The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Science & Nature => Topic started by: miles on December 05, 2004, 06:42:23 am
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Did any of you guys have those Macintosh Pluses or Classics in the 80s? My dad's work was all Macintosh for years, so we grew up with them until he changed jobs and had to change to PC (I was born in 79 so my first computer memories are of these). Remember the ones? The monitor (black and white, of course) and computer fit into the same little box. I remember that the word processor had this cool feature that would speak what you typed. There was also this kickass game called Airborne or something, where you had to shoot paratroopers and aircraft out of the sky? Lode Runner was another favorite, although I also remember PC versions it seems.
Anyway, what I want to know is, first, do any of you know the game I'm talking about, and is there an emulated or updated version out there somewhere? And second, I want another word processor that speaks to me what I type. I get lonely. Is their something like that too?
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That Airbourne game sounds like one of the ones that's built-in to the iPod. That's probably it.
Yeah, I never owned a classic Mac but used them at school. They were so much better than the PCs of the time.
Of course, I was a Commodore man at home. Loved Lode Runner for the C64, especially since it had a level constructor so you could make your own levels.
Speaking of the iPod, though, it uses the same font (Chicago) that the old Mac used to use. It's an old school font, but it still looks great.
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I remember that the word processor had this cool feature that would speak what you typed. ...I want another word processor that speaks to me what I type. I get lonely. Is their something like that too?
Yes, I remember this fondly. I especially remember enjoying making my computer swear at me and speak inapropriatly in general.
I also remember going back to Mac in university when I took film editing, and being really alarmed at how elegant Mac was.
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Of course, I was a Commodore man at home. Loved Lode Runner for the C64, especially since it had a level constructor so you could make your own levels.
I remember that fondly.
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Of course, I was a Commodore man at home. Loved Lode Runner for the C64, especially since it had a level constructor so you could make your own levels.
I never played Lode Runner on anything other than an Apple II. There used to be several of us that would go to the public library and swap games to be played on the Apples there. I spent many hours in that library playing Wizardry!, Karateka and Lode Runner. I had a C64 the whole time, but didn't get into games for it until later.
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Battle Chess pwnz you.
That is all.
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Of course, I was a Commodore man at home. Loved Lode Runner for the C64, especially since it had a level constructor so you could make your own levels.
I never played Lode Runner on anything other than an Apple II. There used to be several of us that would go to the public library and swap games to be played on the Apples there. I spent many hours in that library playing Wizardry!, Karateka and Lode Runner. I had a C64 the whole time, but didn't get into games for it until later.
Sorry, that's what I meant - my Dad was a (very) early adopter. We had an Apple II+, and then a bit later an Apple IIe.
Wizardry/Wolfenstein/Akalabeth/Ultima/Karateka - mmmmmm, good.
I would so love to get a PC version of Odyssey, the compleat apventure for my dad, but I've never seen one. I searched not too long ago fruitlessly.
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I spent like half my elementary-school experience playing games on the AppleIIe. I think my favorite remains the game about trucking -- of course, now that I want to reminisce about it, I can't remember the name. Road Trip USA? Long Haul USA? I know it ended with "USA"... anyway, it was a trucker sim and taught us some things about commodities.
By middle school, of course, we had Macintoshes and the various crack thereon -- various Trails and The Incredible Machine. Oh, TIM, you were the biggest waste of school time ever.
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By middle school, of course, we had Macintoshes and the various crack thereon -- various Trails and The Incredible Machine. Oh, TIM, you were the biggest waste of school time ever.
I had The Incredible Machine for DOS. It was like my computer had a party and only Rube Goldberg was invited!
I never could figure out the purpose of the heart-shaped balloons compared to the normal round ones. Or why they didn't burst immediately if the gravity &c was set to outer space.
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Oh, TIM, you were the biggest waste of school time ever.
Waste of school time? That's redundant.
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OLD SCHOOL GAMERS REPRESENT, YO, ETC
I spent like half my elementary-school experience playing games on the AppleIIe. I think my favorite remains the game about trucking -- of course, now that I want to reminisce about it, I can't remember the name. Road Trip USA? Long Haul USA? I know it ended with "USA"... anyway, it was a trucker sim and taught us some things about commodities.
It was called Crosscountry USA (http://www.smartkidssoftware.com/ndiwi1.htm). A few years ago, I searched high and low for a disk image of that damned game, and an emulator in which to run it - only to discover that the fuck*ng thing is unplayable without the documentation. You need to know, like, which cities supply sulfur and whatnot, and how much corn costs in Bayonne, &c. Also you can drive a long time without sleeping and get into wrecks; this is before ephedrine was widely marketed everywhere in bright green packets as "the Trucker's Friend".
