This week's episode is longer than I expected, but I found I kept going on to the next game as the one before left me wanting more. I would have loved to have played the first game – Who Dares Wins II – for longer, but it crashed almost straightaway. One to come back to, at some point. (I mentioned its similarity to Commando: according to Wikipedia, the first Who Dares Wins was "given an injunction" for basically being a copy of Commando. Funny!) Here's its review from Issue 8 of Zzap!64 magazine: The next game, Fighting Warrior, was hysterical,…

In this week's episode we dust off the Atari 2600 and play a few games on cartridge. We kick things off with Stargate, which is a sequel to Defender, apparently, and then play Missile Command followed by Moon Patrol – games we saw (or talked about) on the C64 in episodes #6 and #26 respectively. After jumping over a few lunar craters, we head back down to Earth to jump hurdles in Summer Games and then juggle hacky sacks and ride downhill mountain bikes in California Games.     During the episode I mentioned "that line drawing algorithm" which was…

It's still a holiday, here in Switzerland, so I'll keep this post short and sweet. We played four games on the C64 in today's Floppy Friday: Defender (which we played in Floppy Friday #25 on the Atari 2600), One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, Sammy Lightfoot and David's Midnight Magic:     I couldn't find a review of any of these games in good old Zzap! 64, so I've cobbled together an image from the cover art for three of them: See you next week!

In this week's episode we take a look at CAD – yes, 3D CAD! – on a Commodore home computer. I've talked in  the past about getting Home Designer running on a C128, but in this episode we look at a German-made application called Giga-CAD on the C64. It took a little while for it to get going, but I was frankly very impressed with what it could do. Here's the episode where we look at Giga-CAD (not yet the Plus version) followed by a quick bit of gaming. As usual, I really didn't research the software much (or at…

In this week's Floppy Friday we stumble across a diskette from the German Commodore 64 magazine, Game On, from June 1992. It contains three games – The Pearl of Dawn, Twin Down and No Deeper Meaning – and a couple of graphics/music demos – Mstocephaloid/XS and Destination '91. I didn't know they were demos when I loaded them, of course, but we got there eventually. Being on a floppy that basically came free with a magazine, none of these are especially "top shelf" (I use that in the North American sense of the term, although in fairness it's also true…

I wasn't sure whether I would stick with the Atari 2600 for this week's Floppy Friday, but as I received a new batch of floppies by post at lunchtime, I decided to dig in and see what was there. After initially loading Create with Garfield! (and no, I won't be loading that one again), I fell upon a single diskette with a pretty interesting little collection of games, and ended up just loading a handful of them. Here's the episode: We started by playing Back to Nature (also known as "Frog"), and then a strange little game called Spider. Then…

This week's Floppy Friday is once again floppiless, as we take a new old Atari CX 2600 A – with its gorgeous wood panelling – for a spin: We focus on space-themed video games – which were apparently a favourite for early video game designers, as the emptiness of space lent itself to more limited hardware platforms – looking at Space Invaders, Asteroids, Phoenix and Defender. (In case people are interested, we looked at Space Invaders and Asteroids on the C6 in Floppy Friday #14 and we saw some games on the Atari 2600 Jr in Floppy Friday #20.) Here's…

In this week's episode we load (or try to, anyway) a number of games from one floppy. We start with a game called Up 'n' Down (mis-labelled as Bump 'n' Jump) and then try to play Jump Jet before moving onto BMX Simulator. Finally I try to load The Goonies, but fail miserably. I'll have to see if I have it elsewhere, or can copy it to a floppy from a .d64 image. Here's the video:     Here are some reviews from Zzap!64 magazine. For Up 'n' Down: For Jump Jet: For BMX Simulator: That's it for this week.…

Yes, every Floppy Friday's a good Friday, but today's really a Good Friday. I hope those of you who wish to – and are able to – are enjoying a nice, long weekend. In this week's episode, we look at three games from 1983-4 that were released on a 1985 compilation called 10 Mega Hits (all I saw on the floppy was "Mega Disk 2", which makes sense, as the ten games would probably have been delivered on two cassettes or floppies). The games are Super Pipeline, Trollie Wallie and Automania (once again this last one was only on Italian…

I've been having soooo much fun with my Floppy Fridays that I couldn't resist trying my hand at developing some code for the Commodore 64. It meant dusting off my BASIC skills – and even dipping into some Assembler for some of the more advanced effects – but I think the results are worth it. After some months of behind-the-scenes effort, I can proudly unveil my (and Autodesk Research's) first project for the C64. Although I found out last week that John Walker – Autodesk's founder and former CEO – also developed a number of programs for the C64 back…