/vr/ - Retro Games

>>6253445
Fuck off with muh speccy and its repulsive pallette seething Yuropoor

>>6253445
Because mutts only had consoles

>>6253450
All your microcomputers have dog shit games

>>6253450
???

>>6253450
This and the millennialcucks were too young to have own them.

>>6253445
I always find it interesting that C64 and Amiga are American computers yet the Europeans used them the most.

>>6253446
I couldn't imagine myself playing "me speccy" either, not even on C64 but Amiga was a very capable machine for its time.

>>6253445
The last Amiga thread was actually not the worst way to go for a niche computer thread on 4chan.
I remember one thread from a couple of months ago that was mostly Amiga gaming content. 90% of the thread were posts from OP. It hit the 14 days autosage with barely any interest in it whatsoever.
Compared to that the last thread was on fire. Just goes to show that /vr/ is not the place to talk about games for these machines. It's just the way it is.

>>6253457
and dog shit ports of games

>>6253445
If you're on 4chan for serious discussion then you're going to have a bad time.

>>6253445
Amiga fans are notorious for preaching their bullshit, that's why

>>6253497
Because the ZX Spectrum and others led to a more computer based culture, they were telling parents that computers and learning how to code were the way of the future, the ZX Spectrum wasn't the most expensive thing in the world, and kids could lie to their parents and say they wanted a computer for school when they just wanted to play games, heck, even computers specifically made for educational purposes like the BBC Micro had many games.

Parents were less willing to buy consoles because...well it's just a toy to play video games with, though after the ZX Spectrum/C64 days, consoles were on the rise because a lot of parents knew that their kids just wanted an Amiga or Atari ST to play games, so might as well just buy the machines designed to only play games, but the habit of playing games on a computer still led to the Amiga becoming popular.

There's something seriously comfy about old computers.

>>6253445
No one had them, that's why.

>>6253457
So it's like all consoles then?

Because i can think of really awful games in many consoles.

>>6253558

I dont even consider that one old..

>>6253445
I can't even think of a good game for these computers desu, I never saw them either despite being born in the 80's. I think people are just interested in the hardware in general.

>>6253445
>Are these computers really so hated or bad
In the Speccy's case, yes. Brits need to cope and admit it sucked shit. C64 at least was a capable machine for the early to mid 80s.

>>6253450
beautiful

>>6253760
Speccy wasn't the best home computer, but it was the best in its price range and far from the worst home computer, the worst ones you never hear about anymore and people who think the Speccy was really that bad have a VERY limited knowlege of home computers of that era

>>6255772
The British home computer market in the 80s was really oversaturated and there were plenty of also-rans like the Dragon 32 or the Atari 8-bits that few people had and which didn't get much software support.

>>6253760
>and admit it sucked

And that's the attitude that ruins every old computer thread here, WHY do we have to admit that stuff sucks?
Why can't we just share good warm memories of enjoying stuff before we all had to accept that everything we ever loved SUCKED.

This is AVGN attitude, where we have to look for the bad in life instead of the good.
I WANT to hear britbong stories about how they were 7 years old and their dad came home one day with a big box that had ZX on it.
I WANT to hear about how amazed they were at *game* despite it not being very good.
I WANT to hear about how much fun they had on a rainy Sunday afternoon playing *game* with cousin/friend/neighbor.

That's what life is about, not if thing sucks or not.

>>6255790
You have my sword

>>6255790
Because it's the internet and this site functions by creating division among groups.

>>6255790
This so much, sure, the ZX Spectrum has a weird look and the sound isn't great, so what, Atari 2600 tended to look worse and not all early games had music or sound, the ZX Spectrum and the other microcomputers are unique and interesting precisely because there were more chances for people to make and publish their own games, and they have their own interesting stories behind them just as much as consoles, but nope, we have to talk badly about them for some reason.

Yes, some classics like Knight Lore on the ZX Spectrum just look bad and slow to people nowadays, but damn, it must have looked impressive to people back in the day and inspired many other developers, it had some cool ideas and did something different.

I will admit, i tried playing some games on a ZX Spectrum emulator and found myself not caring about them as much as i wanted, particularly dissapointed with Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, but i still respect and find those games cool.

