Favorite old game

Prime95 · 2004-10-23, 20:03

I enjoyed Maze Wars (see http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...war/index.html). Friends and I wasted many a night playing that game on Imlacs at NASA Ames Research Center. Of course, it was valuable QA for the network as no other program but as big a strain on the system.

rogue · 2004-10-23, 23:53

I remember that, but a later incarnation. My favorite of the past was 'rogue', my namesake. It was a rather difficult RPG, but lots of fun and rather addicting. The variant I played was AT&T's Advanced Rogue, which came around a few years after the original.

Another Unix game from the 80's was Greed. In Greed you had a grid of 20 rows of numbers (all single digits) by 80 columns. Moving in any direction you would move the number of squares as the number you stepped on. The object was to complete as much of the grid as possible. Completing 80% was not easy and I've never seen anyone over 90%.

clowns789 · 2004-10-27, 23:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Prime95

NASA Ames Research Center

Clickworkers is part of that. Would you know anything about Clickworkers? It shut down about a month ago. It was probably my fault because I did craters and no one else did at that time apparently.

Prime95 · 2004-10-28, 02:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by clowns789

Would you know anything about Clickworkers?

I worked at AMES Research Center in the summers 1976 and 1977. That was a bit before Clickworkers time.

Xyzzy · 2004-10-28, 03:41

Adventure is a fun game... It was my first exposure to computers...

http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/c_xyzzy.html

nomadicus · 2004-10-29, 11:46

Me too. Adventure was the first game that took 20+ hours for me to finish.

Zork was another one.

Fusion_power · 2004-10-31, 01:44

My favorite oldie was an early version of Lunar Lander where you entered a number of gallons of fuel to burn and if you were successful at landing, it gave a message of "Way to go Buck, you made it!". I first ran into a copy in 1981. By the end of the year, I had re-written the code so that it gave a graphic image that showed the ship landing. I also figured out that it ran on a simple variant of D=.5AT^2 using a fixed value for gravity. I modified the formula for landings on Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. Jupiter was the tough one. The ship almost couldn't carry enough fuel to make that one. One other mod I made was to incorporate an accurate formula to determine how big your crater was if you failed.

Games today are much more complex to say the least.

Fusion

adpowers · 2004-11-01, 11:44

Well, I'm only 18, but I have played MazeWars. Back in middle school, the nerdy tech guy set up MazeWars on like a local talk network using some old Mac Classics. I TA'ed for him and it was great fun playing that game with him and some other TAs during lunch or whenever.

Good times,
Andrew

Peter Nelson · 2005-02-02, 01:06

In 1981 I got the first ever computer I owned myself. A Sinclair Research ZX81.

After previously using RML380Z, Apple II, Commodore PETs at school and a friend's home-built ZX80.

Although this machine had only 1KByte onboard RAM, you could do cool stuff by coding in Z80A assembler (no bloatware here) and unlike the ZX80, the machine was able to keep refreshing the screen display while working! (albeit with a performance penalty).

I also bought the (then) massive 16KByte Ram expansion pack which plugged in the back on a PCB edge connector and was notorious. Both for a tendency to overheat with all those RAM chips and the intermittent contact of the edge connector which tended to cause spurious crashes! Solutions to this involved large amounts of sticky tape to physically stabilise the memory expansion.

The machine used casette tape for storage.

It was said at the time the ZX81 had the cpu power capability to control a power station! To show off this awesome capability my favourite game was 3D Monster Maze.

It is available on the net now in various emulator forms but I found this one if you want to try it and get a flavour.

http://www.demonstar.co.uk/document.php?id=8

Just download and unzip it to run on Windows.

The original was in monochrome only and had more blocky graphics but this one is pretty true to the original, (more like a sequel for ZX Spectrum) and includes a realistic tape loading section at the start. Brings back memories! eg "Rex lies in wait" ROFL.

I loved the ZX81 so much I later got a second one, but I think they later got cannibalised for electronics parts like the UHF modulator and chips.

By then I'd moved onto *really* powerful machines like Dragon 32 and BBC Micros! (6809/6502 respectively). The BBC had an excellent clone of the "Defender arcade game" with extremely smooth left/right scrolling and polyphonic sound. I still have these somewhere but they live in the attic, and no, before you suggest it, they won't run prime95.

