The sharpness. The brightness! The sharpness of that display is beyond my ability to describe. It's not the same thing as emulation, and of course I know that already, I have a garage full of things that show that. I don't mean to say "ewwww, without the real thing, you'll never know ewwww" -- no. You do get 95% of the experience just fine. Let's be honest with ourselves, if you are emulating a Commodore 64, or Elevator Action or an IBM PCjr, yah, you can pretty much see what was going on through emulation.
But it's those last, final bits. The way the monitor perfectly rests on the computer. I don't have that now with anything. I couldn't put either of my monitors on top of my main computer. My larger monitor has legs that look like a police sketch artist description of the Glaive from Krull and the other one has a frigging circular piece of plastic holding it up. The PCjr's monitor and the way it is meant to sit on the computer itself is perfection. Flack and I were talking about the right wooden shelf for my Apple //, so I could put the 1080S monitor I have on top of it. This is something a handy person could make in a couple of hours. Well, I can't. I had this giant monstrosity of an Ikea shelf until yesterday. The PCjr just ... fits.
When I started it, I didn't have a disk in the drive, just to be safe. The iconic "IBM" logo appeared on the screen, along with the 16 colors it can proudly display as it counted RAM. It's more "purple" in the photo below than it is in real life, but that's just the room it's in right now, much to my wife's chagrin. So crisp! It's beautiful. This, for me, is how a computer should look, should sound, and should feel.
Next, I took my Zork I disk and popped it in the drive, initiating a warm boot. ("Control, Alt, Delete" worked, funnily enough, which was a nice throwback to when that thing actually did what it was designed for, instead of the eye-rollingly-dumb thing Microsoft did to intercept it for Task Manager and NT's logon.)
And.... it..... loaded.
It LOADED.
The exact disk that changed my life was running in a PCjr again, just like it did in 1985.
I tried others. I took photographs and I shall take more. Shamus worked wonderfully. I forgot that it would, on the fly, shift between the two standard CGA palettes when you got zapped. Lode Runner on my disk would not start. Borrowed Time did! Exodus: Ultima III did. My two copies of Touchdown Football did not.
Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz most certainly did. Look. Look at this perfection. 40 columns. The layout is burned into my brain. Okay well, the layout for Zork I is burned into my brain but I didn't take a picture of that tonight.
The enormous letters. The floppy disk, which provides a menacing soundtrack. Of course you could play Zork II like this. This is how it was meant to look, how it was meant to be presented. Verbosity - the >verbose command - it was a choice here. Not just something I force for the games I make because the screens are infinitely wider and taller. You were choosing to use that precious, beautiful screen to get a description of a room you had already been in. I have Enchanter running on the Apple // next to me. Enchanter is a great game and the Apple // is a great computer. It does not look as good as Zork II does here.
Lastly, I want to leave you with a phone picture I took that does not represent me as an artist. This is of my youngest nephew, whom I could not love more were he of my own flesh and blood, playing Shamus at the age of 1 year, 3 months. He figured out how to move Shamus around the screen when I pointed his right hand to the cursor keys. I mean, he also gleefully mashed every other single key combination on the keyboard before, after, and during the moving of Shamus, but that does not detract from how he did in fact move Shamus around. I want him to be comfortable around computers, I want computers to just be something he knows about and enjoys and is near. (Books too, natch.) I don't know if this is how my father felt on Christmas Day when he spent a, let's be honest, a sizeable portion of his income on a computer for his kids and I just started spewing raw kittens in the shell from my eyeballs when I saw it. But seeing this kid move this BBS's favorite knife-flinging private detective around the board got me as close to that feeling as I will ever in my life get.
Thanks, Dad.
