/vr/ - Retro Games

I was playing "ladder runner" on my apple II before I could read very well. Then I looked at the floppy and blew my mind. WTF is this Loderunner? He climbs ladders and runs. My name makes more sense. Aztec and Superbunny were also great.

All computers available to regular consumers are PC's.

That doesn't look like an Amiga!

Lode Runner
Montezuma's Revenge
King's Quest
Captain Goodnight
all the EPYX Winter/Summer/California Games

i also love that the monitor says MONITOR on it...

>Apple(R)(C)(TM)
>"WE'RE GOING TO MAKE PERSONAL COMPUTERS"
>"Except they're not peecees"
Don't even give me that "PC = IBM PC" crap.
IBM PC compatible = IBM PC compatible
PC = Personal Computer

>>338332
>Montezuma's Revenge

One of the best goddamn platformers not named Super Mario something

>>338374

You... you have no earthly idea what you're talking about, do you?

I miss playing them in grade school.

Isn't there a later model where the monitor and keyboard are integrated into one unit? I think those are the ones we had the most of, but my memory is failing me.

>>338443
Excellent refutation. Fucking pwned xD

>>338443
"PC" was not always synonymous with "IBM compatible".

>>338450

You miiiiight be thinking of the //c but it was still a separate monitor

The only game worth a shit I can remember on those old macs was Oregon trail.

>>338149
Commodore 64, best sound chip and more colors on screen prior to dedicated hardware expansion cards

>>338523

Cheap toy

>>338149
Bzzt.
Guess again.
Hint.

>>338543
Excuse me but I think you misspelled gaming computer.

>>338523
we have a winner

>>338603

No the C64 was cheap unexpandable garbage

>>338626
Except for all the RAM expansions, peripharels, and 3rd party CPU Accelerators.
Nigger, do you even Home Computer?

I had an apple back in the day. The games I played on it:

Wizardry 1-3
Bard's Tale 1-3
Might & Magic 1 & 2
Wasteland <- fucking great
Karateka
Lode Runner
Infocom text adventures
Scott Adams adventures
The Quest

>>338149
>Best non-PC gaming computer
I think you just defined the word "console". I think you mean something like non-IBM compatible PC.

>>338490
I think I was thinking of this.

Monitor still looks separate, against my recollection, but it does seem more unified with the keyboard designwise.

>>338341
Actually says "Monitor ///"
It was designed to go with for the Apple /// computer.

>>338560

>Ne igraj se posle 12 sati - mama
>moj mikro

moje lice kada

>>338690
No slots, no expansion.
Else you will then agree the Macintosh is just as expandable.

>>339010
>no slots

>>339024
slots

Apple IIs were more of a serious computer than the C64 or Atari 8-bit. They were pretty commonly used for business and running machinery.

>>340408
>Apple IIs were more of a serious computer than the C64 or Atari 8-bit. They were pretty commonly used for business and running machinery.

Yep. AppleWorks was serious software back in the day. A word processor, spreadsheet, and database all in one!

My family had two IIc+ computers. I was lucky enough to have one of them in my room, albeit with a monochrome monitor.

>not Amstrad CPC

>>340423
AppleWorks was probably the best application package ever made for an 8-bit machine. Also the Apple II could have other serious big-boy computer features like 80-column text, serial and parallel port cards, CP/M capability, and numeric keypads.

>>338560
Ding ding ding. We have a winner, folks.

>>338560
>>340472
Of course you called him a winner, you samefagging trip loser

>>340445
>not spectrum

>>340408
I dunno if it's quite fair to compare the Apple II with the C64/Atari 8-bit. It's a different kind of computer based on a quite different design philosophy. Also the Apple II was an older machine than either of those and some people would associate it perhaps more with the 70s than the 80s. In that sense, you can say also that the Apple II really belonged more to the Altair era when personal computers were an electronics hobbyist's toy rather than a mainstream consumer product.

>>339075

Slots don't have to be inside the case you moron! It seems you cannot into 80's Micro-Computer...

