This page was updated: June 19, 2020
Jump to month:
January 2000
February 2000
March 2000
April 2000
May 2000
June 2000
July 2000
August 2000
September 2000
October 2000
November 2000
December 2000
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
Happy New Millennium!
Well, what about this new millennium? I am posting this in December (31), along with my Dec posting) with the plan to add a bit on my C64 programming endeavours. Have a Bright and Warm New Year!
January 1, 2000
Well, the new Millennium has dawned and the 21th century has begun. I got up around 5am and fired up GEOS128 on my C128D. Low and behold, there was 01/01/00. I made a test file and listed by date. 1/1/0 was the date at the bottom, out of order from where it should be, but where you'd see a number in a sort list with that value.
I stopped in the paragraph above to type the date up above. I almost typed 1999, or at least 19 something. John sent me a reply to an email on the 30th that said, "See you in 1900!" I replied it would be 2000 for me as I am planning to get the Amiga going as a surfer on the Net. Last night I typed LIST from the CLI and saw the dates listed in two digit form :/ I thought, "the Amiga has the Classic Y2k bug."
This morning I went to dial up ACIS and was unsuccessful. I decided to save a test file and list by date. There was my test file at the top (several actually as my term leaves an error log and updates it's phonebook) where it should be, was 1-Jan-00. It would appear that the Amiga is immune in this classic case of Y2k for the end-user.
The power has been on here steadily since I went to bed last night at 10:30 -- we stayed up just long enough to see if DC would have power after 12am. The furnace, which is gas, should fire-up here in a few minutes, providing the gas company has remained immune to the calendaral change. Water was there at 5 also.
I speculated that there would be no outages, but I was curious to see what really was going to happen. I would imagine rather than a device shutting down because it thought it hasn't been serviced in 100 years, there might be a few signals out over the next 12 months.
My plans.... Well, I really need to get the 1200 setup, as my softs really need the AGA chip set to really crank. And I need to get the game center in the playroom set up so we can watch movies, play games, then close the closet doors when we are done. And I need to get the room often referred to as the storageroom set up with those machines. The C64 needs drives, the plus/4 needs a monitor and drives and I have yet to locate the VIC20.
The furnace has just started to blow warm air. Looks like the gas company made it too!
Happy New Millennium, Century, Decade, Year, Day Everybody!
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
Well, I have spent the last month or so (until I was wiped out by the flu) working on a programming project and trying to get a browser to work on any Amiga. I would like to get Voyager going on the 1200. Everything seems to need MUI (something I have been avoiding). All I want is to get a DEMO going long enough to see how one works before I buy a browser. The only browser I have seen running on any of my machines was the AFCD version of IBrowse on my CD32 -- which has no modem, no keyboard -- it's just a stock machine.
Any who -- the PRG project was a success -- and I completed it before my RAMLink died. I will need to limp along until I can get some items sold to cover repair costs. Which may well be a while as the unpacking process has slowed way down, mainly because of these two pursuits.
More projects.... well, once I get the browser issue settled I can get pages and links updated and stay current. I may have some books to post....I have a scanner to scan the dHs....there are some hurtles I must get over, but I feel like things are slowly moving forward.
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
The silence builds........
MUI -- installed on the A2K030 -- works. The Storage Room is renamed to The Annex. Xerox unpacked, setup -- all but keyboard which has not yet been located and unpacked. The Atari 800's peripherals are set up. The software library is mostly unpacked and all that is, is placed orderly on shelves. Magazines -- same.
graphics.library not found.... I find many references to it on the Net but not the lib itself. Scanner not tried with MUI requiring softs, but soon -- oh yes, external SCSI works (locks up now and then -- 6 foot cable)....
....building.....
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
I give up! Aprilfools! Checkout the Amibench! The silence still builds....
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
Well, I just spent the last 30 minutes ESC d-ing stuff from Ed as the format of this stuff was out of control!
