/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.2477935]

Do we have any Dig Dug fans on /vr/?

[Anonymous No.2477945]

Who had the idea to defeat enemies by blowing them up with a pump?

[Anonymous No.2477948]

Rally X > Dig Dug > Pac Man

[Anonymous No.2478079]

>>2477935
I love Dig Dug. The ghost faces after you beat the enemies kinda spooked me as a kid. Too bad we didn't get the Famicom sequel in the US.

That said, I think Mr. Do! is more fun.

[Anonymous No.2478151]

I wonder how many inflation fetishists this game birthed.

[Anonymous No.2478181]

I love Dig Dug 2.
Seeing the dinosaurs look of sheer horror as they're about to pop is hilarious.

[Anonymous No.2478191]

>>2477948
You are wrong
>>2478079
You are not at all wrong. I used to fucking jam out with Mr. Do! on my C128. If my wife and I ever stop moving around the country, it's the fist cab I buy when we get a house.

[Anonymous No.2478260]

I played a lot of Dig Dug on famiclone multicarts back in the day. Very fun arcade game.

[Anonymous No.2478267]

>>2478151
Haha, good point.

>>2478191
I haven't seen one in forever, I have a feeling it was a conversion kit or something.

[Anonymous No.2478275]

[Anonymous No.2478289]

>>2478275
Oh god what is he filling them up with?

[Anonymous No.2478297]

>>2478191
Nah, you're there over who's wrong. Rally X is fucking awesome and way faster paced than Dig Dug or Pac Man.

Dig Dug is definitely more fun than Pac Man, though.

[Anonymous No.2478331]

>>2478289
Air. Didn't you play Dig Dug?

[Anonymous No.2478373]

>>2478079
We did get DigDug 2 in the US. We never got the first game on the NES

[Anonymous No.2479371]

I love having a blast on Dig Dug.

Mr. Do! is a good thing too.

[Anonymous No.2479389]

>mfw I always drop rocks on my face

[Anonymous No.2479393]

Don't forget Dig Dug's son!

[Anonymous No.2479395]

>>2479371

[Anonymous No.2479403]

Thread theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft63SPa5D0Q

[Anonymous No.2479406]

>>2479393
oh damn i gotta find a mr driller game
man that was addictive

[Anonymous No.2479827]

Oh man used to go to the local Good Guys! store near my high school on lunch since we had a open campus and play Dig Dug on a salesfloor laptop with Microsoft Return of Arcade installed on it

[Anonymous No.2479843]

First Dig Dug is pretty fun.

Second Dig Dug blew my mind. I had no idea it existed til a few months ago. The game is a fucking blast and I'm surprised it isn't more well known. I mean, it may not be fair to compare it to the first game because it is quite different, but it's definitely the on I enjoy most.

[Anonymous No.2479963]

>>2479393
I like Mr. Driller but I've never been able to shake the feeling that there's no strategy to it. It's not really a puzzle game, just try to go as fast as you can and collect air tanks. Fun, but not a thinking kinda game.

[Anonymous No.2479971]

>>2479395
oh god im shitting my pants

[Anonymous No.2480126]

Loved it, and still do. Got into it from playing Namco Museum.

[Anonymous No.2480370]

i loved digdug. such a great feeling to put a air hose up the enemys ass and pump them till they pop

[Anonymous No.2481130]

>>2477935
My dad had a Dig Dug arcade cabinet in our garage when I was a kid. I don't know why he had it. As far as I know it didn't work. He got rid of it when we moved. I wish he still had it, I would attempt to get it repaired.

[Anonymous No.2481154]

>>2477935

digdug fan reporting in.
Played it first time on my XT.
The idea of teraforming an entire planet as the levels progress made it for me.
Still the concept of blowing up the enemies with a pump till they explode was too brutal...
Still remember trying to lure them under the rocks. Bonus food came out because of that.

