Yeah, she's right. Took forever to load a disk. Thank god cassette tape was old by then. I still keep a nice book by the PC to read while downloading mp3's and stuff.


THE
REDO FROM START ERROR
AARDVARK

[size=150][color=blue]LOAD"*",8,1

PLEASE WAIT WHILE LOADING...
INSERT DISC TWO AND HIT ENTER
PLEASE WAIT WHILE LOADING...
PLEASE WAIT WHILE LOADING THIS MAY TAKE SEVERAL MINUTES...
GO TAKE A BATHROOM BREAK...
NO, I'M STILL NOT DONE, GET A SNACK AND DRINK OR SOMETHING
LOADING, ONE MOMENT PLEASE...
OKAY REALISTICALLY SPEAKING GIVE ME ANOTHER 15 MINUTES
ERROR PLEASE INSERT DISK ONE AND TRY AGAIN

[/color][/size]



=)

-LG

Hey hey!

That C64 was something else. It made me root for the underdog ever since I had one. I loved the modem cart you just plugged in, and boom! online. it also played Atari 2600 and C= carts. (which mostly sucked, except for Turbo64, a speedloader cart)

It was wedge shaped so you could keep doors open to let a breeze in, too.

I STILL play some commie games on my PC with x64 emulation. The thrill has gone, however. What with games like Dungeon Siege and Diablo II, those 8 bit games that would FIT ON A 51/4 FLOPPY are sorta ...yawn.

I still remember some tricks that one could do to a 1541 drive to get a pirated game to go. geez, what I'd have to do to play Law of the West...


THE
LOAD"$",8,1
AARDVARK

Oh, cool. I had a PCjr as well. You really have to do a little chuckling when you look back at the attitude that IBM had towards games back in those days, though. The PCjr had the 16 color mode, but at the time when it first came out the PC did not. So rather than write two "versions" of a program, a lot of our stuff was geared towards the lowest common denominator, and we had that black-white-brown-green color scheme (ala Shamus) or black-white-magenta-cyan (ala Bard's Tale, Lode Runner, Tass Times, etc.) or in Jumpman's case, I think it was... black-white-magneta-green? Not many variations on that, though. IBM should have sold a graphics update (or card) for the PC, but... [i]egads, the International Business Machines' Flagship Product being used.... for games?!!?! Oh, horrors!![/i] Frigging twats. And, computer games only ended up being the driving force for practically every advance x86 computing has made in the last 20 years. I guess that's now why Dell is advertising so well in a recession and IBM can't afford to shoot their commercials in color.


The day that my family heard on the news that IBM was stopping production on the PCjr it was like a pet or family friend died. And in a way, I guess one did. But they just messed up so badly with it -- they wanted to continue to sell ridiculously overpriced PCs in the workplace and a more-reasonably priced PCjr for the home. But they had the problem of the PCjr being more powerful than the PC -- which it should be, advances in the field were made -- and cheaper than the PC. Course, with the attack of the clones (Leading Edge, Wang, Tandy, Wang, Wang, Compaq and WANG, hahaha) they had to become more realistic with their price gouging any way.

Oi, this totally got off the subject of games. So I will state:


[quote="Lex"]
Then I got my very own Amiga 500.
[/quote]

The Amiga kicked ass -- I wish I had one, but at the same time if I went the C64, C128, Amiga, etc. route there's a strong possibility that I'd currently be as good with PCs as I currently am with Macs, which is not very. Much in the same way I lucked out that English seems to becoming the international language, I lucked out that the PC became the dominant home computer platform. When the magazine "Amiga Power" was cancelled they should have locked the guys who ran it up in DNA freeze until Britain had come to its senses and shot everyone else working on a gaming mag.


[quote="PTX"]
The jr. had two cartridge slots on the front, but all the games for those sucked.
[/quote]

Heh. That it did. I think we crammed that BASICA cartridge in there and never, ever touched it again. It was nice they put it there in theory, but about a million times easier for someone to distribute their game on floppies rather than get a production run of carts going. (Actually, my brother once accidently put the disc overlay to the Intellivision game "Dungeons and Dragons" into the other cartridge slot and couldn't get it out. He was freaking out because he thought he'd broken the computer. But our dad never noticed and neither did the PCjr. Mattel also gave you two overlays even if the game was one-player, so that was nice of them.)

I loved that PCjr when we got it -- remember that this predates the first Amiga by about 3 years, so the only comparison at the time was with the Apple ][, which used this dithering stuff to get colors. And IIRC, the earliest ones needed some sort of hardware hack to do lowercase letters. The PCjr could actually display a whopping 16 colors, making it the nVidia chipset of the Pre-Return-of-the-Jedi era.

I lived on Jumpman. Oh, sweet, sweet Jumpman, and I never busted that 30th level, damn it all. The jr. had two cartridge slots on the front, but all the games for those sucked.

The PCjr and the Atari 5200 began a personal trend of backing whatever technology eventually failed, continuing up into the present with an old Newton 130, and (most lamented) my championship of the BeOS, R.I.P. Wanna know what tech to invest in? [i][b]don't watch me for tips.[/b][/i] Other than what to stay away from.