I mean, many of these were games made by one person or a really small group for a system with low capabilities but still unique looks or sounds, particularly the C64 with it's SID chip, i may not enjoy those games, but i like learning about them.

This board doesn't like anything but AAA Japanese console games.

>>6255886
That explains the prejudice against PC in general. Discussing console games released in 2003 is ok, but discussing Win98 games released in 2000/2001 is a no-no, unless that game is Deus Ex.

4chan user base on average is young as fuck, most of them weren't even alive in the retro era, so what do you expect. All they know is whatever nintendo and the youtube hipster celebrities told them. Zelda is classic! Buy new Zelda.

>>6256038

They're free to pretend Nintendo is suuuuuuuper oldskool if it makes them happy, but let me talk about my love for Atari ST in peace without someone spouting another "DURRR AMIGA WAS BETTER"
I Knoooooooooooow Amiga was better, but it was what my dad bought because more people he knew had one and it would allow us to trade software.
I just wanna talk about how comfy Simcity was for the ST, and how I only had access to the German version of Monkey Island instead of the English one and how much I enjoyed that homebrew game that someone coded for free and he probably doesn't even realize how much joy it brought people.
Its gotten so fucking annoying, fucking idiots with their "THING YOU LIKE WAS ACTUALLY BAD".

Stick a sock in it faggots.

>>6255790
>I want to experience happiness vicariously through childhood stories
Every year you grow older and you'll just have to cope. The past is never coming back; it's time to move on.

The issue most people have with old computer games is that they're not very accessible or easy to play. Nobody would really have the patience to subject themselves to 80s CRPGs no matter how historically important they were.

>>6256136
Actually it's more that European computer games pre-PC were really pretty bad and most were just nickel and dime copies of Japanese console and arcade games. Most of the important milestones in computer gaming came from the US not Europe.

>>6256143
Europe was always behind the curve. They were later to get home computers than us and later to move past the era of bedroom coders. The shift towards big box productions and predominantly sit-down RPGs and simulations happened in the US starting in the mid-80s while it didn't come to Europe for almost another decade.

>>6255913
Ugh. Name a game in 2003 or after for pc that I should play. Oh wait, you can't, because there aren't any. Win98? Oh that's easy...

Blizzard.
Blizzard.
Unreal. Tournament.
Id software/Raven
Psx ports.
Redneck Rampage.

I guess there were a few games that were prettt solid after 2003, but for some reason only Lineage 2 comes to mind. I guess PSO was decent. But besides opening up the mud world, after 2003 doesn't really have shit.

Oh wait, years later they had Skyrim, but hours put into that don't compare to Blizzard games.

>>6256135
>past is never coming back

Unless you have a time machine.

>>6256392
Rimworld, Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, Cuphead, Nex Machina, XCOM, Prison Architect, Portal, Alien Isolation among others.

Though i think we have wildly different tastes, cannot say i like all of those...for example, i hate Redneck Rampage and think it does not do anything great, even moreso when you compare it to Duke Nukem 3D and Blood.

>>6256135
>you'll just have to cope

And we cope by reliving it through stories, but you'll learn how that works soon enough. time waits for no one.

>>6256392
That's not what I said, read again.

There isn't much discussion about videogames prior to the 90's around here, and most of the /v/ tourists just want to talk about the retro console games their favorite e-celeb mentioned. On top of that, due to the sheer domination of DOS in that era most of the best games from these computers were ported to IBM compatibles.

Lemmings? Got whored out everywhere, including nearly every console. Ditto with Another World/Out of this World. Likewise for Zool, Worms, and The Chaos Engine. Pirates, Defender of the Crown, Ultima series, Prince of Persia, Gauntlet, Populous, the list goes on and on. Every great game on any of these computers is also on DOS. While some Amiga games did have superior versions, it's usually easier for someone to run the DOS version through some auto-setup like D-fend Reloaded than to figure out which version of kickstarter and AmigaOS and hardware they need to emulate to get the Amiga version working right. Short of nostalgia for a specific version of a game from that era, you are better off playing the DOS version or arcade original in 98% of cases.

Now combine that with the dozen "What's the best version of X game to play?" threads at any given time, and that's why you don't see many threads about C64 gaming or Atari ST gaming.

