Retro Computing Thread - Speccy, C64, Atari ST, Amiga, DOS PC, Amstrad, BBC Micro, and other wonderful machines from 25+ years ago

[Ginger Piglet]

I had one of those Amigas that was a giant keyboard that you connected to a television.

Believe it or not, I mainly used it for word processing (which I didn't have much need of in elementary school, and I could get away with handwritten reports as late as middle school). The only games I played for it were Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Tetris.

It also had a text-to-voice editor that frankly puts Microsoft Sam to shame. Good times.

I suspect that may be SPEAKTEX which was also on the Atari ST, both being 68000 based systems. I had that, both as a standalone program and as a raw binary module that you could plug in to a high level language or just include and branch to directly from assembler. Came as an added extra on a PD disk that I came into possession of.

EDIT:

My C++ teacher spent three days coding on a C64 and it consisted of 4000 lines and it showed two clowns on a seesaw. His C64 crashed and he didn't save the code.

Ahhh, the demoscene. Good times.

I never really had much of the 8 bit era, but people a bit older than myself reminisce about loading software from cassette tapes and waiting for ages while it ground away then, just as you thought it was going to run, TAPE LOAD ERROR

 

[дядя Боря]

every time I want to dig up the dusty shite out of my basement I realize that there are plenty projects to do.

For people who are nostalgic about assembler, those days sucked. MASM sucked monkey balls. There are many imbedded devices now that could benefit from better lower level code, in case you want to scratch that itch.

Here is an interesting vid on as retro as they come, electronic circuit emulator from 1968. I firmly believe that the more software evolves, the more shit it is.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

MASM sucked monkey balls.

Firstly, it was a DOS-era Microsoft product, of course it sucked. And secondly, x86 assembler, from what I have seen of it, is brain damaged. Daily reminder that until the 386 came out, you could only address memory above 640KB by putting the processor into protected mode and the only way to get out of protected mode was to deliberately crash.

(And when, boys and girls, did the 640KB limit finally take a farewell bow in mainstream PC use? Windows XP.)

 

[дядя Боря]

Firstly, it was a DOS-era Microsoft product, of course it sucked. And secondly, x86 assembler, from what I have seen of it, is brain damaged. Daily reminder that until the 386 came out, you could only address memory above 640KB by putting the processor into protected mode and the only way to get out of protected mode was to deliberately crash.

(And when, boys and girls, did the 640KB limit finally take a farewell bow in mainstream PC use? Windows XP.)

TASM forever!

Microslime always sucked, always will. They just buying up outside tech to dilute the suck. It's like diluting a gallon of shit with honey, eventually it's going to be almost pure honey, but I'll still taste shit by just looking at it.

Yes, good times writing directly to memory to draw on screen, hiding code snippets in memory. This is the time when virus length was measured in bytes.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I never really had much of the 8 bit era, but people a bit older than myself reminisce about loading software from cassette tapes and waiting for ages while it ground away then, just as you thought it was going to run, TAPE LOAD ERROR

That lead to some fun superstition. They say blowing into NES cartridges doesn't work but by god, leaving the room while loading from cassette on the C64 was a surefire way to avoid tape errors.

On cassettes with lots of pirated game you always marked on the cover insert the meter number so you knew where to fast forward to before loading. Wikipedia even had a picture of the exact style pirated cassettes looked, even the turbo loader is there, that's nice.

With game prices these days it has been largely forgotten how cheap games used to be, cassettes were such an inexpensive medium and tons of bedroom coders cranked out games hoping to sell hundreds of copies, leading to situations where a kid could stand in a store trying to decide if he should buy the ice cream or a C64 game out of the bargain bin.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

A good chunk of my early childhood was playing Burger Time on the TI-99, along with Parsec.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

where a kid could stand in a store trying to decide if he should buy the ice cream or a C64 game out of the bargain bin.

Which in turn meant that if you ended up buying some utter shite like SQIJ or Alien Sidestep or Super Gran or suchlike, it was no great loss, just wipe the tape with a magnet and pirate your mate's Katakis or Jet Set Willy onto it with your dual tape deck.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

One of my favorite things about the Amiga 500 and almost the only reason I have WinUAE installed is the demos. They're really impressive and there's so much history there.

Here's a demo, Hardwired, from The Silents(TSL) and Crionics with music by Jesper Kyd. The Silents would later go on to become Digital Illusions that later became Digital Illusions CE just so they could shorten their name to DICE.