As Jonsey's asleep, because people in central America are SLACKERS and get up SEVEN HOURS later than US, I'll give me experiences;
Captain Comic on the PC. God, that was sexy.
Then I got my very own Amiga 500. Sweet Christ it was powerful; I remember playing Battle Chess and and some Bitmap Brothers games on it, then look at their PC counterparts; nowhere near the quality. What really astounded me was the sound; the Amiga had fucking [i]digitised speech![/i] It was fricking [i]awesome![/i] I still remember the intro song to Gods: Into <dunnn-dunn-dunn> The Wonderful....
Those were the days.
I swear that if Jonsey ever gets round to really doing a course in Video Game / Game Art & Design, I'm flying over. I mean that. Or meen it, whatever. That's one word I never got the hang of.

You're asking the wrong guy about C64 titles. My first computer was an IBM PCjr, waaaayyyy back in 1982 or 1983 (IIRC). It was a good year, geekwise: First the computer, and then that year I was introduced to D&D. That first D&D experience in 2nd grade was to me what I imagine Keith Richards' first poorly-rolled joint was to him -- "Where the hell has this BEEN all my life!??"

Sorry, nostalgia. Only console I owned as a kid was an Atari 5200, which at the time seemed to have all of a half-dozen games available for purchase in Southern California. The PCjr was the machine I did everything on until I could afford a PS/1 around 88-89. The jr. was light years ahead of the Trash-80s at school, but I spent most of the 80s lusting after the hipper computers I couldn't afford: the old-school Macintoshes, the Amigas, and the NeXTCube, which was the computer made to entrance a thirteen-year-old. I remember wanting a NeXTCube even more than a IIgs signed by Woz himself.

And I always had an [b]IBM[/b], a computer made by guys who thought beige was a maybe little too edgy and avant-garde for their target market.

Sorry to ramble; it's later for me than I thought. Out of curiousity, what were the boxen and consoles of your formative years? I can guess by certain clues in FoD you probably took this sort of thing a lot more seriously than I did at that age.

Emulation may be available for this title (if you haven't found it in that format already). I'll take a look. Frankly, a two-player console Dracula game sounds pretty good to me. Bruce Lee (that extremely old version -- I used to play it on my friend's C64, but I am pretty sure it was around for the Atari 400/800 and Apple as well) definitely allowed two people to play at the same time, one as Bruce Lee and one as that big fat sumo guy.... and... did Friday the 13th for the C64 allow that as well? I can't recall.

I'll see what I can dig up on this Dracula Intellivision game.

This looks like it might be the one. Many thanks for your efforts on my behalf, o wise one. Now: to cruise eBay and get that intellevision and cartridge, to see if it's the one I recall. I KNOW it had a 2-player mode. I distinctly remember getting my 7-year-old ass handed to me by a guy nmed Mark. Funny, the things that stick in the brain, and the ones that don't.

It wasn't this game by any chance, was it?

http://www.spatula-city.mine.nu/~intvlib/inty/reviews/dracula.html

[img]http://www.joltcountry.com/pics/dracula3.gif[/img]

Apparently it's just called "Dracula." I don't know how I missed this one (there was an Intellivision in our household while we were young), as it's definitely one I would have liked to have had.

[quote]
I could be wrong, or mixing up more than one early memory) that the controller had this silver disc on it, and you rocked it in the directions you wanted to go -- a pad rather than a joystick
[/quote]

Right, that'd be the Intellivision controller, all right.

I'll check around if it's not Dracula. I am officially intrigued as well, now. The review listed in the link up above doesn't mention the mode where the kid tries to stay alive, so I'll keep looking.

I mean, if you wanna know about bread, ask a baker.

I'm trying to find an ancient game for what I think was an Intellivision. Please bear in mind 2 things: I was in second grade when I played it (7 years old is a LONG fricking time ago), and I've seen this thing all of one, count 'em, ONE time.

It was a console game where there's this kid trying to find a vampire and destroy him. But what was really, really cool was the two-player mode: one of you plays the kid, who needs to find a hammer and stake and so forth or stay alive for a few hours until sunup, and the other plays the vampire, who's trying to get the kid and make it back to the coffin before turning to dust.

I haven't the foggiest idea what it was called. It's possible that it was a British import -- the family was from the UK. Come to think of it, it's possible that there was some sort of European-only console -- I just can't remember it very well. Petty much anyone who reads this base will have a better idea than I.

The only other clue I have to give to the hard-working retro-gamers willing to consider my humble request is this: I think (THINK -- I could be wrong, or mixing up more than one early memory) that the controller had this silver disc on it, and you rocked it in the directions you wanted to go -- a pad rather than a joystick.

If anyone has a lead on it, please post a reply. I have a friend who's an absolute nut for anything involving vampires, and I'd love to find out what it was, maybe get him one for his collection of stuff (guys got like 400 books on Vampirism, some apparently quite rare).

Thanks all.