>>6257362
>old computer emulation is more difficult to setup
Compare to a plugin-based N64 or Playstation emulator? No it isn't. If your argument is that people are lazy and unwilling to learn new things, then I agree.
>the best games are multiplat
Games with different versions may appeal to more types of people. The difference in Music style alone is reason enough to check some out. Being exclusive doesn't automatically make your game more worthwhile. Being multiplat doesn't automatically make it less.
But that's actually not an argument for why those games are not talked about. Different version of console games get discussed all the time on /vr/.
It just comes down to computer gaming being too niche. Not just the lesser known computers, dos gaming is also not a hot topic aside from the usual suspects.
Come to think of it, pretty much anything but the usual suspects is pretty far from being a hot topic.
And without support from a big chunk of users any niche is just fodder for the trolls.

>>6257362
>running amiga games in an emu
>"hard"
What is whdload?

>>6253445
>Are these computers really so hated or bad that you can't make a thread without people coming to insult them or people actually talking about the damn games the systems have!?

Sometimes little edgelords need to shit all over threads to stop people from having productive conversations because it's not their approved amusement box.

Allow me to demonstrate.

I have an old MAC.
An old MAC I enjoy.
I play games on it.
Games I enjoy.

Wait for it....

>>6256136
To illustrate what I mean, take Wizard's Crown. Neat early combat RPG, battles can take as long as 30 minutes and you have unbelievably clunky keyboard controls. Who has the patience for that nowadays?

>>6257698
Honestly, i respect old computer gaming, but i have to admit i can't get used to old CRPG's, i remember trying Ultima IV and ending up running away from it, they are just way too clunky for me.

Still, it's not as if RPG's are the only genre that computers have, there are tons of simulation, strategy, platformers, arcadey, sports and more games for them.

Just saying, i love Monkey Island and wouldn't mind talking about it more than quite a few SNES classics.

Though i will admit Speccy games look a bit...meh, don't get me wrong, i have tried some of them in an emulator, but nothing that really made me amazed, though i still like to look at videos and learning about it, though few people talk about it on Youtube, it's basically Kim Justice and a few others talking about the Speccy, also, wow, saw Kim's Top 100 games on the Spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEZvUWdAtA0
And even some of the classic games i didn't try don't look that great in modern eyes, Skool Daze(number 5 on the list) just looks slow and boring even if the ideas behind it sound fun.

>>6257716
>Still, it's not as if RPG's are the only genre that computers have, there are tons of simulation, strategy, platformers, arcadey, sports and more games for them
Simulations and sports games have the same issues of awful control schemes and the hardware being too limited to really do justice to them. Playing an 8-bit baseball sim is like playing on a Tiger handheld.

>>6253445
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fLKm_wuaJ8
>inb4 "Amiga's sound so limited".

Amigarulez. ALWAYS.

>>6258051
https://youtu.be/O_GSzuxGUvQ
Some crazy shit.

>>6253457
So bad, that our games kept our industry afloat, while you retards were going through a crash... Saved by the fucking Nips, and now you're all socially retarded, morbidly obese weebs. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA! Thank you, great Nippon!

>>6253445
>poor europeans
Sorry, but the proper term is "poor european faggots".

>>6258530
>apologising on 4channel

>>6256143
>>>6256136
>Actually it's more that European computer games pre-PC were really pretty bad and most were just nickel and dime copies of Japanese console and arcade games. Most of the important milestones in computer gaming came from the US not Europe.

Most milestones in nearly every video game genre a part from CRPG's and DOOM came from Japan. If you think that's wrong then sorry, you have no clue about the history of video games as a whole.

>>6253478
Our micro market got killed by the Crash of '83 and more importantly the rise of relatively affordable IBM Clones. If you wanted to do serious work there was no substitute but unless you had a Tandy they were TERRIBLE for action games until the early '90s.

>>6258530
>faggots
The US of Gay is the faggiest country on the planet, bar none. The west coast alone has more shit stabbers than the rest of the world combined. Have a day off, Cecil.

>>6255846
>so what, Atari 2600 tended to look worse and not all early games had music or sound,
Because it's easier for even the dumbest zoomer to comprehend a system released in 197-goddamn-7 to have simplistic visuals and gameplay as vidya was beginning to take shape. It's a lot harder to sell someone on a jerky speccu title when even the shittiest NES game ran faster moment to moment gameplay.
Cope.