There was also this kickass game called Airborne or something, where you had to shoot paratroopers and aircraft out of the sky?
Actually called Sabotage (http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/sabotage.htm), in that the little paratroopers would form a human set of stairs, climb up the side of your little turret, and blow it into a million little pieces.
Now here's a game I played for 100% certain back in 1st or 2nd grade that no one remembers - it was for the Apple ][ and it was called, I believe, "Pit". You were a little dude in the bottom of a pit, and you answered math questions until you either (a) climbed out of said pit or (b) a rock fell in and crushed you. The best element of "Pit" was a rattlesnake that sat with you in the bottom of the pit and did nothing except vibrate menacingly. It was awesome.
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God bless you, Zartan. God bless you.
All I remember about the commodities market is that you can buy peanuts in Macon, Georgia. (I remember this because it was the first time we actually realized that we were supposed to be buying commodities and delivering them places; previous to that, the game had just been, well, a trucker sim. We weren't always the brightest kids.)
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Oh my goodness Sabotage. I had completely forgotten that.
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Since we're talking about Old Skool games, does anybody else remember NukeWar for the C-64? Kind of like Battleship, only with thermonuclear weapons?
Each side had a grid which represented their country. During the cold war phase you built Missles, Bomber, Subs and ABM's. Later, when the hot war started you tried to take our your opponents sites. As the years went on, the missles became more and more accurate (in the 50's they were hit their designated target about 40% of the time -- in the 80's they were pretty much pinpoint.)
It was a pretty macabre game. Simple graphics but fun gameplay. Also, freaky sound effects. A Flash version would rock.
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Since we're talking about Old Skool games, does anybody else remember NukeWar for the C-64? Kind of like Battleship, only with thermonuclear weapons?
Sadly, my access to C-64's back in the day was extremely limited (a single friend who only had a tape drive [that never worked, so saving our terrific "Adventure Creator" dungeons was the impossible dream] and a cartridge slot), because this sounds like the sort of game that would have owned my life.
I only mention this because I did play Nuclear War (http://screenmania.retrogames.com/amiga/01/amiga_0009.html). I played this game a lot. It is just as absurd and awesome as the screenshots suggest; try it (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=777), won't you?
EDIT: You can't actually download it from that last link, dammit.
EDIT ZWEI: This (http://je.loss.free.fr/fichiers/abandonware/Nukewar.zip) may be it.
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I only mention this because I did play Nuclear War (http://screenmania.retrogames.com/amiga/01/amiga_0009.html). I played this game a lot. It is just as absurd and awesome as the screenshots suggest; try it (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=777), won't you?
EDIT: You can't actually download it from that last link, dammit.
Thank you so much for that link. For quite a while I've been trying to remember the name of that cool war game I played on my first PC, but couldn't figure it out until I took advantage of The Underdog's sort by year feature. The game was Command HQ (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=214), and I think it may have been my favorite computer war game of all time. You could play in many different time frames, and it even included nukes that would actually take territory out of the game. I think I'll be downloading this tonight to see if it's as good as I remember it being.
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Alas, I cannot go there (blockpage - thank you, evil corporate overlords) but I hope to when I get home.
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My Apple II memories are "In Search Of The Most Amazing Thing", "Alice's Adventures", "Below The Root", and some Conan thing for the IIc. Of these, Below The Root is the only one I really wish I could figure out how to emulate and play again.
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I had that Conan thing, too. Man, I can barely remember that.
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my tale of computer generated games is one of woe and evil tidings, beware kind souls lest ye be forever scarred:
2nd half of 2nd grade or 1st half of 3rd grade, apple II products of some sort. the "game" was not a game, but it seemed as such, but in actuality it was trying to teach rudimentary _something_, be it math or programing or something. i believe it was called "log*" wherin *="something", logo, logus, i dunno. you were a "turtle", a turtle represented by a "triangle". you would command the triangle, no wait, the TURTLE to move about the screen. sometimes there would be pieces of paper with a MAZE on them that you could tape to the SCREEN.
the only thing that truly stood with me from that experience, was that STATIC ELECTRICITY IS BAD. to this day i'm not sure if it's merely urban legend in mah haid that the underside of the keyboard "area" on a II was grounded or whether they were designed that way.
i have vague memories of, from that era, seeing empire strikes back and playing on some neighbor kid's atair 5200 once. but that would have been, uh, 83? 84? my memories are shot.
