I have several of the old Infocom games on my SC126 RC2014 running CP/M that I built a few years ago. They actually play pretty well on the Z180.
I used to play Sublogic’s Flight Simulator on a TRS-80 Model 1 from a tape drive. I believe it took about 20 minutes to load when the volume was set correctly and worked. Many times it took multiple tries. When it worked it was great fun for my old C-172 aviator self.
The Apple IIc was my first computer back in 1984, and I played the three Zork games that released on it back in those times, really great games. Seeing these photos of the computer but especially the screen brings back pleasant memories!
The 80s were fantastic time to be a teenager. I feel so sorry for those born to this millennium. They have so much more BS and so much less freedom.
Did you ever try programming a robot? I was too young to get it to do what I wanted (was still learning BASIC). But since the winner of most battles was BOTTOM, with its strategy of moving to the bottom of the playfield, then sliding left and right while shooting upwards, Space Invaders-style, I tried to make crappy BOTTOM knockoffs like SIDES. They didn’t work.
-Wade
ykno what? fair point. Well, (politics)
maybe not the reagan and AIDS part, but it’s not like trump and covid are much better
Yes. For some months I was in an arms race with a flatmate when it came to robot design. It was just the pair of us (neither of us programmers). One would come up with a design, and then the other would program something that would pick on its weaknesses or target it directly (which was an easy way to handle Bottom for example, as you always knew where it was going to be). Our lack of programming skills, when combined with the very limited space for code and memory meant we were never able to come up with a good all round bot.
Many years later I found the code for some of the winning entrants from the annual RobotWar competitions that were run in the early 80s (including the 1983 winner “Dragon”).
I then tried running some of these against our old creations, using an Apple II emulator. The results weren’t pretty. A copy of RobotWar with our home-brewed bots made it out into the wild at some point. If you’re curious you can find it at places such as the Asimov Apple II archive (it’s the one with “extra robots”).
After trying some of our better efforts against “Dragon” I spent quite a while jealously looking through Dragon’s code to try to work out how it did so well.
Ah, I’m looking forward to trying em out!
-Wade
Is that a Typhoon Class submarine in the foreground? And is it there for scale? ![]()
It’s pretty cool anyway.
The Apple II was the first PC I owned, and I still have a real soft spot for it. I even limited myself to Z5 format for my IFComp game just so I could run it on my old computer.
The only other thing of any note I did with the Apple was a knock-off Wizardry I mod, after an unsuccessful attempt to write my own Wizardry-style game in Apple Pascal.
ACHHTCHUALLY, to load files you have to LOAD”FILE”,8,1 (the 8 alone, which is indeed the chosen drive, is not enough). To get a directory (which was NOT instantaneous in any way) you had to LOAD”$”,8.
Incidentally, you can try those commands in any emulator, launching one of the BEST PunyInform games out there. Many of which, incidentally, are mine. ![]()
It is a cereal box toy from the 60s. Roughly a copy of the USS Nautilus. The conning tower is a reservoir for baking powder. After filling it with fuel, it will sink and float in a bowl of water. It is a memory from grade school. ![]()
Nice! ![]()
Typical original Tape games loaded took 5 minutes to load. The pirate Tape games used fast loader, with the flashing colors on the screen and beeps.
I have Commodore 64 again bought several years ago. Got disk drive and new datasette with it. I bought a cable to write data to diskettes from PC.
Thank you for correction. As of 8,1 I remember, but I think it’s not required.
dang cereal box toys were really cool in the 60s apparently
Indeed they were! I remember them dearly. The toys were always at the bottom of the packet and we used to dig down to the bottom of a new packet to get the toys before we ate the cereal. Oh, happy days.
I have an original C64. I have an SD card reader to use in place of a disk drive and a converter to HDMI that came from Australia. My original power supply still works. I still take it out of the closet every once in a while. I am afraid that one day it is going to go bork. The electrolytic capacitors are very old.
i’m debating getting one of the ‘new’ rebooted c64s from commodore.net.
it’s hard to know how on-the-level some of these operations are, although they do seem to have their ducks in a row.
I have thought of a C64 replica for a long time. I just can’t bring myself to pay $300 plus. It is not a bad deal, I just wouldn’t spend enough time with one to justify the cost.