That was during the effects/tricks era where effects were shown one after the other. It is really impressive and in the best demos there are small things that makes you go "wait a minute...". That part, the small flourish, might be lost on the viewer and the format itself isn't something that grabs the attention of a casual viewer. It's stylized nerdery.
edit: the bit that starts at about ~4:15 in the video above is pretty crazy, but it's a good example of something that might be lost on some people while dropping the jaws of others.

But then in 1992 Spaceballs did something amazing, they put everything together as part of a larger production creating something exciting instead of a parade of effects.
State of the Art.

Spoiler

The sequel, Nine Fingers were more advanced and in my opinion the better one.
Linked but not inlined.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzwib7JQ

Here's the real gold though, footage from when the high school kids that made up Spaceballs where video taping the footage used in the demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgriMuXZ3QY

Spaceballs were Norwegian but didn't turn into a games company like so many other groups(in Scandinavia there are so many game studios that grew out of the demo scene), but watch State of the Art and then check out Funcom's first(?) game WinterFX on the SNES. There are some obvious technical similarities...

 

[Ginger Piglet]

One of my favorite things about the Amiga 500 and almost the only reason I have WinUAE installed is the demos. They're really impressive and there's so much history there.

Here's a demo, Hardwired, from The Silents(TSL) and Crionics with music by Jesper Kyd. The Silents would later go on to become Digital Illusions that later became Digital Illusions CE just so they could shorten their name to DICE.

That was during the effects/tricks era where effects were shown one after the other. It is really impressive and in the best demos there are small things that makes you go "wait a minute...". That part, the small flourish, might be lost on the viewer and the format itself isn't something that grabs the attention of a casual viewer. It's stylized nerdery.
edit: the bit that starts at about ~4:15 in the video above is pretty crazy, but it's a good example of something that might be lost on some people while dropping the jaws of others.

But then in 1992 Spaceballs did something amazing, they put everything together as part of a larger production creating something exciting instead of a parade of effects.
State of the Art.

Spoiler

The sequel, Nine Fingers were more advanced and in my opinion the better one.
Linked but not inlined.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzwib7JQ

Here's the real gold though, footage from when the high school kids that made up Spaceballs where video taping the footage used in the demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgriMuXZ3QY

Spaceballs were Norwegian but didn't turn into a games company like so many other groups(in Scandinavia there are so many game studios that grew out of the demo scene), but watch State of the Art and then check out Funcom's first(?) game WinterFX on the SNES. There are some obvious technical similarities...

Never really was all that au fait with the demoscene but considering how awful the 68000 was with floating point maths on which most 3D graphics are based (you can hack around it by multiplying and dividing by large powers of ten but it's slower than a proper floating point unit) that's genuinely impressive.

As regards DICE, how the mighty have fallen. Another excellent dev that were swallowed and looted by EA.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Never really was all that au fait with the demoscene but considering how awful the 68000 was with floating point maths on which most 3D graphics are based (you can hack around it by multiplying and dividing by large powers of ten but it's slower than a proper floating point unit) that's genuinely impressive.

As regards DICE, how the mighty have fallen. Another excellent dev that were swallowed and looted by EA.

Ironically DICE only became the DICE we know it as by swallowing up a smaller company(Refraction).

Floating point wasn't really used on the Amiga like that as far as I know, maybe for pre-calculations and look up tables during loading if I had to guess.
In the Amiga demos it isn't even 3D as we know it today and a point of pride for some groups/demos was to do a spinning cube without the look-up tables or pre-calculations, maybe even let the viewer spin it around a bit to prove it wasn't just a sort of "playback" or rigged in some way. Their cube wouldn't look as good but no matter what it's still impressive even if it's "faked".


Enough of that, did anyone have an Atari Falcon or whatever it was called? Did that one even come out?

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Atari Falcon

It did indeed come out. And it's a pretty tasty machine. Unfortunately it didn't sell well because it broke a lot of backward compatibility with earlier ST and STE models.

Expect to pay up to two grand for one in working order nowadays.

 

[Coolio55]

I'm thinking about experimenting with Z88DK on the spectrum. Some cool modern games have been made using it (Forest Raider Cherry and Ninjajar! to name a few) (Ninjajar! is absolutely ace BTW. It's on the level of a good NES game which is astonishing for the speccy) and it comes packed in with a really nifty sprite library.

Anyone else have experience with modern homebrew?