>>338869
>>338465
>>338374

PC alway have been IBM&clones shit since they came out. What you are saying was true in the 70's, but not in the 80's/90's.

>>340674

You can still compare the Apple II to the Commodore VIC-20...

>>340925
Not even remotely close. The VIC-20 was just a toy computer for playing really simple Atari 2600-esque games. You couldn't do anything serious with it.

>>340951

You could still use it for "serious" purposes like word processing, terminal communication...

>>340975
Barely. Aside from which, you needed all kinds of memory expanders since the VIC-20 only had 3.5k out of the box.

>word processing with 22-column text
Do not want

that aside, doing serious computer stuff requires disk drives and almost no VIC-20s were used with them

>>338317
>>338523
>>338560
Only guys who are right.

Those who never had an Amiga 500 or 1200 didn't have anything worth of a childhood and I can only pity them.

Commodore just were the best. Expecially the Amiga were at least 4 years above any competition.

Too bad the overpriced 1200 could not compete with PC stuff anymore at that time though, only because The AGA-chip was expensive and VGA was the new deal.

Fucking deal with it.

>>341002
Amiga was primarily a Euro thing. While they did have an American userbase, it was pretty small and mostly as a niche machine for gaming. Also it died out in North America after 1990, while in Europe it persisted up to the mid-90s.

>>341006
The second half of the 80s saw PC clones become dominant and if sheeple went in a store and saw an Amiga on display, the first thing they'd probably ask was "Is that thing IBM-compatible?" Upon being told no, they'd walk away and say "Fuck. I can't run WordPerfect on that thing."

>>340986

But... But it' still better than the Z81!

>>341002

That's some Bro over here! I still have my Amiga 500.
I heard that there's a game called Citadel, a Doom-like, that could run even on an Amiga 500 w/ 1MB. Have you ever played it?

>>341006
Mid-1994 to be exact.

Still, it's legacy lasts since today, and it's popularity is still raising.

It had many god-tier games though and every nostalgiafag shouls at least try to emuilate that machine once.

>>341006

Yes, while IBM dominated the US, Commodore (and Atari too) were kings in Europe! If it wasn't for these stupid consoles (AKA CD32 and Jaguar), they could have been popular a bit longer.

>>341006
The US Amiga scene was mostly dominated by stuff like Microprose strategy/sim games with copy protections forged by Lucifer himself.

>>341046

While we Europeans were playing Fucking Starglider II that ran on both Amiga and Atari ST with the same floppy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnaKLfuD6wQ

>>341038
Atari's US peak was 1981-84, after which they became fucked by the video game crash. The 8-bit computer line faded out here during the mid-80s, but it lasted in Europe until the end of the decade. Also the Atari ST was almost exclusively European and probably only like 20 people in the US had them.

As for Commodore, they were one of the only survivors of the vidya/computer meltdown (the computer industry crashed during that period as well) and continued to sell in the US up to 1990 as niche machines for gaming. Again as I said, the C64 and Amiga survived into the SNES era in Europe.

>>341068
the computer industry absolutely did not crash in the mid 80s, are you retarded?

>>341068
some of that was Commodore's ruthless price wars gutting the low-end market in North America

Three things happened after 1985:

1. Cheap Taiwanese PCs like Acer and Leading Edge arrived and effectively killed off any alternative architectures. Contrary to popular belief, the early PC clones like Compaq and Zenith didn't affect the market much because they were expensive.
2. There were too many computer architectures around by the mid-80s and there was somewhat of the same problem as the video game industry, which was market oversaturation
3. People found that a lot of the lofty promises made about the things you could do with a computer turned out to not be true

>>341093
I'm going to assume you're a Euro, so maybe not over there, but here it experienced a major slump in the mid-80s.

Amiga had the best graphics and the best games. It was a magical thing.

>>340674
It straddled the eras. Going from the Apple I to II, the molded cases was done to make it more appealing beyond hobbyists. But its motherboard still contained elements allowing you to tinker the hell out of it.

>>340909
Its expansion options were still very limited, like a modern closed box PC with USB as your primary option.