How did I get here today? I am online from the studio. It is not early morning, but I did update some stuff this morning! If you missed any of the announcements I'll not URL ya elsewhere -- I am online with an Escom Amiga 1200. It has an expanded and fast brain (Blizzard 1260 50 Mhz w/52 Meg of RAM). I am using IBrowse and I love it!
The system is set up on the card table that the Commodore Amiga 1200 used to be on (it is still setup). I can't believe how fast iNet access is through an Amiga. I only have a 14.4 modem (USRobotics Sportster 14400) but that seems to have little over-all effect. I can pop on from powerup to check email in less than a minute. It is truly amazing.
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
Editing live has changed substantially for me. I open Wordworth, hit a little E in the edit box in IBrowse in the corner of the edit box and Ed opens up. I hit save and Ed saves the file as TextEditFieldTemp.0, I then pop over to Wordworth and Open Recent and select TextEditFieldTemp.0 from the menu. I can then add text, spell check, etc. I select Save As... , select ASCII, push the save button and overwrite. I am then automatically popped back into IBrowse and the text is updated in the HTML Form on my screen, ready to preview, save, etc, live on Angelfire. It sounds like a lot, but it is simple and quick.
Ok, don't hold me to this, but I can now spell check my pages. (It is now April 29, 2002 and I am spell checking! -- now, back to the past! (Wait! I am in GoldED reproofing and it is June 17, 2020! I have ASpell installed so I can spell check within GoldED! And now, forward, into the past!))
The one thing I don't like about Wordworth is it looks at the HTML code as part of the word if they happen to touch. geoWrite does not do this, making the C64 superior in the spell checking of html pages -- at least in my realm.
It's a nice set up, but eBay is another story. Apparently they use Java in some of the stuff they use for posting items and IBrowse (V1.xx) does not get along with it well.
I have moved the Escom machine into the space the C= 1200 was. I moved that 1200 onto the video arcade center (as opposed to a home entertainment center). It is hooked up to both a commodore 1501 monitor and a 19 inch color tv. It'll be great for playing games and doing Amiga SIG (Special Interest Group) meeting DEMOs. It is nice to have the space back. Soon the videos will have their own shelves and can be unpacked and the boxes removed. And finally my Magic Cabinet can go into place (I am also a Magician, close up magic is my speciality -- yes the kids love it ;)
There are still boxes laying around, mostly Timex/sinclair stuff and disk boxes awaiting my buying some serious shelves, but it feels unpacked. As well it should we moved last October. It is time to start my eBay posting (I have), my scans, and web page updating! Make that last article Life Is Good....
A r c h a i c C o m p u t e r
Brian Crosthwaite
I hope everyone has a safe and sane one!
It is tradition to break out the Fireworks Construction Kit for the commodore 64 every year about this time. There is a demo that we play (for the most part) that came about as tradition mainly due to DEMO's Law. Only, in this case, the demo actually works.
DEMO's Law basically states that the reason the DEMO is failing is because there is someone watching. Further, the more people who are watching the more will go wrong, to the point where the DEMO may not work at all.
Now how does this apply with Kids and commodores? Well, it is a little known fact that kids love games on computers (really?). No, that's not the little known fact, we all know kids love games on computers. What isn't wide knowledge, is that they do not demand superb graphics, nor do they demand superb sound. This is evidenced by the game Adventure on the Atari 2600. The castle you explore looks like cursor characters laid out to make the walls and the main character is a square of the same dimensions. Graphics don't get much worse than that. But the game is great! My son loves that game!
What kids do demand, is that it loads. And if you don't want to go bonkers (especially if you are the one loading the games) you will need a fast load. Preferably, you snap shot the game and put it on your HD.
Now back to DEMO's Law. The game will not work right the first time you load it. "...Oh, the joystick needs to be in port one..." or "...I need to turn JiffyDOS off for this one..." or even "...the VIC Switch needs to be by passed...."
Once you overcome DEMO's Law, Murphy's Law kicks in -- they are ready to play another game.