>>6258679
What are you talking about? The console crash barely affected the home computer market, and in fact the success of home computers at the time was a major contributing factor in the crash. The Commodore 64 was fucking everywhere in '83 and '84, to the extent that it ended up destroying all its competition by simply being better than everything else by a wide margin.

>>6258642
Still the same jingoistic crap.
Games from all around the world contributed to the gaming landscape. Wether it was:
Adventure games (Sierra)
Space Combat and Trading (Elite)
God Games (Popolous)
Stealth Tactics (Wolfenstein)
Open World Strategy (Pirates)
Puzzle Platformer (Loderunner)
The list goes on and on. Everybody has got a long list. Japan, Europe and America.
Feel free to cripple yourself and ignore two thirds of gaming history, if you like. You'll have to do it alone.

>>6258693
And the Atari 2600 was specifically made to play games while the ZX Spectrum was supposed to just be a cheap computer to entice kids to learn coding and to use computers, not play games, in fact, it was an exercise in frustration just making any game in the ZX Spectrum, when Manic Miner had some kind of music, it was something that astounded people.

That's part of the reason why ZX Spectrum games look and sound the way they did, they weren't made with games in fact, hell, the failed successor, the Sinclair QL, went even further into being just a business oriented computer and ignoring games.

Apparently Clive Sinclair didn't design the computer thinking about games nor did he like them at all, though he didn't complain when money started coming in, but yeah, the Atari 2600 had people who were leaders in the arcade market working on it to just play games and even designed games for it, the ZX Spectrum was just a cheap crappy computer that would serve as an intro to coding that got more popular than anyone expected, making games was so hard some people that were essentially demosceners just made games because it was more impressive than some program or one animation or what not, yes, the ZX Spectrum was that bad for making games.

they have no direct experience, knowledge, or indeed interest in the scene. they have nothing to add yet feel compelled to comment anyway.

>>6253445
Old pc fanbases are littered with schizos.

>>6259147

This, all they know is to point out flaws.
you could show them the best movie of your era and they'd find flaws, best painting ever? flaws, best song from your era? flaws.
Imagine being a 70 year old zoomer someday, and you wasted your entire life just finding flaws in everything.

>>6253558
How would you know? You don't seem to actually own one.

They're not as good as their console counterparts and people only played them because they were extremely cheap games made for an extremely cheap system.

I do like a lot of C64/Spectrum titles, but more for their punkish spirit and sheer novelty than the actual quality of the games. They try hard to convince you that what you're playing is the coolest shit ever, and sometimes it works.

>>6253445
Because /vr/ is infested with zoom? I mean, just look at cringe OP.

>>6259651
Damn, I can't lie, that looks badass as fuck. Guessing it plays like shit, though.

>>6259651
damn that fucking graphics perspective on the wall was solid as fuck. game seems to have a lot of vision in it even if it comes out flat.

>>6257675
mac is for fags
Happy?

>>6258793
And hey, aside from maybe Sierra(depending on how you like arbitrary game overs and strange puzzles) all of those are great games, seriously, the original Lode Runner is still a lot of fun and it got popular enough that Japan basically adopted the franchise while the west kinda forgot it.

Oh, and when he says Wolfenstein, he means the first two games, Wolf 3D was the third one that got really popular, the first two were more like classic Metal Gear.

Not that i care that much for classic Wolfenstein, even the third one, but the other games are fun or interesting.

>>6253445
There's nothing wrong with organic conversations developing you fucktard

>>6259814

There's no developing here fuckface, its all "hey remember thing? NO I DON'T BUT THING WAS SHIT"
all coming from kids like you who never even touched an old computer.

27 year old here, never played a ZX Spectrum, and grew up with DOS and PC gaming, but my dad had a ZX Spectrum when he was a kid, every time he would talk about the games he played in his childhood the ZX Spectrum always came about and he'd talk about spending days playing pirated games in his computer.

It's not what i grew up with but the ZX Spectrum was part of the gaming history of many people and they have really fond memories of it, just like we all have fond memories of playing games and tend to cherish the systems from our childhoods, maybe the games don't look great, but the ZX Spectrum and the other old computers certainly have their place in gaming history and deserve some recognition.