in 7th grade, i received my first gaming console for christmas. my parents were so proud to extend to me an atari 7800. to this day i have a 50/50 ratio of loathing and lust when presented with the icon of mario.
as a freshmen in highschool, i was able to play oregon trail on another II series. these were quite the "aparatus" at warren county highschool. they were used for english class (????) and also for a programming class. i lost a letter grade in that class because i was subjected to punishments for being beat up. to this day i still want to find out how the 15 or so II's shared a disk system. was this an OEM apple feature, or had some industrious third party hacked the II system to support a shared resource! indeed.
at the last high school, we utilized ibm all-in-one clones, and some horrific pascal compiler. i received, from a family friend, a used MAc 512K. even though my friend's pc, with a hard drive!, could play relevant games such as football!, i was struck by the notion that it sucked. and the notion that computers suck has stayed with me as well.
then i went to "college" for "computers" and things just sort of went to hell.
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2nd half of 2nd grade or 1st half of 3rd grade, apple II products of some sort. the "game" was not a game, but it seemed as such, but in actuality it was trying to teach rudimentary _something_, be it math or programing or something. i believe it was called "log*" wherin *="something", logo, logus, i dunno. you were a "turtle", a turtle represented by a "triangle". you would command the triangle, no wait, the TURTLE to move about the screen. sometimes there would be pieces of paper with a MAZE on them that you could tape to the SCREEN.
You speak of Logo, which is not a game, but is nothing less than the MOST POWERFUL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
Well, I liked it anyway.
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I remember logo but could never (and still can't) visualize angles and whatnot so I sucked at getting the turtle to to what I wanted.
My main memories are of * Muncher and Oregon Trail. I also remember the older kids playing this sprawling first-person adventure/RPG game that required a 4' poster with a map of an island to be posted in the computer room. I so wanted to play that game but moved to another school that didn't have it before I was old enough. I'm convinced this memory is the only reason I got into Final Fantasy/Earthbound/&c.
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Wow. Logo!
We were made to use it at school, just as a kind of, fun learning experience. Most of the kids would make fairly simple things. I would sent entire evenings with a book of graph paper making the most ludicrously complex jet-fighters and the like, then spend an hour knocking it up in Logo.
Never really used the turtle though, as that was in the years 1-3 side of the school (room - 29 was the most people we ever had there I think. 7 years of it too. It ruled!).
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Ma bought me an Atari, 5200 I think. Basically all I remember is that it had actual arcade games, just like in the arcade! I liked Defender and Joust.
Now I have a little GBA for plane flights. I have a set of four games - Defender/*****ron/Joust/that damn space game where a giant head comes after you - that just suck on it. Earth to video game people - you can't play arcade games on such a tiny screen. My experience so far is that you can only play RPGs and Monopoly on it.
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Now I have a little GBA for plane flights. I have a set of four games - Defender/*****ron/Joust/that damn space game where a giant head comes after you - that just suck on it. Earth to video game people - you can't play arcade games on such a tiny screen. My experience so far is that you can only play RPGs and Monopoly on it.
<tetris.wav>
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Tetris sort of annoys me. What would be my dream would be for them to have Risk on it, but that game is hardly conducive to a screen the size of a nicotine patch.
Fuck cliches.
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I did some "Summer School for the Precocious" thing back in the early 1980's, and it was all about Logo. There were smarter, older kids who were doing rad things like making pictures of airplanes and pulsing sunbursts and such; I'm pretty sure that these required algebra. I was happy making basic geometric shapes and playing Digger (http://www.digger.org/) on the PCjr.
BUT
Logo could be used to control TOPO. TOPO was a Real Rob[size=0] [/size]ot (http://www.*****swanted.com/*****gallery/and*****/topo1fs.jpg). He would say whatever you typed in ("pizza" came out "pih-ziz-uh") and move around on the floor. TOPO was, pretty much, the coolest thing I had ever seen, and proof that the Future really was Now.
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Zelda: Link's Awakening worked surprisingly well on the original Game Boy's tiny screen. It wasn't too busy and had a nice overall style to the art. Plus Link could jump!
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Ma bought me an Atari, 5200 I think. Basically all I remember is that it had actual arcade games, just like in the arcade! I liked Defender and Joust.
the main thing that i remember about the 5200 was the controller. 1, it had TWO buttons. 2, it had a NUMBER PAD on the controller. so you could, i guess, use numbers.
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the main thing that i remember about the 5200 was the controller. 1, it had TWO buttons. 2, it had a NUMBER PAD on the controller. so you could, i guess, use numbers.