Going back further in time, I recall "Temple of Asphai" on the Commodore PET where you walked around a 2D maze. We had PET diskette drives to load that from though. The 4040 dual disk unit was about the size of today's PCs and interfaced using an IEEE-488 bus.

We also made up some pretty cool PET games of our own, by writing directly to PET's screen memory (using Basic "poke" to location 32768 onwards) or 6502 machine code. We had access to the PETspeed compiler which gave our creations warp-drive compared to interpreted BASIC. An early example (I was probably 11) involved a keyboard-controlled racing car (actually a "V") which had to stay between a pseudo randomly winding race track which was scrolling up the screen. By clever coding the 2D road had narrow and wide stretches, junctions, collision detection, even other cars to avoid or overtake!

With a bit of assembler to implement 4 directional scrolling, we advanced to space games, with psuedo-randomly placed "." to form a starfield background.

Those were the days. The DIY-written games sometimes got the best laugh. We made our own lame clones of things like "Space Invaders" the arcade machine or pong the TV tennis game.

The discovery of algebra and trig functions like sine and cosine to fly something in a circle was a good introduction to the math we started learning in math class a few years later LOL.

TauCeti · 2005-02-25, 14:03

My father was a teacher and had access to a Commodore PET 2001.
In the school holidays we took the PET home and i played my favourite games - miner and frog...

I also had an Interton 4000 and loved to play tank battle and sea/air battle with my dad.

Some years later the C64 entered my life and a plethora of games became available...

Tau

garo · 2005-02-25, 15:13

There is an old old game that I played on the BBC micro at school back in the mid 80's. I don't remember it's name and maybe xilman on other UK old hands can help me on this. It was a very simple sort of god game where you had to allocate workers to food, flood control (I think there was a dyke somewhere in the game) and maybe one or two other activities. After each turn some random events happened and you either got a population increase or decrease.

It is a far cry from the games today, more than twenty years later. Just got myself Civ3 Conquests

But I will never forget that game.

2004-10-23, 20:03	#1
Prime95 P90 years forever! Aug 2002 Yeehaw, FL 2·3·5²·7² Posts	Favorite old game I enjoyed Maze Wars (see http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...war/index.html). Friends and I wasted many a night playing that game on Imlacs at NASA Ames Research Center. Of course, it was valuable QA for the network as no other program but as big a strain on the system.

2005-02-02, 01:06	#9
Peter Nelson Oct 2004 23² Posts	Is this old enough? In 1981 I got the first ever computer I owned myself. A Sinclair Research ZX81. After previously using RML380Z, Apple II, Commodore PETs at school and a friend's home-built ZX80. Although this machine had only 1KByte onboard RAM, you could do cool stuff by coding in Z80A assembler (no bloatware here) and unlike the ZX80, the machine was able to keep refreshing the screen display while working! (albeit with a performance penalty). I also bought the (then) massive 16KByte Ram expansion pack which plugged in the back on a PCB edge connector and was notorious. Both for a tendency to overheat with all those RAM chips and the intermittent contact of the edge connector which tended to cause spurious crashes! Solutions to this involved large amounts of sticky tape to physically stabilise the memory expansion. The machine used casette tape for storage. It was said at the time the ZX81 had the cpu power capability to control a power station! To show off this awesome capability my favourite game was 3D Monster Maze. It is available on the net now in various emulator forms but I found this one if you want to try it and get a flavour. http://www.demonstar.co.uk/document.php?id=8 Just download and unzip it to run on Windows. The original was in monochrome only and had more blocky graphics but this one is pretty true to the original, (more like a sequel for ZX Spectrum) and includes a realistic tape loading section at the start. Brings back memories! eg "Rex lies in wait" ROFL. I loved the ZX81 so much I later got a second one, but I think they later got cannibalised for electronics parts like the UHF modulator and chips. By then I'd moved onto really powerful machines like Dragon 32 and BBC Micros! (6809/6502 respectively). The BBC had an excellent clone of the "Defender arcade game" with extremely smooth left/right scrolling and polyphonic sound. I still have these somewhere but they live in the attic, and no, before you suggest it, they won't run prime95. Going back further in time, I recall "Temple of Asphai" on the Commodore PET where you walked around a 2D maze. We had PET diskette drives to load that from though. The 4040 dual disk unit was about the size of today's PCs and interfaced using an IEEE-488 bus. We also made up some pretty cool PET games of our own, by writing directly to PET's screen memory (using Basic "poke" to location 32768 onwards) or 6502 machine code. We had access to the PETspeed compiler which gave our creations warp-drive compared to interpreted BASIC. An early example (I was probably 11) involved a keyboard-controlled racing car (actually a "V") which had to stay between a pseudo randomly winding race track which was scrolling up the screen. By clever coding the 2D road had narrow and wide stretches, junctions, collision detection, even other cars to avoid or overtake! With a bit of assembler to implement 4 directional scrolling, we advanced to space games, with psuedo-randomly placed "." to form a starfield background. Those were the days. The DIY-written games sometimes got the best laugh. We made our own lame clones of things like "Space Invaders" the arcade machine or pong the TV tennis game. The discovery of algebra and trig functions like sine and cosine to fly something in a circle was a good introduction to the math we started learning in math class a few years later LOL.

