Old-timers and millenials

[R21352]

You lot think you're old?

We played games as kids with toy guns when the bad guys were still Ze Germans (I was born just 14 years after WWII finished up) Anyone remember the Johnny 7 or the Man from U.N.C.L.E briefcase?

I also watched the first moon landing live on my neighbour's TV in 1969 (annoyed that they had interrupted the Champions to show it)

I had been to war (Falklands 1982) as a soldier before I played Elite in 1984...the original was my decompression time, as Elite : Dangerous is for a few young soldiers fresh back from foreign fields today...

During all this huge amount of time on the planet, I've witnessed quite a bit, from the invention of computer games, the rise of the BB and the internet to internet gaming as it is today ....

Wouldn't have missed any of it

Yes I remember The Man from uncle, also watched the moonlandings on mums TV which was like a small box, seen a lot of changes in my life time.

Also played the original elite, on the 464, then Amaga 500, then on a PC clone Haven't stopped playing computer games ever since.

Richard

 

[iconoclypse]

I wasn't born when the first Elite dropped in on the old boxes. But then, I'm no millennial either.

Well, this is awkward.

We'll just guess you're spritely enough to join the latter. My main point was wondering if you ever feel like you missed out.

 

[dangerzone]

We'll just guess you're spritely enough to join the latter. My main point was wondering if you ever feel like you missed out.

I joined this world just AFTER Elite dropped out of witchspace, 1985. I spent most of my childhood on a children's ward in a hospital instead of a school, so all I got was Biker mice from Mars and Problem Child. I eventually did try Elite on an old BBC? computer in 1997, but that was the PlayStation/ Saturn generation and sadly it didn't hold my interest beyond curiosity.

Then I saw Elite Dangerous mentioned as a PC kick-starter. I've always been fascinated with space and kept a keen eye on it until it was suddenly dropped onto the Xbox GPP for 23 quid. Picked it up, never looked back.

 

[Hordriss]

I joined this world just AFTER Elite dropped out of witchspace, 1985. I spent most of my childhood on a children's ward in a hospital instead of a school, so all I got was Biker mice from Mars and Problem Child. I eventually did try Elite on an old BBC? computer in 1997, but that was the PlayStation/ Saturn generation and sadly it didn't hold my interest beyond curiosity.

Then I saw Elite Dangerous mentioned as a PC kick-starter. I've always been fascinated with space and kept a keen eye on it until it was suddenly dropped onto the Xbox GPP for 23 quid. Picked it up, never looked back.

I was too young myself to enjoy Elite when it first arrived, being born very late in 1981 (no way I could have grasped Elite at the tender age of 2!), but I did first discover Elite when it got a PAL release on the NES in 1992/3. I saw a glowing review for it in TOTAL! magazine and was intrigued by the sound of the game, and saved up for it with my pocket money and was absolutely hooked by it. Saw the development of the PC version of ED but knew my laptop wouldn't be able to handle it.

Got the Xbox One in July last year and saw it on the GPP and snapped it up pretty much immediately.

 

[tafkabb]

I edited the code on Elite for the Acorn Electron so I was elite rank in about ten minutes

 

[iconoclypse]

The first games I counciously experienced were on the Amiga 500 which my older brother had at the time. Well, maybe it was Pacman on the C-64, but that was semi-counciously at best. So I kinda missed the early beginnings (catched up on parts of that through emulation in later years). I'm sad I was too young back then to experience video arcades. But I still feel like I've witnessed important parts of gaming history since I've played a lot over the years, all kinds of different systems and genres. Great memories and some of the older games still shine even today. Unfortunatley I never came in contact with one of ED's predecessors though.

Arcades. That's a really good example of something that you can't (or perhaps shouldn't!) emulate. But I have very fond memories of my 'local' - the Silver Strike. Games like Missile Command, Asteroids, Galaxians, though my our favourite period was later - Carrier Airwing, Image Fight, Thunder Cross 4. Some of the best SHMUPs ever. It's now a funeral parlour. Trying not to read too much into that.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Did you played ever Impossible Mission on the C=64...

"Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay FORRRREEEEVVVVEEERRR!" Great game. I beat it on the C64, and then 30 years later on the DS.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Don't laugh, that was my Computer Studies course at school.
We did have one Commodore PET computer, but the rest of the time it was writing code onto squared paper and sending it off to the local Polytechnic to be transferred onto punched cards and run by their computer. A week later we'd get a couple of cards and a slip of paper back as the output

Tell that to the kids today and ..............(better stop myself right there).