[Anonymous No.2481164]

>>2478373
Namco did not have a US branch until the early 90s, so they relied on other publishers to distribute their games here. Bandai and Tengen (Atari) were their two main licensees in the NES era. As things would have it, Bandai chose to bring the Famicom ports of Dig Dug 2 and Galaga to North America while skipping Dig Dug and Galaxian. They reasoned that everyone already knew about the latter games and there had been tons of home versions already produced, so it was better to just bring over Galaga and DD2 which really had no home versions.

[Anonymous No.2481167]

I like the concept but every time I try to play it I remember that it feels really slow and tedious when compared to the other big arcade games of the era.

[Anonymous No.2481169]

>>2481154
>Played it first time on my XT

That's the Apple II port. The IBM port has some pretty sloppy programming; it's also very much easier than the arcade game.

[Anonymous No.2481171]

>>2478079
Mr. Do! wasn't that popular thanks to arriving during the video game crash, however it did have a bunch of home versions.

[Anonymous No.2481174]

Dig Dug is essentially 2D retro Minecraft. Prove me wrong.

[Anonymous No.2481181]

>>2481169
I downloaded this from an abandonware site years ago and played it on my 90s PCs. Eventually I got to run it on a real CGA-equipped IBM XT and found out that the color palette displays incorrectly on VGA (the pictured colors are what it should look like). Plus it blanks the screen between levels to hide the sloppy-looking screen fill. These are both done by writing to the bare metal on the CGA card so they don't work on VGA and you instead get the pink/white/aqua palette and see the screen being redrawn between levels.

[Anonymous No.2481187]

VIC-20 Dig Dug. Blocky as fuck, but very bright and colorful compared to the mud-like IBM and Apple ports.

[Anonymous No.2481191]

Commodore 64. This port has graphics that look pretty arcade-accurate compared to the other versions posted, but it runs at a snail's pace due to the programmer's inexplicable decision to use bitmap graphics instead of characters. It's also missing a lot of music.

[Anonymous No.2481201]

The Atari 8-bits had actually two versions of Dig Dug. This is the original 1982 brown cartridge release (appropriate color if you think about it) which really sucks. Apparently the programmer was some inexperienced kid who was just newly hired and shouldn't have been assigned to a major project like this.

[Anonymous No.2481206]

Atari were evidently rather embarrassed about this, so they put out a redux version on a silver cartridge.

[Anonymous No.2481212]

>>2481206
You have them reversed. That's the original shit Dig Dug and the other one above is the redo.

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987

This is a memoir by the programmer of A8 bit Donkey Kong. He mentions that the Dig Dug programmer was a nimrod who didn't know how to operate a computer beyond flipping the power switch when he got hired.

[Anonymous No.2481215]

>>2481212
That's actually kind of impressive to go from not even knowing how to operate a computer to producing a functioning game for the Atari.

[Anonymous No.2481232]

>>2481212
WTF. How do you hire a programmer who doesn't even have the faintest clue how a computer works.

[Anonymous No.2481235]

>>2481232
Atari crashed and burned for a good reason, you know.

[Anonymous No.2481239]

>>2481215
Even so, the game's lack of refinement is pretty noticeable. It flickers like crazy and has terrible collision detection.

[Anonymous No.2481241]

>>2481212
>This is a memoir by the programmer of A8 bit Donkey Kong

It's interesting how he also mentions that his original prototype had more elements of the arcade game in it (animations and whatnot) but they had to be left out of the finished product so it would fit on a 16k cartridge.

Wonder if the prototype is still out there somewhere.

[Anonymous No.2481362]

>>2481181
>>2481169
One inconvenience about the PC Dig Dug is that it's one of those games that reroutes the INT 9h keyboard vector and has its own built-in routine for reading the keyboard. This was done fairly often in the early days for performance reasons - games that had their own keyboard code ran faster than the BIOS routines. Same deal with Dig Dug switching color palettes by writing directly to the 3D9h register rather than using INT 10h Function 0Bh.