 

[Lifeguard Hermit]

I learned how to launch games (blockbuster/treasure mountain etc) on the old ibm ps/2 in elementary school, when I turned 10 my stepdad gave me a compaq 286 that just stopped working one day, so he helped me assemble a 386 he brought home from work and I used that pc for years. I actually have no idea where it is now unfortunately, it might be in a grandparent's basement with my vader 2600(pictured) though.
Now I just run FS-UAE (an amiga emu) If I want to play something old like commander keen

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

I learned how to launch games (blockbuster/treasure mountain etc) on the old ibm ps/2 in elementary school, when I turned 10 my stepdad gave me a compaq 286 that just stopped working one day, so he helped me assemble a 386 he brought home from work and I used that pc for years. I actually have no idea where it is now unfortunately, it might be in a grandparent's basement with my vader 2600(pictured) though.
Now I just run FS-UAE (an amiga emu) If I want to play something old like commander keen
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Treasure Mountain was an awesome game. They also did one, where you had to be in a museum at night?
Math rescue was also a really great educational game.

My first foray into computers was my Dad's work computer, he had for engineering. I can't remember the make but it was a new model in 1987, and my earliest memories was watching my brother install Street Fighter 2 on it.

I was about 3 and 1/2 when he got a but load of sierra games from a friend, and I started learning how to use DOS prompt and Windows 3.1.

I was too young to appreciate BBS, but used to play Legend Of The Red Dragon quite a bit as well. Computers at that time used to be really fun to explore, and there was such a big back catalog of Sierra and Lucas Arts games, as well as some of the other companies, that I have very fond memories having to work out puzzles.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I am now the proud owner of a fully working Mega STE. These were intended to be an end of line spectacular for the Atari ST series as the following year (1992) the Falcon was supposed to replace it. The Mega STE has a double speed processor (16 MHz 68000), a VME bus into which a PC graphics card of the time can be inserted, hardware support for a LAN (though on what protocol I'm yet to work out, I think it might be IPX?), an internal hard drive as standard, and all the features of the STE other than Jagpad sockets. It is also so ugly it's actually rather good looking. It was also proof that they could have made the standard STE at a higher clock rate and still kept compatibility because the CPU can be dropped to 8 MHz for compatibility in software (which the Falcon could surely have done also.)

It didn't sell though because Atari's marketing was pants, and the business world (to which it was intended) was moving wholesale to PCs because they were becoming less expensive and had a massive software library. Still, however, it sold quite well in Germany (mine originated there according to the warranty sticker on the base) where the ST already had a large install base in businesses.

(That one's not actually mine btw.)

So... yeah, this is a right little hotrod. Rare too. I'm told that Commodore, when they heard about the Falcon, were initially worried because it was going head to head with their newly released A1200 price-wise but with significantly higher spec, but then someone told them that Atari were aiming at the PC with it and in their words, it was at that moment they knew they'd won. The same probably applies to the Mega STE really. Can't compete with the massive install base and software library and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

 

[Lifeguard Hermit]

Sierra and Lucas Arts games, as well as some of the other companies, that I have very fond memories having to work out puzzles

Lol both of those companies were kings of the beginners trap but I have soo many fond memories of them, legend of kyrandia being a favorite.
I remember playing the old tank game battlezone a good bit and getting frustrated at ES:Arena as well lol

 

[Coolio55]

The 8-Bit Guy is making his own 8-bit computer:

Here's an FAQ:

Commander X16 FAQ (From David Murray on Facebook)

From the Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/notes/commander-x16-prototype/frequently-asked-questions/402529397164827/ --- Frequently Asked Questions If you haven’t already, please watch the Commander X16 project video(s): https://youtu.be/ayh0qebfD2g What CPU/sound/video chip will you...

murray2.com

(Also 2 AY-3-8910 chips means you can use 2 envelopes natively as well with 3 channels for each)

The first development board has been drawn up:

First development board rendered

murray2.com

 

[Crichax]

Windows is pretty much never slow for me. It doesn't take a lengthy amount of time to boot up with my setup.

Also, the Chinese DOS scene was surprisingly quite big in the day. Here's a link to the best JRPG I've played on DOS: the Chinese-made Legend of Sword and Fairy.

An explanation for the rather stupid name for the game is that "xian" (which is a word for Daoist immortal) often gets translated to fairy.

 

[Coolio55]

HOLY SHIT. Someone else knows about that game.

Haven't played it but the soundtrack is amazing

 

[Crichax]

HOLY SHIT. Someone else knows about that game.

Haven't played it but the soundtrack is amazing

There's a whole series of these games, but only one other game (the 6th one) is translated. I like the 6th one, but the controls are awkward.

Also, I'm considering attempting to recreate the soundtrack of the game (similar to what people have done for Undertale and some anime OSTs) with the FM synth VST Dexed. But FM synths have a ton of options, so this'll be hard.