>>6253445
I'm intrigued by the ZX Spectrum Next. The Spectrum is really rare in the US and it didn't seem worth the fuss because of all the different power and video format considerations, but would it be worth my time to pick up a Spectrum Next? It sounds really well made but I don't really know much about the system other that a few games and I should probably try some more before I'd commit to buying one.

My biggest concern is the cost, which honestly is perfectly reasonable considering how much it would cost to buy a power converter and all the other stuff I'd need to get a good original model of the Speccy running, not to mention all the extra compatibility the Next has, but the cost is part of why I haven't gotten a Spectrum yet. It's hard to make that kind of investment on a retro system that does not have an immediate sense of familiarity about it like with the C64.

If anyone can recommend some must-play games on the system that I could try emulating that would at least be a start.

>>6260248
Download an emulator.

>>6260248
>>6260270
This, get an emulator like Virtual Machine and try some games before buying the Spectrum Next, if you find yourself enjoying the games, then go for it, if you don't, then the Speccy isn't for you.

Yes, the ZX Spectrum Next will have exclusives and can run games the old Speccy never could, but it's still too early to say to go for it, as for games:

Chaos if you have friends willing to play local multiplayer, great game for that.

Most Ultimate games even if i find the isometric ones less fun nowadays, but games like Jetpac are still solid arcade like titles.

Lords Of Midnight might also be worth a look and...it's actually hard trying to come up with games to recommend that aren't ports or that i think people will genuinely like if they didn't grow up with a Speccy.

But may as well say Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy too.

>>6260318
If they're ports that are fun to play and distinct looking/feeling from other versions I would still be interested.

>>6255846
Combat for the 2600 is better than literally every ZX Spectrum game. I say this as somebody who grew up playing ZX Spectrum games.

>>6259814
>when you prove your neckbeard shitpost wrong with a single fedora tipping shitpost

>>6253445
ZNIGGY IS A PEARL BEFORE SWINES M8
YOU DONT KNOW SPECCY LIKE I DO

>>6260027
Read better you white-noise trashposter.
>Either that or you get discussions that aren't about games, like the last Amiga thread which seemingly became a freaking hardware thread with everyone talking about specs, chips and what not while comparing the Amiga to other systems at the time rather than talking about, you know, the many games that the Amiga had.

>>6253446
>Yuropoor

>>6253457
>All your microcomputers have dog shit games

>>6253529
>and dog shit ports of games

>>6256135
>cope

>>6257698
>Who has the patience for that nowadays?

>>6258530
>"poor european faggots".
>>6258680
>shit stabbers

>>6258693
>Cope

>>6259150
>Old pc fanbases are littered with schizos.

>>6259661
>cringe

>>6259671
>plays like shit

>>6259691
>mac is for fags

>>6259814
>fucktard

>>6260027
>fuckface

>>6260894
>white-noise trashposter

>>6261228
>i replied to the entire thread
>surely this will prove i'm not just an underage shitposter
A big yikes to you kiddo

>>6261556
He got called out for being a moron and wanted to respond, but knew he'd look like a moron again. So he sprayed the entire thread with his faggotry to obfuscate who he really wanted to reply to.
That's pretty pathetic.

>>6253445
If a million people say that a shit sandwich is unappealing and look down on anyone that eats them you can't be surprised when you bring up shit sandwiches and people call it unappealing and look down on you.

It's the nature of concensus and unlike /v/ it's not always wrong here.

You boomers just relish games that you used to play as you jerked off in your youth. Nostalgia is the factor that makes these games remotely entertaining.

>>6261578
Wow you sure are trolling us. I'm very upset.

>>6261578
>im as young as i am stupid
lol

>>6253445
A couple of years ago there was always a retro computer thread in here, but then retarded /v/tards and normies flooded this board.

>>6259651

A lot of games on these systems feel like a Paranthropus, an extinct branch evolution of video games. Like a peek into an alternate universe that split from our own in 1983.

Like the zniggy platformers/willyvanias, which are just as indebted to Donkey Kong as Mario is but took things in a completely different (and less successful) direction.

>>6261228
So, not actually a refutation then, shit stabber?

Does mega drive controllers work on amiga out of the box?

