator (CASIO CFX-9850G). the question is wether i can find spare batteries, and even more so is if i had to wipe the memory before the a-level exams to avoid being stung by plaigarism rules.

*****EDIT*****

OK cancel the above, it turns out I'd actually found the wife's A-level calculator (identical to mine superficially), so no Catch The Eggs i'm afraid. What it did have on however was a program I wrote for a Londoner friend of ours at uni, it was called "COCKNEY", and when you run it the screen simply prints the message "FUCK OFF BACK TO LONDON YOU COCKNEY BASTARD TWAT".

[GCW]

wether

Castrated ram?

[dave]

yeah, the CFX-9850G always suffered from a lack of RAM.

[Paz]

Aah crap Dave, tht was probaby why I lost mine too.  Never mind, as a tribute to your cockney program I've recreated it in basic:

PROGRAM "COCKNEY"
10 PRINT "FUCK OFF BACK TO LONDON YOU BASTARD COCKNEY TWAT"
BREAK

[GCW]

I remember spending a few hours programming the Spectrum.

Young boy, meticulously typing out pages and pages of code.
In triumph he completes the task.
5 hours work.

What does he get?  A fucking circle.  And not even a proper circle.  A squared off, pixellated pile of shite.   

[Bubba]

you could have done that with one line

Code: [Select]

CIRCLE 100,100,66

[GCW]

So I wasted my time?????
Bubba, I hate you




Not as much as Sinclair though.

[Jaspersharpe]

Loads of online Speccy games here..........

http://www.zxspectrum.net/#football-manager

Specifically Football Manager for Chris. 

Horace goes skiing is still really difficult.

[Paz]

Did anyone else have Horrace and The Spiders too?  That had one killer level in it.

[Zods Beard]

Was I the only one who used to have an Amstrad CPC?

I too had one of these badboys, complete with crappy light pen that drew one pixel at a time. As for the best game, there can be only one:

www.laser-squad.co.uk/

I spent many happy hours tracking down Sterner Regix and kicking his ass with my Marsec autogun. The above version you can download is great, amazing atmosphere for a 20 year old game with basic graphics.

AWESOME!

[rich d]

I still have a ZX81 with 16k velcro ram pack - took it for a spin 2 years ago and played the 1k version of chess - i lost.
I also have a BBC 32k - played Elite last year. Both are going to be skipped this weekend as I leave my house-of-many-bad-memories. Free to anyone who wants to pick them up in Sheff. PM me

Spent many hours on elite, what a game.