Computer game nostalgia & Mac OS/IOS


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Janx

Hero
IIc? You young generations, with your Cs and your Es and your GSs.

It's been downhill since they came out the +.
had a IIe but swapped it for a laser128 because it was more compact. I'd gotten it as a legacy device to play my old game disks, so I wasn't for caring about the hardware itself.
 

Janx

Hero
I miss The Bilestoad. We'd gotten ahold of a stack of pirate game disks and had to figure out the controls, and that game had quite a few.

keys to move shield in and out, more keys for axe and you'd try to chop the other player up, leaving blood and limbs on the island. I got pretty good at it.
 

Mad_Jack

Hero
The TRS-80 was followed by a Coleco Adam, complete with tape drive. I played quite a bit of Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., and an "educational" game called Fraction Fever on that.

Same here - the Adam was our first computer. I used to refer to it as a typewriter that played video games.
The Smurfs game rocked. We didn't get the disk drive for it until about two years later.

(Fun story: One time when my brother and I were in college, we were sitting around down in the basement with some of his friends, stoned as rocks, and he accidentally put one of the game tapes in the stereo, with the volume cranked up... scared the living <bleepity-bleep> out of us, lol.)

The Amiga was our second family computer, although technically it belonged to my brother.


EDIT: Wow... :D

For years I used to have a couple of the old Adam game cassettes around here somewhere. When I just checked to see if I still had them, I found an old Atari 2600 joystick...
...And the case to my Edie Brickell cassette. (Which brings up the question, where the <bleep> did the tape go?)
 

MarkB

Legend
The first computer I personally owned was a VIC-20, while my brother had a ZX Spectrum. I have vague but fond memories of Lunar Jetman and Manic Miner. Later I had a Commodore 64, then an Atari ST around the time I was going to college. Much clearer memories of the Atari ST - some real favourites like Carrier Command, Starglider II, Elite II, The Sentinel.

After that I moved on to my first gaming PC, back when including a sound card and a CD-ROM drive qualified it as a "Multimedia" PC. 486 processor, back when Pentiums were still the hyped next big thing. Magic Carpet and X-Wing Collectors CD-ROM were my first games, wow X-Wing was awesome at the time.
 



Mad_Jack

Hero
I'm pretty sure the first "real computer game" I played on the Amiga was Dungeon Master. I loved the hell out of that game. That and Bard's Tale.
(Years ago, I found a Dungeon Master emulator online somewhere and lost literally three whole weeks of my life to it, lol.)

Interestingly, I never played any of the old-school D&D video games like the Gold Box series - I started with Baldur's Gate and Temple of Elemental Evil - but I actually do own copies of several of them despite having no way to play them. (I somewhat haphazardly collect old D&D merch when I find it online for cheap...)
 

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
I played that old IIe Star Trek game in BASIC where your ship was an “E”, the Klingons were “K”s, stars were asterisks and photon torpedoes were “#”s. I knew just enough to reprogram it so your phasers got MORE powerful the farther away the target.

And text games like Zork and Madventure.

Then came things like Wizardry & Ultima III.

When we got Macs to replace the Apple IIe, Bard’s Tale, Sim City, Sim Earth and those Forgotten Realms games got lots of play.

That last one was hilarious to me because I found a fatal bug. My party, which included a Magic-User/Thief, encountered a Spectre (in library, as I recall). She kept getting nailed as I battled it, but she survived. Then I noticed she had -300 levels or more. It was late, so I saved the game, thinking to figure it out later. The next day, the saved game would NOT reload properly. The few times it rebooted, it crashed within minutes. I tried resuming play from a prior save, but each time, the Spectre encounter ended the same way- the MU-Th in big negative levels, followed by a crash.

I restarted the game with an entirely different party, but by that time, I was too frustrated to continue. (A friend of mine who frequently visited from out of town would play the game when I had to go to class or do homework…and he eventually finished the game.)
 

MarkB

Legend
I played that old IIe Star Trek game in BASIC where your ship was an “E”, the Klingons were “K”s, stars were asterisks and photon torpedoes were “#”s. I knew just enough to reprogram it so your phasers got MORE powerful the farther away the target.