>>341190

It wasn't as limited as you're saying. It's more like a single/two external PCI port at the side/behind the machine. The expansion port on Amiga 500 is even compatible with the internal expansion slots found inside Big Box models like Amiga 2000 and 3000. On ZX 81/Spectrum they had an entire Sound Module to replace their shitty beeper.

>>341038
I agree, there was no need for those consoles. Poor marketing decisions.

bump!

>>338149
>best non personal computer gaming computer
>ever

>>338149
The Prisoner was awesome.

>>341190
More correctly, you had the initial kit computers in 74-76 and then the fully-assembled appliance computers like the Apple II by 1977

>>342737
Fact of the day: The first microprocessor-based personal computer wasn't the Altair, but in fact a slightly earlier French machine built on the Intel 8008.

>>341019
My experience exactly. I became computer literate on a TI-99/4A at home and wished I had an Apple ][ because school. By the time Commodore was even on my radar I wanted PC.

>>341019
Commodore and Atari did make PC clones, but they were Europe only

>>344281

Mainly Commodore I think (you can find a some of these machine quite easily in France). But it's not what most people here are searching when they want machine from Commodore... Also, Amstrad did some PC Compatible too, before stopping all computer-related activities and going back to it's main task, VCRs and stuff.

>>344316

>>344363
>>344316
it's pretty weird too seeing the Commodore or Atari logo on a PC

>>344316
>But it's not what most people here are searching when they want machine from Commodore.

As pointed out earlier, PC clones in Europe were largely just business computers before the 90s that people didn't have at home or play games on.

>>344387
wasn't that true in the US as well?

>>344393
No. PCs were well established in the North American home and educational markets after 1985 (well not as much the latter which Apple had a near-total stranglehold on). By 87, there was nothing left here but PC clones, Commodore, and Apple.

>>344387

I know. Even in some serious activities, an Amiga or an Atari was preferred to a PC (TV broadcasting, 3D modeling, Sound engineering...)

>>344413
Apple had the school and desktop publishing market, Commodore had a small niche as a gaming computer (until they bowed out of the US market in the early 90s), and PCs were for everything else, but especially business use.

>>344443
>I know. Even in some serious activities, an Amiga or an Atari was preferred to a PC (TV broadcasting, 3D modeling, Sound engineering...)

I believe Apple pretty much had the multimedia market here locked up by the late 80s

>>341046
Do you even lemmings?

or psygnosis in general

>>344445
The Tandy 1000 line were the premier home/gaming PC compatible in the late 80s and directly competed with Amiga.

>>344540
meanwhile you had the huge hulking IBM AT and PS/2 boxes used to do the company payroll on Lotus 123

you can find big boxes of Apple or Commodore disks and software on Ebay pretty often, but I rarely see PC stuff of that vintage

>>344469

psygnosis was great! What was that werewolf game they made?

>>344558
I happen to own such a huge box of PC 5.25" disks. But it's all business stuff and utilities, no games.

>>344540
80s PCs were crappy shit anyway with bleeper sound and aqua, pink, and white graphics while Amiga had hardware sprites, scrolling, and awesome sound.

>>338560
Woah. An Amiga... but it's WHITE.

What kind of freaky universe is this?!

>>344458

Well here it was totally different. The Amiga was used by almost every TV channels (the National TV channels too) thanks to Newtek's Video Toaster. The Atari ST was still used by the late 90's by Sound Engineers.
Take a look at this and you'll understand why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2WbusNJie8

>>344585
As far as arcade games, the Amiga easily wins. Trying to do that on an 8086/286 PC is tough and few programmers could get it right. When it comes to adventures, RPGs, and strategy (the traditional computer game genres in the US), there's not such a clear-cut advantage.

>>344585
Amiga's hardware sprites were fucking weedy. They were barely above what the C64 could do.

>>344615
When John Carmack discovered a way to do smooth scrolling on PCs, it was a gigantic breakthrough. He concluded that updating the entire background is unnecessary and a waste of code and CPU cycles, and you only needed to move clouds or trees or certain specific objects.