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2004-10-23, 23:53	#2
rogue "Mark" Apr 2003 Between here and the 1100001100100₂ Posts	I remember that, but a later incarnation. My favorite of the past was 'rogue', my namesake. It was a rather difficult RPG, but lots of fun and rather addicting. The variant I played was AT&T's Advanced Rogue, which came around a few years after the original. Another Unix game from the 80's was Greed. In Greed you had a grid of 20 rows of numbers (all single digits) by 80 columns. Moving in any direction you would move the number of squares as the number you stepped on. The object was to complete as much of the grid as possible. Completing 80% was not easy and I've never seen anyone over 90%.

2004-10-28, 03:41	#5
Xyzzy "Mike" Aug 2002 79×101 Posts	Adventure is a fun game... It was my first exposure to computers... http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/c_xyzzy.html

2004-10-29, 11:46	#6
nomadicus Jan 2003 North Carolina F6₁₆ Posts	Me too. Adventure was the first game that took 20+ hours for me to finish. Zork was another one.

2004-10-31, 01:44	#7
Fusion_power Aug 2003 Snicker, AL 1677₈ Posts	My favorite oldie was an early version of Lunar Lander where you entered a number of gallons of fuel to burn and if you were successful at landing, it gave a message of "Way to go Buck, you made it!". I first ran into a copy in 1981. By the end of the year, I had re-written the code so that it gave a graphic image that showed the ship landing. I also figured out that it ran on a simple variant of D=.5AT^2 using a fixed value for gravity. I modified the formula for landings on Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. Jupiter was the tough one. The ship almost couldn't carry enough fuel to make that one. One other mod I made was to incorporate an accurate formula to determine how big your crater was if you failed. Games today are much more complex to say the least. Fusion

2004-11-01, 11:44	#8
adpowers Sep 2002 2⁴·5 Posts	Well, I'm only 18, but I have played MazeWars. Back in middle school, the nerdy tech guy set up MazeWars on like a local talk network using some old Mac Classics. I TA'ed for him and it was great fun playing that game with him and some other TAs during lunch or whenever. Good times, Andrew

2005-02-25, 14:03	#10
TauCeti Mar 2003 Braunschweig, Germany 2·113 Posts	My father was a teacher and had access to a Commodore PET 2001. In the school holidays we took the PET home and i played my favourite games - miner and frog... I also had an Interton 4000 and loved to play tank battle and sea/air battle with my dad. Some years later the C64 entered my life and a plethora of games became available... Tau

2005-02-25, 15:13	#11
garo Aug 2002 Termonfeckin, IE 3·919 Posts	There is an old old game that I played on the BBC micro at school back in the mid 80's. I don't remember it's name and maybe xilman on other UK old hands can help me on this. It was a very simple sort of god game where you had to allocate workers to food, flood control (I think there was a dyke somewhere in the game) and maybe one or two other activities. After each turn some random events happened and you either got a population increase or decrease. It is a far cry from the games today, more than twenty years later. Just got myself Civ3 Conquests But I will never forget that game.