Rediscovering the Joy - Stuff you may not of wanted to know

[radass]

If you're anything like me, you're a geek, and you've loved computers ever since you met them :D

I remeber fondly all that time playing with the TRS80 and C64 memory locations in order to induce them into graphics mode and display my carefully designed sprites .. (Plotted on sheets of graph paper and converted to hex via a binary interpretation, of course ) .. or how i 'wasnt allowed' to use my Dad's C64 (but did of course as working night shift he slept all day :D). And the games! ... Gems such as creatures I/II, night shift and turrican I/II, Maniac Mansion, International Karate/IK+, wasteland, all the D&D games (Champions/Death knights of Krynn, Pool of Radiance), Buck Rogers, and of course dosens of others ..

I even remember actually hugging my very own C64 (once i got one) on more than one occasion - being able to game/code on it meant that much to me :D

Like many, it's always been one of my life goals to make kick ass computer games of my very own .. i have filled SO many notebooks over the years with illustrations of my 'awesome robot dudes' and diagrams of exactly how my games were going to be programmed ..

Anyway, with the stress of building a business and the pressures of deadlines .. over time i think i have lost some of the love and fascination - until now

Whilst strutting my shit through the computing section of a bookstore today, i spotted a book that i had read a sample chapter of about a year ago: "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner. It's Id software's story, starting from the geeky childhoods of John Carmack and John Romero. I snarfed it up, and i've only read the first two chapters so far .. but i having read about and related to their childhoods my imagination has been captured and the old feeling of awe and empowerment that i grew up with seems renewed :O

Fuck computers are cool ! And NOW, we have the Internet ! AND LANS !!
And getting some homegrown graphics on that screen has never been easier ..

So go on, give that keyboard a hug :) And get that book, it's rad! And keep (or start!) coding/modeling – If i’m going to make my computer games, I’m going to need some rad people to work with :D

Peace

[Moo]

those c64 games were fking awesome dude. used to play em for hours on end when i was at dads. and teh NES too.

unfortunatly, i started being a codemonkey..and stopped. that was a wrong decision. i cant remember shit about any of it now.

ive kinda been stuck for awhile, not knowing what i should be doing, or in which direction to head next. its pretty bad really.

mleh.

[radass]

get the book then :)

[Joshu]

Modeling, ew. :p

All I remember of those "good old days" was plotting a character set to use as my own space-invaders game. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about physics (guess I was eight years old) and nothing about coding.

Damn, this makes me wanna go out and buy a dotmatrix printer.

[radass]

dotmatrix printers! with continuous paper!

reminds me of playing hard hat mac on the apple IIe

I've read a bit more now, Carmack just figured out how to make shit-slow pc's do smooth tile based sideways scrolling, much to the excitement of Romero

And look at him now, he basically dictates which direction graphics card manufacturers go in and single handedly rescued OpenGL as a consumer level 3D Graphics API ..

[Joshu]

Originally posted by radass
dotmatrix printers! with continuous paper!

Indeed - that very thought makes me want to hook one up to CrawleyTech and connect remotely to it. And print to it at 3am, when Chris is asleep. :D


To revive a very old post; anyone got any ideas for a fun multiplayer game? :D :D :D :D

[Moo]

i got a few working dot matrix printers!

i think i may even have a box on that paper too!

[Griphonix]

hey, I recognise one of those games! wasteland, that was the one with the rabbits, wasn't it?

[radass]

FUCK i hate it when you use the quick reply box but click the wrong post button and lose your post - i'm going to have to make some js that prevents that

anyway

Wasteland was an rpg, kinda like fallout, but much much older but still hardcore and rad

[the_balance]

Beware: rant ahead.

Fucking hell, the flashbacks I'm getting from this thread!

I'm pretty sure I've still got a couple of C64 units around somewhere, and even a Vic-20, though not sure if it still works. Got a tape deck, and '1541' floppy drives, even have an actual commodore screen around somewhere I think.
:woot

Been a couple of years since I last hooked them all up, since then I haven't been bothered, it just takes so damn long to load anything. Guess I've got a bit spoiled these days.

Got an old dot matrix printer kicking around on the floor here too, but it's a fair bet that the ribbon would be fucked by now.