>>344458
Video Toaster and LightWave36 were the standard for quite awhile which were Amiga exclusive.

Computer lab in the early 90s. If you got done with your typing activity early, you could load up a game and play for the rest of the period. Found a box with Infocom floppies in the storage closet, including Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

>>344640
It also helped that VGA Mode 13 was completely linear and didn't have the interlacing and planar clusterfuck of CGA/EGA.

Also, Amiga have the best monitor.

>>344651
That game is really difficult. And really terrible.

And it's not terrible because it's difficult. Apidya is difficult but not terrible. At least, I assume it's not terrible because nobody's ever got past level 3.

Project X on the other hand IS terrible because it's difficult.

>>344660
Oi, chum, that's not Genetic Species.

>>344640
>>344656
Also you had guys like Mike Abrash writing books like "The Zen of Graphics Programming" that greatly improved PC game development.

>>344650
*3D

>>344683
Genetic Species was quite confusing. I remember you could be stucked if you did something wrong.

>>344703
I would blame the sloppiness of 80s PC games on inexperience particularly with the x86 CPUs. Most programmers were used to 6502/Z80 assembly and hadn't yet mastered 8086s.

Like for example, Hard Hat Mack on the PC suffers from animation that speeds up and slows down while the Apple II port is completely smooth even though that machine didn't have hardware sprites either.

>>344739
Sierra had excellent PC games, although their primary focus was adventures which from a programming standpoint are much less complicated than arcade games.

>>344720
It's true. Genetic Species is confusing as hell, and it's only 'technically' an Amiga game because you need a high-end workstation with fully upgraded everything and a discrete graphics card to play it.

Behind the Iron Gate works on a stock A500!

What's that in your pic?

>>344739
yeh, by the early 90s they knew the PC hardware a lot better than say, in 1985, plus as someone mentioned, VGA was easier to work with than the earlier graphics standards.

>>344615
Scrolling on the Amiga is absolute cake and works just like the NES (set up your tile data and adjust the X/Y scroll registers)

>>344819
Except you get a looping screen for free on the consoles.

To get a looping (in memory) screen on the amiga, you need to make a copperlist that changes the bitplane source data pointers at the appropriate display line. The alternative is a screen with no looping with finite vertical scrolling (and this wastes LOADS of memory).

>>344371
I had a Commodore PC-compatible.... made in 2004.

>>344760
I think that game is gun godz

>>344852
Sorry to hear that.

>>344852

How is your overpriced piece of hardware?
I don't think it's the same Commodore though

>>344863
That ain't no Amiga game.

>>344760
Gun Godz, look like a rip off of FEAR amiga version, but faster.

>>344845
ok so you're saying the NES automatically wraps when you reach the end of the tile data, but the Amiga requires you to manually reset the pointer

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx

Does anyone here have one of these?

Basically a modern PC packed into a C64 shell. It'd be neat to have one for novelty reasons alone, but they're so expensive for what you get.

>>344902
I believe that's how it works. I haven't done NES, but I have done Amiga and SMS programming.

It's a little more involved than manually setting a pointer though. The copperlist is a program that you basically have to construct in memory manually every frame. A vertical hardware scroll on the amiga is implemented by writing a program that does the following.

> ON NEW FRAME
> set pointer A to xxxxx
> set pointer B to xxxxx
> set pointer C to xxxxx
> set pointer D to xxxxx
> WAIT FOR LINE foobar
> set pointer A to xxxxx - heightofscreen
> set pointer B to xxxxx - heightofscreen
> set pointer C to xxxxx - heightofscreen
> set pointer D to xxxxx - heightofscreen

You need to calculate the xxxxxes and you need to calculate where the line you want the split to be is. Then you write that into an array and pointer the copper at it. Otherwise you get shitty janky scrolling.

On the SMS you set the screen scrolling pointers. It's done.