I did the same, probably I few years after you, but I was college by then. An ICL mainframe using punchcards in 1988! But in the classroom we did have Apricots. Yes, Apple rip-offs. How imaginative.

 

[iconoclypse]

I rember many hours aligning heads.

Plenty of misery there......

Great thread, favourite old school game apart from elite is R-TYPE on the Amiga.

Great choice.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Well, the first game(*) was "spacewar" on a DEC PDP-1. I played it at the Johns Hopkins University summer fair in 1973 or so. It was written in 1961 so it was already old code. I remember watching them load it from punch-tapes.

The gameplay was great and I'm sure a lot of the ED crowd would love it because it was all Open mode and all PVP. Except since it was skill-only based and the ships were the same, some of the ED ganker crowd probably would find it too challenging. Edit: Someone should wrap a leaderboard around it and set up a match ladder.

You can play it under a simulation of the entire PDP-1 running in a Javascript virtual machine in your browser:
http://spacewar.oversigma.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bzWnaH-0sg

(* Pace some of the finite state machine code one of John Von Neumann's colleagues was running on the first computer, ever)

The history lesson is appreciated, though I seem to remember there was a game or two before, but Spacewar was the first that we'd recognise utilising a graphical representation etc.

 

[Ashnak]

The best was the old school floppies. Just that sound when it loaded up was the best. Computers felt like a real machine.

Are you talking abut 5 1/4" or 8"?

No, I never worked with 8" floppies, but my dad did. Once he brought home a few discarded hard disc covers. These hard disks were stacks of platters, about 12-14" diameter, and those stacks were loaded into the machine (i.e. r/w heads and motors were fixed, the platter stack was exchanged). In order to protect them from dust, they were transported inside nice smoked acrylic covers. Made some nice flower pots (among other stuff...).

But if you want computers as machines, you'll need a chain printer .

 

[iconoclypse]

What about when Computer and Video Games magazine used to publish a game code that you could type in,in BASIC.
Took hours to enter and they would never work.
You had to wait a month for the next issue which would sort out the mis-prints.
Still loved it though,I think it is because it was so new,I knew I was at the beginning of something big.

I remember typing in 3000 lines of code from Electron User, much of it assembly code. Then when I ran it it did indeed run but simply displayed 'April Fool' in 8-inch scrolling letters. Gits!
Now That What I Call Trolling Vol. 1

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

For all my fellow 8 bit veterans, I humbly present PICO-8, an emulator of an idealised 8 bit console that has its own built in editor, allowing you to write 'carts' in Lua (much the good bits of BASIC), draw sprites and map tiles, and compose bleepy tunes.

http://www.pico-8.com

It even has its own fanzine, complete with listings to type in: https://sectordub.itch.io/pico-8-fanzine-1

I'm writing a demake of ED for it, with a Spacewar flight model, but I'm stuck with NPC combat AI. Maybe if I wasn't playing ED so much...

Simply beautiful

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Lets not forget the ZX81 RAM pack. One jolt and the machine would crash. Mine was held in place with Blu Tack. That worked a treat to make sure it stayed stable.

Yep we have nicer computers now, better games, but the 80's will be the best always for home computing. Simple computers, easy to learn, easy to hack, wires everywhere. 6502 machine code. Sprites. Proper disk drives which clanked.

It strikes me just how physical and mechanical so much old tech was. I can't recall how many times I had to take a screwdriver and soldering iron to my microswitch joystick. Youngsters might want to Google 'soldering iron'...

 

[iconoclypse]

Are you talking abut 5 1/4" or 8"?

No, I never worked with 8" floppies, but my dad did. Once he brought home a few discarded hard disc covers. These hard disks were stacks of platters, about 12-14" diameter, and those stacks were loaded into the machine (i.e. r/w heads and motors were fixed, the platter stack was exchanged). In order to protect them from dust, they were transported inside nice smoked acrylic covers. Made some nice flower pots (among other stuff...).

But if you want computers as machines, you'll need a chain printer .

I used both 8" floppies and those 12" disk packs, not to mention a chain printer. Man, the noise.

 

[Ashnak]

hey guys, what was it like when the wheel was invented?

Well, in the late 80's/early 90's, a single postdoc (not me! - I was just a grad student) could disable the internet (not WWW - that wasn't invented yet) for all of Europe:

He was a postdoc at Lund (in Sweden).
He had been working at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.
His experiment was at the CERN in Geneva.