I didn't really get into coding back on the C64, but I do remember whole magazines filled with code that you had to type in to make a basic program, with shitloads of peek and poke commands. :D

I too remember fondly the old games, but I didn't get into the D&D games, and I don't I've never heard of 'wasteland' before, much to my regret from your description of it. At the last lan I found a shitload of C64 roms on someones system, but I can't remember who's it was now. Whoever that was, thanks! :D I'm having a ball with them.
If I remember right, creatures is the one pictured in your avatar right? And was really bloodthirsty, cutting up the little bastards with chainsaws and shit. I think If I remember right, that game was an absolute blast (or I could just be imagining shit. It's seems so long ago now!). Can't get the rom for creatures working under the emulator though dammit. :(

Playing many of these old games I can't believe that nobody has made updates of them to take advantage of modern video hardware (and that haven't completely sucked ass!). Playing old games like choplifter, river raid, archon, wizard of wor ...

While I'm thinking of it, I feel the need to make a point that single-player gaming is really getting shafted these days. I mean, just look at lucasarts for example. They were making sequels to Full Throttle and Sam n Max, and scrapped them them both.Some Lucasarts marketing fuckwit wrote:
"After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we've decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC"Don't get me wrong, I'm not against all the multiplayer games that have come out, but it just shits me that that's almost all there is on offer these days. For me, the most memorable and entertaining games ever were graphic adventures, etc.

and Rad.. since you mentioned Maniac Mansion, I noticed that a bunch of guys have revamped it with 256 color graphics (and Zak McKracken too). Check out: LucasFan Games (http://www25.brinkster.com/lucasfangames/). I haven't tried it out yet, but I just love that someone has taken the time and effort to give an old game a graphical facelift.

Fuck. I'm ranting again.... I'll go away now...

[radass]

haha! a fellow c64 warrior! I had 2 1541 drives as well eventually, for that ultimate in c64 hardcoreness

I feel an equivalent dismay regarding lucasarts, i dont know if you've played night shift before but god damn that was a classic and incredibly creative game. basically a 3 screen high machine that you had to keep running, with things contstantly going wrong with it that you had to fix. The machine made star wars figurines, and you had a quota to fill in a time limite from memory. As you progressed more and more control panels for the machine become available making the task harder and harder ...

.. a truely unique game. And yes, Full throttle and Sam and Max were classics, however i only ever got to see them over the shoulder of my amiga owning friend (oh how i was jealous!)

You DO remember creatures correctly, 2 gaming masterpieces by the aphex twins right towards the end of the c64 lifespan .. gees those boys knew how to make the c64 cane .. (they even found an extra 4KB of usable ram on it!) Their last game 'Mayhem in Monsterland', released at the deathbed of the c64, is also worth a look

OMG do you remember airborne ranger ??? fuuuuck that was cool

smash tv was a pretty rad port too

--

It's hardly original, but one of the first games i want to make is what could be described as 'diablo with guns'. Just imagine how god damn cool that would be

[kyzen]

'Diablo' and 'cool' in the same sentence... BLASPHEMER!

[radass]

diablo pwns

[radass]

and a fastload cartridge!

[mudgie]

The Balance, you are so right. Fuck LucasArts, they eat penis. I was looking foward to Sam and Max 2 for yonks, and they go and cancel production! I got the trailer, and it looked sweet.

Sometimes the multiplayer scene does get boring, and I'd love to sit down to a nice ol' adventure game again. Pity they're fucking up the new Leisure Suit Larry sequel.

You fellas predate me by a long while, my first memory of computing was my grand 286, where we'd have to make a boot disk to play Wolfenstein. And it shit itself with Doom.

[radass]

I was so blown away when i saw wolfenstein coming from a c64 machine ... was sooooooooooo jealous of pc owners after that

when i first saw doom, i thought, "How can games ever look better than this ?"

[Lilbro]

there are some old games on this site you might dig up something

www.acid-play.com

[Eoin]

I have recently taken up 3D modelling in StudioMax as a hobby. It has consumed a degree of my life to this point and I would definetly be interested in some sort of collaboration once I learn little bit more about animation in particular.

I have abosultely no programming/coding skills, so I can't really do anything with my models as yet. :(

Although Spot and I are investigating several possibilities in this area at the moment.

and Dave IK and IK+ absolutely rocked :D

[SPOT]

if you want ANY old games go to www.the-underdogs.org (http://www.the-underdogs.org) they fkn rock for old games.

[Lilbro]

yeah spot

thanks dude ive been trying to find that for ages

[radass]

Originally posted by Eoin
I have recently taken up 3D modelling in StudioMax as a hobby. It has consumed a degree of my life to this point and I would definetly be interested in some sort of collaboration once I learn little bit more about animation in particular.

Holy moly

Got any wireframes you can share ?