>>344952
Yeh the Amiga works kind of like the Atari's ANTIC chip since they were both designed by the same guys

>>344880
>>344871
The strange thing is, i can't find any information about that PC on the internet, the only thing i know is that it was sold as a part of a program made by the Chilean Goverment called "Mi Primer PC" (my first PC), my family for some reason bought one of those overpriced pieces of crap back in the day, and after a few years my parents gave it to my brother, who later sold it.

I remember it came with Windows XP Starter Edtion, which only let you have 3 applications opened at the same time and had a 512MB RAM limit, so it totally sucked.

>>344902
>>344952
C64 is the worst. I fucking hate trying to program a scroll routine on there.

>>345015
The actual scrolling or the placement of new tiles on the incoming edge?

>>345070
All of it:

>manually shovel row of tiles into the scroll buffer
>you can only scroll two tiles before having to go back and fetch the next row
>also if you don't use double-buffering, you end up with screen tearing
>color RAM can't be double-buffered at all
>all this on a CPU that's 75% slower than the NES

>>344640
> He concluded that updating the entire background is unnecessary and a waste of code and CPU cycles, and you only needed to move clouds or trees or certain specific objects.
He concluded wrong.
Also I would hardly call commander keen, smooth. Definitely not on par with a NES.

What about this ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agm10GX3CxE

>>345134
Gotta update two separate places? ye gods.

>>344739
The problem with that old computers it's sometimes doesn't have the slightest specialization like hardware for sprites or blitter operations. Like VGA in PC, only raw point access at sluggish performance. None sprites or scroll planes. Only points in screen at the speed of a snail.

Other more "multimedia" systems have el cheapo bastard edition video hardware with very few sprites or listenable sound generation (sometimes provokes eye or ear herpes). With shitty performance but better that HUEG UGLY CGA. My fucking eyes IBM what are you doing!!

>>345178
Old PC games have framerates like N64 games. I think Jazz Jackrabbit 1 was the first to have smooth 60fps/70fps (selectable) scrolling, and even that wasn't full screen. Still very impressive at the time, as the first "console quality" platform game.

And then soon after that everybody started developing for Windows with no direct hardware access and we got shitty scrolling again until platform games died as commercially successful genre. Even now the vast majority of indie platform games fail at scrolling too.

>>346384
>And then soon after that everybody started developing for Windows with no direct hardware access and we got shitty scrolling again
Looks like you ain't played Handkerchief.

>>346384
A lot of games ran at proper framerates. Dosgames often run at 60/75 fps at normal speed. Though not often having their sprites/textures animated at such typically.
Though to be fair, the largest issue wasn't scrolling in DOS games, but that until the 90s most DOS games just sucked anyway.
On a side note, Gauntlet 2 in 1989 was about the same smoothness of scrolling as keen. Checking a few other games as well. I don't really see where it's getting that it was the first 'smooth scrolling' game for the computer, I thought I recalled some dos games scrolling just fine as well.

>>348017
Really, the idea between smooth scrolling is simply to scroll more or less per pixel, which frankly, it doesn't do, it's still fairly jittery as far as scrolling goes.

>>348017
> until the 90s most DOS games just sucked anyway.

DOS extenders. Was hard to do much before as you were limited to 640K RAM.

this game.

>>345698
>My fucking eyes IBM what are you doing!!

The PC was created mostly for businesses, IBM even tried to market to the home with the PCjr, but they failed miserably, so they stayed on the business market until the 90's.

>>349974
Fuck you dysentery.

>>350014
>The PC was created mostly for businesses

Actually IBM intended the original PC as a jack-of-all-trades machine for either home or business use, but it was too expensive to succeed in the former market and instead established itself in the corporate world based on those magic three letters and because as a 16-bit machine, it had more raw power than 8-bits.

PCs did not enter the home market in large numbers until the second half of the 80s,

>>350014
Pink and blue, business, IBM... My fucking sides. It's awful developers fell obligated to create games for a business computer because IBM PC it's everywhere and sometimes the only computer users have. And for that a generation of horrible pink and blue eye rape CGA. Fuck you CGA ruined my childhood.