At that time (and also still today), these also were the three main Internet nodes in Europe - everything else practically hung off them.

Since he was in Karlsruhe for some time, he had his main mail account in Lund set to forward his mail to Karlsruhe.
When he went to the CERN, he had his Karlsruhe account set to forward his mail to Geneva.
When he went back home for a holiday, he set his CERN account to forward his mail to Lund.

As a result, 10 minutes later, the internet was down in Europe, since all the servers were busy with forwarding his mails.

The next day, the admins had recofigured the routers and servers to check for this kind of problem and block it.

N.B.: the simple dual computer email bounce had already been disabled earlier in the routers, but nobody had thought to extend that to multiple hops...

Yes, I knew that guy personally. He was good, but also sometimes a bit forgetful.

 

[wstephenson]

It strikes me just how physical and mechanical so much old tech was. I can't recall how many times I had to take a screwdriver and soldering iron to my microswitch joystick. Youngsters might want to Google 'soldering iron'...

Fed up of Quickshot I's constantly breaking as I played Track and Field and Nemesis on my MSX, my Dad and I built the World's First Gamepad: a Golden Virginia tin with holes cut in the top, containing a bit of breadboard and 5 microswitches arranged with a 'D' pattern, wired to an Atari joystick connector - we should have patented it!

However the youngsters are quite handy with soldering irons nowadays, it's just there's typically an Arduino in every circuit.

 

[Finbar]

Lets not forget the ZX81 RAM pack. One jolt and the machine would crash. Mine was held in place with Blu Tack. That worked a treat to make sure it stayed stable.

Impossible to forget it; in fact I still have my ZX81.
But using Blu Tack to avoid sudden in-game death? Definitely an exploit

 

[I PORKCH0P I]

Impossible to forget it; in fact I still have my ZX81.
But using Blu Tack to avoid sudden in-game death? Definitely an exploit

What about using cellotape to stick a snapped speccy tape back together.
Living in Blackpool I misspent my youth hanging around the arcades playing cabinet games like space harrier , you could the hear the "get ready " from miles away.

 

[Spudulika]

Oh god yes, I remember doing that. When you got a speccy the hunt for a tape player that actually worked with the speccy was a side quest in its own right. I made the mistake of overplaying Daley Thompson's decathlon on my one and killed half the keys, so ended up getting a replacement case (had proper keys too!!!). Still, on the bright side, their was no need for central heating when you had one, even in winter it heated the room up nicely purely from playing elite to silly o clock in the morning.

 

[I PORKCH0P I]

Lol yeah trying to get the squeaks and squeals right on the spectrum was fun. I've just remembered something didn't the original elite come with some kind of code thingy on the spectrum to stop piracy ? I know jet set willy did.

 

[Reaper373]

I actually have a question for you old hands. I myself have been playing off and on since FE2 and love the Elite games, but I am definitely a new hand and the original Elite games pre-date me by quite a few years. So the question is, for those of you who have been around from the start, has Barben and Elite development always been this frustrating. It seems like with every Q&A we get 100 "we would love to do that one day" for every 1 "yes that is being done". Perhaps it's a sign of the times, season passes and current game dev, but it is so frustrating.

 

[Mole HD]

Daley Thompson's decathlon... with the 100 yard hurdles, I could almost feel my wrist break along with the quickshot stick

 

[Spudulika]

Lol yeah trying to get the squeaks and squeals right on the spectrum was fun. I've just remembered something didn't the original elite come with some kind of code thingy on the spectrum to stop piracy ? I know jet set willy did.

Yeah I think your right, didn't you have to put a word in from the manual?

 

[iconoclypse]

I actually have a question for you old hands. I myself have been playing off and on since FE2 and love the Elite games, but I am definitely a new hand and the original Elite games pre-date me by quite a few years. So the question is, for those of you who have been around from the start, has Barben and Elite development always been this frustrating. It seems like with every Q&A we get 100 "we would love to do that one day" for every 1 "yes that is being done". Perhaps it's a sign of the times, season passes and current game dev, but it is so frustrating.

You couldn't really communicate with devs back then, and when I game shipped, that was it, 'your game is complete, any bugs will stay, deal with it'. So we're in a fortunate position these days that we can have a dialogue with the devs and they can respond on the fly, or as quickly as their resources and manpower will allow. Try to be grateful, rather than frustrated.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Daley Thompson's decathlon... with the 100 yard hurdles, I could almost feel my wrist break along with the quickshot stick

Gotta love those hardware destroyers.