Fortunately I haven’t really been eating dog food, I’m talking metaphorically. It started when I ‘accidentally’ purchased an Amiga 500 on Ebay for a fiver, and found that the only Amiga software I had in the house was a still-shrinkwrapped copy of one of my own games, a flight sim called Dogfight – 80 Years of Aerial Warfare. (In the US it was called Air Duel I think)
The first thing I was hit with was the ‘DRM‘, in the form of a “please enter 12 from page 47, paragraph 3 of the manual” question. A classic way to irritate your paying customers repeatedly, while the so-called pirates (arrrrr!) get off scot free. Of course, these days far more devious and dastardly schemes sail the high seas, but it did remind me of various other similar copy-protection fiascos I should be ashamed to have been involved in, so I’ll probably write more about them another day.
The next realisation was that it was really a PC game, shoehorned onto the Amiga, and really needing at least an A1200 rather than the comparitively sluggish A500. It did keep me amused for an hour or so, but all in all it wasn’t a very rewarding experience. Like most (but not all) old games, the memory is better than the reality, and probably best left that way. Suffice to say the game, and manual, have gone back in the box and will probably stay there for a long time.
In fact, until I get hold of some software, the Amiga is going back in the box as well, to sit in the loft with the countless other old computers.
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“Like most (but not all) old games, the memory is better than the reality, and probably best left that way.”
Perhaps but its good to preserve this stuff for future generations and also for video game history. I just wish more games companies had a plan for preserving their products after the money has stopped flowing in.
Its great to read about someone playing pac man but its even better to be able to play it yourself.
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Maybe I’m out of touch, but if you’d asked me I’d have said that pretty much every historical game is available online if you know where to look, and further can be played on today’s commodity hardware via an emulator. That certainly includes even the original arcade Pacman.
That aside, you can also pick all this stuff up on ebay because by its very nature there are thousands of now unwanted copies floating around.
Then of course, there are numerous projects dedicated to preserving this history – even the US Library of Congress has got involved.
Expecting game companies to do it, when they frequently don’t exist long enough to preserve anything and can rarely see past the next release, is probably a little optimistic.
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Have you got a Sinclair ZX-80 in your loft?
I think my mate had one at school which probably dates it at around 1979. As I recall a whopping 1k of RAM. You better write efficent code for that eh?
If you do have one then you better buy a cassette tape recorder and some tapes before they become extinct.
btw how do I leave a comment that is not anonymous when I am not a LiveJournal user (and never will be) and don’t have an OpenID?
Alastair the anon.
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I don’t have a ZX80 up there unfortunately, although I will have sooner or later. (Don’t tell the wife mind you). You didn’t have anywhere near 1K usable RAM in fact, but that’s a story I will save for a later post, because the way it worked was very clever. I started out with a ZX81, which was much the same machine, with a few improvements.
There’s very little ZX80/81 software that’s not already available on the web, the main exception being stuff I did myself, which I did rescue from cassettes some years ago, and there is some more printed out on shiny silver paper.
As for OpenID, you do have at least one, see here: http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/12/228.html
Alternatively, get one at http://www.myopenid.com.
If you wanted to get really flash, there is a WordPress plugin that lets your blog act as a delegate for OpenID – you can then just log in anywhere using your blog URL. That might be taking things a bit too far though, in terms of the hassle of setting it up.
I will probably relocate myself to a Wordpress blog on one of my own servers at some point anyway – I seem to be better at keeping them up and running than these Livejournal folks, and I don’t locate my servers in an earthquake zone either. Or, for that matter, all in the same place. Tsk.
So, as an anon, do you get notified of my reply I wonder?
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