Australia-kun killed home computer threads on /vr/, he baited way too much against the yanks, and in response now you have a lot of yanks who will always reply with "europoor shit" every time bong computers are brought up.
But the reality is that not many people actually enjoy these games for the ludo aspect itself, and more for the novelty, as another anon said.

>>6262408
No controller works with anything unless you take it out of the box

>>6260331
The thing is that ports tend to be distinct because the ZX Spectrum has an unique look and isn't very powerful, heck, some of the most loved ports like R-Type pale in comparison to the original.

But may as well mention a video someone made talking about 100 Spectrum games they liked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEZvUWdAtA0
You may also want to check homebrew games like Aliens Neoplasma and use sites like Indie Retro News to learn more about homebrew games.

>>6262453
You know what I mean. Do i need additional adapter?

>>6262408
Yeah they work fine without any adaptors

>>6262579
I know what you you mean but I've chosen to devote my life to helping ESL fucktards to learn to communicate. Improve yourself and I'll give you are the knowledge you seek.

>>6253445
Why?
Kids. That's why. This board is flooded with kids. No one shielded this board with exclusivity. Now it's plagued with children.

>>6262608
I find it hard to believe you're unfamiliar with the expression 'out of the box' unless you're an ESL yourself.

It's complicated.

I enjoy my Amiga.

>>6253558
>old
>52x

>>6262629
>This board is flooded with kids.

It's actually more that this board is flooded with people nearing 40 who still live with their mothers and still have to defend computer systems they played on as a child like they're still ont the playground trying to insist the rich kids don't have better things than them.

>>6262829
>i'm stupid and mad
I know. It gives me pleasure.

>>6263003
Well yeah but that's what you sign up for.

Anon's right though, this board does feel remarkably more like a kindergarten even just in the last few weeks.
A couple months ago I might see maybe one idiot spouting bullshit Youtuber meme factoids in a day, but currently it feels like there's one in every single thread.

>>6259110
How did people write games for the Spectrum? I'm guessing they weren't written in ZX BASIC but I've never heard of anything like a C compiler or assembler available for the Spectrum.

It occurred to me early on when I was writing silly little BASIC programs that this probably wasn't the way games were being made.

>>6260342
Did you play Gift From The Gods? Cosmic Wartoad? Mailstrom? NOMAD?

>>6262408
Pretty sure I heard that pressing Start when plugged into a home computer will cause a short circuit.

>>6262408
I've used a mega drive controller on my A500, but I heard (could be wrong) that some of the buttons such as start could fry your controller port because *reasons*.

You can't use MD controllers on a C64 or Amiga because the signals work in a way that the CIA chips don't like very much.

>>6264960
Actually you can if you can keep your fingers of the start button.
Fun fact: On amiga playing Turrican2, the A and B button have the exact same functions as on the Megadrive

>>6264924
What? Most games were made using ASM just like on any platform at the time. Higher level languages just weren't efficient enough.

Though some madmen did use BASIC like Julian Gollop for some of his early games like Rebelstar Raiders (you can sort of tell that he did)
And some text adventures made using Quill were commercially released.

>>6265007
>Most games were made using ASM just like on any platform at the time. Higher level languages just weren't efficient enough.
I;m sure they were - do you have any details? Were they written on PCs but compiled to Z80? Was there a Sinclair Assembler on the shelves of computer stores? As I say, I don't recall ever seeing or hearing of such software.

>>6258693
NES also came years after Spectrum. Spectrum is clearly more advanced than 2600 while being less advanced than NES. Seems pretty easy to understand to me?

>>6265020
Thankfully I don't need to know anything because I can use a search engine.
https://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0008736
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus_Assembler
Here's at least two different assemblers for the spectrum released in 1982-1983.

>>6255846
Manic Miner should be easier to appreciate if you think of it less as a platformer like Mario or whatever but more like a memorization game. It's actually a quite tightly designed little game when you realise everything about it is deterministic and precisely timed - you can literally memorize it like a shmup. There's something zen-like about learning how to beat the game like I once did on an emulator decades after the games release.

Jet Set Willy is a bit more all over the place and I can perfectly understand people not liking it if they didn't grew up with it.