On the downside, if you play the stuff on a real IBM XT, there's no way out of the game short of turning the power off because Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work due to the remapped keyboard vector (on my 90s PCs, I could just tap the Reset button).

[Anonymous No.2481363]

>>2481362
Intwesting. I'm surprised the thing would work on later PCs because the original IBM 83 key keyboard I assumed had different scan codes than 101 key keyboards.

[Anonymous No.2481367]

>>2481363
The keyboards aren't electrically compatible but AFAIK the scan codes are the same. One thing I noticed is that a lot of XT-era games will automatically enable Num Lock so you could use the numeric keypad for control (the 83 key keyboards didn't have separate cursor keys). You'd actually never even notice this on a real XT because they don't have keyboard LEDs.

[Anonymous No.2481381]

Moonbugs. This game has a title screen that uses the normal CGA 320x200x4 mode, but does so by directly modifying the video registers, thus producing a screen full of garbage on VGA. I fixed this pretty easily by opening the executable in DEBUG and simply putting a MOV AX,4/INT 10h instruction in place of the original code. It sounds silly to set the video registers directly when just using the dang BIOS would be much easier, but the programmers I assume wanted to show off what l33t hax0rs they were. Plus the performance difference is pretty noticeable on a real 8088 PC. I've run Moonbugs on an XT and the video mode switch happens almost instantaneously after you type MOONBUGS at the DOS prompt and hit Enter, while on games that use the BIOS, there's a pause of about half a second.

[Anonymous No.2481382]

The in-game graphics use the so-called CGA 160x100 mode, which is really a hack of 80x25 text mode where you set the scanlines per character register to half its normal value, thus making it possible to construct low-resolution 16 color graphics by using the block character (ASCII 219) as pixels. Since CGA characters are 8x8 pixels, the game sets this value to 4. But because VGA has 9x16 pixels, you end up getting a picture that fills only the top half of the screen. This is simple as pie to fix since you just change the scanline value to 8 instead of 4.

But there's more. When using 160x100 mode, you also want to disable blinking so you can use the upper 8 colors of the text mode palette. There's no BIOS function for this on CGA, so you do it by directly manipulating the Blink Enable/Disable bit in 3D8h. Since that won't work on VGA, you instead just use INT 10h Function 1003h. Thus, it's also necessary to insert a MOV AX,1003/MOV BH,0/INT 10h into the code.

[Anonymous No.2481563]

>>2479963
I pretty much agree, stopping and thinking usually leaves you worse off

Posting best Namco game

[Anonymous No.2481572]

>>2481563
They had Pole Position for the PC; it was done by Mindscape and published under the Thunder Mountain label. They did a couple rereleases of old Atarisoft arcade ports plus new ports of Jr. Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Super Pac-Man.

The C64 ports are quite good; the PC ones are CGA crud.

[Anonymous No.2481634]

>>2481174
You can't build things, nor have an open world to explore. The only thing it has in common is digging.

[Anonymous No.2481637]

https://archive.moe/vr/thread/2477935/

The fuck? What's with the deleted posts? A quarter of the thread vanished.

[Anonymous No.2481640]

>>2481634
DigDug is the ancestor of Terraria.

[Anonymous No.2481671]

>>2481637
Someone got banned and had his posts deleted.

[Anonymous No.2481704]

>>2477935
I liked it, but Baraduke was my favorite Namco game. The way the canon had recoil amazed me when I first played it.

[Anonymous No.2483162]

>>2481671
Why would you delete completely on topic posts? Just delete the offending ones, you pathetic Hot Pocket-consuming wastes of life.

[Anonymous No.2483165]

>>2483162
Mods are lazy and would rather just use a global post wipe than take the time to delete individual posts. They don't receive any monetary compensation for this job, you know.

[Anonymous No.2483228]

>>2481154
That's the Apple II Dig Dug, not the IBM version.