Retro computing
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I was researching a blog post for next week when I came across a nice surprise. John Walker – the founder and former CEO of Autodesk, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for this blog more than a decade ago – published some programs he wrote for the Commodore 64 and 128 when he was exploring the capabilities of this platform back in the late 1980s. John had published two of them, Key Clicker and Rainy Day Moon – in Compute! and Commodore Magazine respectively – but the third, BrainSim, was just too far ahead of its time. John…
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In today's episode of Floppy Friday I'm happy to say that we're back on floppies after a couple of weeks focused on cartridge games and unboxing. We play three games, this week: Predator (a trainer for it, anyway), Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing and Ghosts 'n Goblins. These games were really chosen at random – and not played beforehand – so I missed a few important details, such as the fact that the protagonist in Ghosts 'n Goblins was a knight rather than a mummy. Sigh. Here are their reviews from Zzap!64 magazine… Predator Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing Ghosts…
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Ready Player One! This week's Floppy Friday once again doesn't show a single floppy disk (sorry!), but focuses on the epic console showcased at the end of Ernest Cline's retro-lovers' Bible (not sorry ;-). In this episode we start by unboxing an Atari 2600 console (a "Jr." version from 1986) bought via an online auction. At the beginning of the episode I had no expectation that we'd be able to tune my basement TV to view the signals output by the console, but by the end we'd played games from all four cartridges that came with the auction lot. As…
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We've reached the end of a much-needed week off up in the mountains. I've actually spent a bunch of time fooling around with getting RetroPie working on a Raspberry Pi 400 I bought for the kids (ahem). We've been having lots of fun playing Zelda on the NES and Super-NES, Sonic on the Megadrive, and Runn 'n' Gunn on the C64. Before leaving to come up, I did record an additional episode of Floppy Friday, although in fairness no floppy was harmed (or used) in the making of this particular episode: we take a look at three C64 games I…
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This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK. This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to government subsidies – available in the majority of schools in the UK. For my Computer Science A-level I used some networked Beebs to automate a hypothetical fast food restaurant: from touchpad-driven ordering by customers to printing of receipts and stock control. Here's an image of…
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In this week's Floppy Friday – a short one, weighing in at under 10 minutes – we look at a couple of games: Bionic Commando and Zaga (sorry – the best article I could find on this game is in Italian). I found a couple of old reviews online for today's games. The first – for Bionic Commando – is from Zzap! 64 magazine: The second – for Zaga – is from Anirog: As mentioned in today's episode – and a post from earlier in the week – I have another bundle of retro computing joy about to…
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I've been thinking a lot about "technology wars", of late. Some of this has been driven by my foolings around with Floppy Fridays – thinking about the competition between 8-bit computing platforms, back in the day – but other musings have been prompted by links I've been sent in various newsletters. For instance, here's an article on Quora by Dave Whittle that takes a look at the fascinating history between OS/2 and Windows, and why the latter won the battle for the graphical desktop OS. In a JavaScript newsletter I received a link to this excellent 3-hour (!) podcast interview…
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This week's Floppy Friday is all about Indiana Jones games. Well, two of them, anyway. First we look at Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom from 1985 and then we play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – The Action Game from 1989. They're very different games, which I'm sure you'll see from this episode. I think I've managed to fix the focus-related issue from last week (this happened when there was a major change in luminosity with the screen), so hopefully that's better. Feedback welcome! I've also made some progress with repairing the second of my two…
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In this week's episode we look at two games: one from 1986 and one from 2021. That's right: we're playing Super Cycle from the 80s and Runn 'n' Gunn which was just released last week. How crazy is that? I did what I could to adjust the settings on my TV and on my phone to get better colours from the screen recording (thanks to Fernando Malard for the YouTube link!) but I do see there was some auto-focus strangeness. I'll try to get that fixed for episode #16. Both games shown in today's episode were lots of fun to…
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In today's episode of Floppy Friday we use a Commodore 128D – with integrated, double-sided floppy drive! – to play some classic arcade games. Many thanks to Daniel from Bern for parting with the C= 128D via an online auction: this was his family's home computer growing up. It even came with a Seikosha SP-1200VC, which I'm dying to try out. (I grew up with an Epson FX-80, and I just love the raw – sometimes harsh – music of a dot matrix printer.) So why play classic arcade games on an early "personal" (rather than "home") computer? It was…