Waxing nostalic about old PC games

bjornart said:
I can get a C64 emulator that will even emulate the time it took to load something from tape, yet getting an old PC game to run is almost impossible. The universe sucks.
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Nah just PCs... well IBM PCs :)

One of my favourite pastimes used to be seeing how long a chain of emulators I could get to work, so I'd emulate a Spectrum on an emulation of a BBC Micro on an emulation of a PC on an emulation of an Atari ST on an Archimedes! Not much practical use but I found it fun!

And one other things that bugs me about PCs – scrolling, why after all these years don’t PC scroll as smoothly as my Atari 400!


(Edited for mms.)
 
Current computers should be able to perfectly emule a P75, maybe an entire DOS machine with specific characteristics. It would be nice.
 
Bodhi Dharma Zen said:
X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, Descent, are among my all time favorites
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:rolleyes: ahhhh youth....

(actually I'm jealous - if only I could shave a handful of years off)
 
DangerousBeliefs said:
Zork used to drive me crasy.
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That was one of those that to me always sounded good in theory but bored me when I tried it, frankly.

I thought of another one: Starlight (II). Just average graphics for the time, but really had a lot of depth to it - and I know some might find this nuts, but I actually liked that it took more time to fly to more distant places and that some planets ended up just being more or less worthless rocks; gave it a little more sense of realism.

Never did finish it though. :( Got about 1/2 way and couldn't figure it out any more.
 
We used to sit around for hours playing vs. golf. A couple of weeks ago I found a NES emulator so I can now play the game again, and even though there are far better golf games out there nothing beats vs. golf.

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lol - you just ID-ed another classic (the PC version I had was called "Mean 18" which included the ability to create your own courses.....a big big deal at the time).
 
PS can anyone top this for all-time OLD OLD computer games....I'm talking pre-PC:

I visited my brother at college and he had classes one day so he managed to set me up in the "computer lab" area one day where they had a football game programmed into the computer (which took up a whole room). Course it was all text/number-crunching.....all output was on a huge dot-matrix printer, and it gave you options that you typed on the keyboard. You could call a handful of offensive and defensive plays and it typed out the result. This was about mid/late 70s and it was at the time extremely cool.....

Man I'm old.
 
Perhaps then you remember "Artillery". You would have a goal target at a certain distance and would have to answer two questions - "Angle?", and amount of powder or something.

Ah, I miss the old teletype sound.
 
Many hours wasted on the following:

M.U.L.E.

Sword of Fargoal

Telengard

Ultima II - VI

Infocom games

On Telengard I would find a transporter, transport to the lowest level, find the first weapon then return to the first floor. If anything caught you on the lowest level you were toast, but if you could grab something and make it topside you could really rock the game for several levels.
 
I had a TRS-80 Model I with a green monitor (oh, wait it was a piuece of green plastic tapes onto the monitor) and there was a collection of adventure games for it.

Can't remember their names but it was a whole series of text games and a couple of them had a purple worm. The first time you met it you could not kill it (and didn't need to) and the next game it was simple to kill, but did nothing to the story except make you feel good.
 
Zep said:
What you WILL need is an old PC to run them on! :) A 386 or 486 or perhaps a 75MHz Pentium with the original SoundBlaster and a Trident VGA card... Boot the PC from a DOS "games floppy" with the appropriate drivers, and start your games from the HD.

Incidentally, I happen to think Descent is still the best flying shooter game ever - I still play my copy in my rare downtime, and Zeplette and I are planning on fighting it out with network games soon.
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No!! You can play these on your Windows XP P4 system!!

Just go here:

DosBox

and get a nice front end here:

D-Fend

I spent last month playing lots of old games in an archaeological layer of my hard drive...
 
For my 6ish'th birthday I got Commander Keens 2-5, 6 was yet to come....there went most of my childhood. :p
 
bigred said:
lol - you just ID-ed another classic (the PC version I had was called "Mean 18" which included the ability to create your own courses.....a big big deal at the time).
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Whoaaaa....flashback! Thanks! I spent many, many hours on Mean 18!

Back in the day I also completed the first 4 Kings Quests, Quest for Glory, all the Police Quests, all the Space Quests, and several of the Leisure Suit Larry's. I was a Sierra junkie.
 
malaka said:
Back in the day I also completed the first 4 Kings Quests
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I remember playing one of them (III or IV I think) but never did get close to finishing. I liked the storyline kinda thing, but if I couldn't figure it out after awhile, I bagged it (I always hated that they wouldn't give you the freakin answers if you wanted to cheat - hey I paid, fess up). I also remember what I think was a "Lara Croft" one where she was a detective on some egyptian museum cover-up. Bought in a discount bin and was pretty fun (still I got stuck, then got the answers from someone). There was also a series that I forget the name of where you could choose to be one of about 3/4 characters (like fighter, magician, etc), was pretty good. I remember you had to cross some desert and I mean literally walk it.....took a handful of turns and once in awhile you'd get stalked by a rhino or some such.

Yknow one thing I never understood about games like that (this probably still holds true) is that after ALL that time you put into it and finally get to the end, that the end didn't have some kind of big dramatic "splash" to it. Usually it was just a "OK you're at the end, nice job, bye" kind of thing. Cmon animate some fireworks up, make the screen flash, or SOMETHING....

PS the only Zork I played wasn't text, it was similar to the games above....
 
I purchased one of the first Atari 2600's that hit the market - I remember that it didn't even have an option to switch game
play from channel 3 to channel 4---sheesh---it wouldn't work well on my tv so I had to return it for a refund.
 
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