>>6265046
Excellent stuff! Although I was 8 years old, I wish I knew of this stuff back then. I was just getting used to programming with BASIC but knew there must have been something else when it came to commercial games.

In fact I remember in the Spectrum +3 manual there was a bit off assembly (though I never knew what it was called then) that apparently called up a "+3 DOS catalogue".

I didn't know what it was and tried typing it into the BASIC interpreter. I blame the manual for not explaining any of this shit adequately, or even how you even access +3 DOS in the first place.

>>6265098
Dang you never thought of buying any computer magazines? That's where people learned that stuff back then
Plenty of programming books were also around for pretty much every computer you could imagine.

>>6265108
>Dang you never thought of buying any computer magazines?
No I didn't. I never got into those until GamesMaster, and that was only because my mum decided to buy me a copy just after I got my SNES (I was a fan of the show). Otherwise I don't think it would have entered my head for a while - definitely not at the age of 8.

Almost every thread here goes bad because at least half the posters here are bitter autists with a chip on their shoulder over whatever console/computer war they grew up in. This problem isn't unique to microcomputers, but it does get some of the worst of it.

>>6265030
>NES also came years after Spectrum
>Spectrum: Release date April 23, 1982
>Famicom: Release date: July 15, 1983
...

>>6263003
It can't be both?

>>6264924
In the early days when games were mostly 16k or less, it was common to use a TRS-80 for cross-development due to the shared CPU. As games got bigger, they'd be written on some 16-bit machine or workstation with a Z80 cross compiler. However a lot of games were made by pure amateurs who wrote their code on paper, worked out jump offsets in their head, and manually entered the opcodes into the computer.

>>6265152
>manually entered the opcodes into the computer.
With a hex editor?

>>6265159
Pokes I assume. I don't think it would have been hard to code a rudimentary assembler in BASIC. In fact I'm pretty sure I remember seeing listings for those in some old mags. That was one of the funnier aspects of the old microcomputer era, programs being published as code on the pages of magazines that you would type in manually yourself.

>>6265172
So if you use poke, you've got the image in memory - how would you then save it as an executable for later use/distribution?

>>6265172
You'd enter the hex codes as a giant-ass string of DATA statements and POKE them into memory, then save them.

>>6265189
Oh yeah DATA/READ - I never got to grips with that. I never understood how it knew which DATA string to refer to when you executed READ. There could be several such lines in a program and there seemed to be no way of uniquely identifying/referring to them.

When you say saving them, do you mean that Spectrum executables were simple memory images like COM files in DOS?

>>6265184
>how would you then save it as an executable for later use/distribution?
On the C64 you had the kernal LOAD/SAVE routine which would let you save or load up a range of memory as a PRG file to disk or tape, you could poke your code into memory and then write a stub that calls the kernal routine up to save it. I don't know how it worked on the Spectrum though.

>>6265196
could be done from BASIC as well but I forget the exact commands

>>6265203
I remember some weird command called PRINT USR that did weird low level shit I never understood. I think you used it to make custom characters.

>>6265195
>When you say saving them, do you mean that Spectrum executables were simple memory images like COM files in DOS?
Yes, just memory images. It is an 8-bit computer. On C64 the first two bytes contained the load address.

>>6265216
>load address.
As in where in RAM to put the data?

>>6265152
C64 and Spectrum both ran an entire decade, by the later days in 89-92 the development tools used had come a long way from the beginning in 82-83. This was also true of the Famicom, late period games like Kirby's Adventure were coded on GUI-driven workstations or minicomputers, tools that would have been unheard of in 1983 when they had to plot game graphics on graph paper and manually convert them to hex codes.

>>6265218
yeah the load address, which was in little endian/big endian so 00 C0 loads at $C000

>>6265228
I'd have thought that, on such a simple system, where a program gets loaded to would be a constant. What's the utility of being able to choose the exact address to start dumping to?

>>6265236
Most C64 machine language programs load at $801 where the BASIC memory begins (other than that, $8000 and $C000 are commonly used), but the kernal save/load function can load anywhere and can also be used for data files.

>>6259676
>>6259671
its a 30 year old game. they were all simple.
those perspective effects were amazing at the time and the game had many tasty details and tried to stick with the cumbersome feel of being a massive dragon.
a stand out speccy title

>>6261578
i only jerked off to the game adverts