Was this the one where games came with inserts you could put over the number pad? I think a house I was babysat at used to have one of those, but I never got to play with it.
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Was this the one where games came with inserts you could put over the number pad? I think a house I was babysat at used to have one of those, but I never got to play with it.
That was the Intellivision (http://www.intvfunhouse.com/), dude; it is one of the best consoles ever. That controller was a marvel, Capable of Wonderful Things.
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the main thing that i remember about the 5200 was the controller. 1, it had TWO buttons. 2, it had a NUMBER PAD on the controller. so you could, i guess, use numbers.
Was this the one where games came with inserts you could put over the number pad? I think a house I was babysat at used to have one of those, but I never got to play with it.
yes.
system (http://www.atariage.com/5200/?SystemID=5200)
overlays (http://www.atariage.com/system_items.html?SystemID=5200&ItemTypeID=OVERLAY)
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My main reason for fond memories of Logo is the board game Robo Rally. People who learned Logo in school tend to demolish non-Logo-ites at Robo Rally.
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Just de-lurking to reminisce about an age when I was still good at video games...
Commodore 64 - We had a couple of games for this (cartridges, as I recall), but usually I just played whatever game I copied out of 321 Contact magazine that month.
Apple 2 - I still have one somewhere. We could never figure out Crossroads USA; our favorite was Taipan. You were a Chinese pirate in the 1800s, trading opium and silk and fighting off other pirates. It was dope wars, but educational. Except the school version traded opals instead of opium.
Oh - and I was a LOGO ninja. I got really good at composing my own 8-bit music by the end of 8th grade.
Alas, now first person shooters make me nauseous, and I really don't have the twitch skills for 'em anyway. Don't even ask me to control a camera AND shoot at stuff. At least there's Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the GBA...
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I have Dragon Warrior 1/2/3 for GBA - I remember it fondly from my youthful, pot-smoke-clouded days.
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Just de-lurking
Why not stay de-lurked? We don't bite...
much.
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Just de-lurking
Why not stay de-lurked? We don't bite...
much.
I do, but only in that way you like...
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There was also this kickass game called Airborne or something, where you had to shoot paratroopers and aircraft out of the sky?
Actually called Sabotage (http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/sabotage.htm), in that the little paratroopers would form a human set of stairs, climb up the side of your little turret, and blow it into a million little pieces.
Where the hell did I get Airborne then? It was great though. So much fun times. Still wondering about the word processor? I want one again that talks back to me. I'm going home in two weeks, and I'll check if my dad still has the good old Mac Plus stored somewhere.
I remember that the word processor had this cool feature that would speak what you typed. ...I want another word processor that speaks to me what I type. I get lonely. Is their something like that too?
Yes, I remember this fondly. I especially remember enjoying making my computer swear at me and speak inapropriatly in general.
I also remember going back to Mac in university when I took film editing, and being really alarmed at how elegant Mac was.
I remember that we used to do prank calls with it. Now that I don't have it anymore, I have to get a bit more creative with my pranking techniques, using my own voice and all.
Speaking of switching back to Mac, I was all but convinced the other night to go out and buy me an Apple laptop. I am still going to wait till graduate school to decide (which is probably a year and a half in the future if I ever do make it--I'm slow), but again I am leaning heavily towards making the switch back to Apple.
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To me, eighth grade will always be summed up by hours in the computer lab that ended with five or six guys typing long strings of obscenities into SimpleText, setting the SimpleText voice to "Good News" (the one that basically spoke to the tune of 'Pomp and Circumstance'), and then setting it to start talking right as they left the room. Damn good times!
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Where the hell did I get Airborne then? It was great though. So much fun times. Still wondering about the word processor? I want one again that talks back to me. I'm going home in two weeks, and I'll check if my dad still has the good old Mac Plus stored somewhere.
The game's been copied, ported, ripped off, &c like a million times - Jough mentioned that it comes standard on the fuck*ng iPod? Hell, in finding that link, I came across a variation called "Ganja Farmer".
So "Airborne" is a perfectly good name for it, just not, as far as I understand, the original.
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Where the hell did I get Airborne then? It was great though. So much fun times. Still wondering about the word processor? I want one again that talks back to me. I'm going home in two weeks, and I'll check if my dad still has the good old Mac Plus stored somewhere.
The game's been copied, ported, ripped off, &c like a million times - Jough mentioned that it comes standard on the fuck*ng iPod? Hell, in finding that link, I came across a variation called "Ganja Farmer".
So "Airborne" is a perfectly good name for it, just not, as far as I understand, the original.
Fair enough. I loved that game. Thanks for the informative link, by the way.