Quote:
Originally Posted by browna
Arcade games in 80s. Track and Field, Spy Hunter, Centipede and Exciting Hour Wrestling, Star wars with the vector graphics where you sat down. Superchexx, sure. That was at Bullwinkles.
The coolest part of going around town and then out of town as a 8-12 year old, and most of our family travel was by car, was finding video games in hotels or anywhere without being a destination arcade. Banff Springs Hotel, long before its current incarnation, had a great one. Places like the old Family Lesuire Center. The airport. Many hotels in Spokane had a few games. Though you may expect to see an Arcade, you were never sure until you got somewhere, and then the quality.
From the age of 8 we had an Intellivision, and so did a couple buddies, so some great games there. Burger time, many games playing Baseball, football, boxing. Lock N Chase. Snafu. Dungeons and Dragons, Tron Deadly discs. Casino. List goes on. A few years late got a Commodore 64, but not a floppy disk drive right away, so started by playing cartridge games. When got the disk drive, Hardball was a favourite.Summer and Winter games by Epyx.
Around 1990,got an Amiga, and that was mind blowing for graphics but that's for the next thread.
|
You're kind of tracking my computer history.
I remember going to the arcade at South Centre (Wizards castle) and skipping school afternoons to spend several dollars worth of quarters. I remember playing a vector graphic star trek game that was awesome. Wizard of Wor, I rarely played pinball.
I got a Commodore 64 when I was about 12, I was in a lot of trouble at the time, and my mom and dad decided that I needed something to focus on when I was grounded forever. I got the 64, the tape drive and the 9 pin dot matrix printer.
I also remember that I didn't buy a lot of games, me and my cousin swapped copied games using cracker programs.
I remember starting up the C-64 the first time with its basic parser, and just falling in love. the first game I got was forbidden forest, which was such a colorful and awesome game. Impossible Mission, Chop lifter, baseball. But at the same time, I started learning basic. What I didn't realize at the time was how limited the basic was on the C-64. You could only use 16k at a time so if you wanted to take advantage of the C-64 you needed to use bank switching. I learned about sprites, super bit maps and that there were no native commands in C-64 basic to make sounds or graphics. You had to use Peek and Poke.
I remember spending hours waiting for things to load from the tape drive so I demanded a 1541 disc drive. We were shocked when we found it costs more then the C-64, but to keep me on the straight and narrow I got it and promptly learned two things.
1) You could cut a notch in the disc and use both sides of the media
2) The drive head would quickly go out of alignment and fail, but a hobby magazine told me how to go in and permanently align the drive.
I felt powerful.
I moved on to the C-128. That was a lot of memory, but unless you worked in the 128 or CPM mode you couldn't use it and you still had to bank switch.
I went to a hobby shop and found a C-128 compiler program, and suddenly there wasn't anything I couldn't do with that machine.
Games got more awesome, but I hadn't seen anything until I bought a Amiga 1000.
Holy crap, way ahead of its time with independent sound and video processes. The graphics and sound make the 64 and 128 look like poop.
Superstar ice hockey was a generational leap forward and I was addicted to that game for the longest time.
Its a shame that Commodore went bankrupt, but there is hope.