And text games like Zork and Madventure.

Then came things like Wizardry & Ultima III.

When we got Macs to replace the Apple IIe, Bard’s Tale, Sim City, Sim Earth and those Forgotten Realms games got lots of play.

That last one was hilarious to me because I found a fatal bug. My party, which included a Magic-User/Thief, encountered a Spectre (in library, as I recall). She kept getting nailed as I battled it, but she survived. Then I noticed she had -300 levels or more. It was late, so I saved the game, thinking to figure it out later. The next day, the saved game would NOT reload properly. The few times it rebooted, it crashed within minutes. I tried resuming play from a prior save, but each time, the Spectre encounter ended the same way- the MU-Th in big negative levels, followed by a crash.

I restarted the game with an entirely different party, but by that time, I was too frustrated to continue. (A friend of mine who frequently visited from out of town would play the game when I had to go to class or do homework…and he eventually finished the game.)
A new definition of TPK - Total Program Kill.
 

MarkB

Legend
I wound up with an unusable save state in Wizardry 8. There's a mission where you have to rescue two captives from a Rapax encampment, and after I freed them and added them to my party, I immediately teleported back to a safe location.

It was only several hours of gameplay later that I discovered that, even though teleportation was a standard spell, the game didn't account for it's use in this situation. You were supposed to fight your way back out of the camp, encountering and defeating several top-rank Rapax in the process, and that was the only way to progress the main plot.

Fortunately I had a save from prior to the quest, but having to replay so much of the game nearly killed my interest in it.
 

Dioltach

Legend
I played that old IIe Star Trek game in BASIC where your ship was an “E”, the Klingons were “K”s, stars were asterisks and photon torpedoes were “#”s. I knew just enough to reprogram it so your phasers got MORE powerful the farther away the target.
I played that old BASIC game too, on a Philips P2000. My dad brought home a printout (dot matrix!) of the version he played at work and I spent a whole night typing it out. Never got it to work, though. Perhaps because of typos, or perhaps because my P2000 had 16kb, and the cutting-edge high-tech lab where he worked had 4Gb.
 

MoonSong

Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
Wow, a lot of truly old school here. I feel like a baby in comparison! The first computer I truly interacted with was an Atari ST, no videogames there though. I only truly owned a W98 PC later. So I'm more familiar with newer games, like Zeus, Wizardry 8, AoE II, NfS III, and in particular a quirky RTS game called Ancient Conquest. Of course, there's D&D games like ToEE and Neverwinter Nights.
 

GreyLord

Legend
30 or so years ago, a brilliant little meditative puzzle game called Heaven & Earth was released, first for PCs, then for Macs. It had 3 types of activities: Illusions (where you rearranged tiles on your screen to match the provided image), a pendulum you nudged to hit targets, and a mystic-themed card game.

I loved it, mostly for its card game. The other stuff was fun, but the card game was addictive…at least, for me. Alas, it’s not playable on Macs upgraded to anything post OS X. (Yeah, that goes back a ways.)

I was wondering, though, if anyone knew of an IOS app or that had a similar vibe. (Especially for the card game aspect.)

AAAAAANND while I’m at it…

Same questions go for the ancient computer games Broadsides, Moebius, Playmaker Football, Escape Velocity, and Abuse.

Here is the PC version

msdos heaven and earth 1992

and here is the Macintosh version. You need to click on the disk that says heaven and earth to get it to to work I imagine (didn't test it out, just looked it up to find it)

Heaven and Earth Macintosh version
 

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
Here is the PC version

msdos heaven and earth 1992

and here is the Macintosh version. You need to click on the disk that says heaven and earth to get it to to work I imagine (didn't test it out, just looked it up to find it)

Heaven and Earth Macintosh version
Thank you, Internet Angel!

It does seem to work, albeit in B&W and slowly- controlling the cursor is difficult. But now I only have to remember how to play!

And there were some links that may take me to a more current version, or some other info about the game. I now have something to investigate.
 

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