Having an HD has been a blessing in this area. I have Jason-Ramheim's Capture cartridge plugged into the RAMLink most of the time as it is transparent, allowing me to boot in 64, 128 or CP/M mode with no problems. In fact, it is the only cartridge I have never had to remove due to incompatibility issues. It has a blue button on the face that I can press and pop me into a menu that lets me reset the computer and clear the memory.
The Super Snapshot does an excellent job of letting us play games and reset. Now why would we need to do this on a computer that has several reset options? Well the cart allows the computer to be reconfigured, say with a softwired drive -- when reset the drive stays softwired. It also allows a reset when the game starts at the reset area(s) in memory (mainly 64738).
Now the SuperCPU is something new around here. It has a reset that allows the same sort of leaving the drives alone thing we like, and it really amazes me how much stuff works with it as-is. May favourite application on the C64 is Planetarium (Sky Travel). The one thing that was a bother about it, the only thing really, was the time it takes to get from say the SET mode to the MAP mode. Ok, it is tricky getting the latitude and longitude set precisely. But that pause is totally gone with the SuperCPU. It just jumps from one screen to the next. Changing the time laps works wonderfully quick. Everything seems to be fully functional. It is still tricky to set latitude and longitude, but I'm used to that.
The fireworks program works well also. The stuff in the sky is a little faster, but not too fast. The music is a different story. It makes an occasional blip here and there, but not much more. I'll have to try out the SID programs we have. I am really curious about Euphony and the SuperCPU. I suppose this is where I need to say, "More on this as the story develops...."
Update: July 2, 2000:
Well, Euphony loads and runs with the SuperCPU, but the MIDI does not work full-time. It pops in now and then and the notes being played.... I'm not sure where they come from really, they were not the same ones SID was playing. What would the SuperCPU do that would be desirable for Euphony?
Euphony, loads almost instantly off of the HD with JiffyDOS, the player already is perfectly timed and all works rather nice. The program's display and playing of music does not speed up with the SuperCPU and if I didn't have the MIDI hooked up I might think it was 100% compatible.
I don't like plugging in and pulling stuff off my computer. But I don't mind a bit throwing an occasional switch -- it's a little like Frankenstein's Laboratory around here anyway ;)
Update: July 4, 2000:
The Stereo SID Player works well, the animations (outside of the text animations) run super fast, but in no way affect the play.
The keyboard display and music play normal, most of the time. On a couple of songs I heard a pause, but it was only noticeable because I know the songs well that I tested. I don't think anyone who ever heard them would think they were not supposed to be there.
The only strange part of playing at 20Mhz was when Neurosynth does it's fake-out where the SID chip, that only has 3 voices, sounds like there are five (normally a truly amazing part in both the music and the fact that it sounds like 5). It only played two voices.
The system I tested it on does not have the SID Symphony Stereo Cart plugged in, but the program thought it was (it also thinks the RAMLink is a SID Cart), as a result it loaded and played both .MUS and .STR files, of course, only the .MUS files could be heard as there is only one SID on this particular machine.
The color changing text (fea-phenomana) was lighting fast on many of the songs, but didn't flicker or get out of sync with the display.
All in all it did a really great job. Since all files were loading from the HD they loaded in less than an instance, and the keyboard display just popped up -- no wait-time at all.
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
The Dog Daze are here and the temperature is at the 100 mark. Boise has really bizarre weather. We don't get 101 or 99 degree weather, we get 100 degree, precisely weather. And we can really tell, especially since the Vanagon has no AC. So we have been heading out to my folks house around 8am and slowly picking away at what was once a great mountain.
Yes, The Great Crosthwaite Mountain -o- Computers is no more. After this morning there will only be a couple of old electric typewriters (Canon and Olympia) and three huge Okidata printers. These will go to a local thrift store. They are too big for me to ship. I'd use one for my PRG listings, but I have no room for it.
This will leave the garage bay empty. You know, my folks built the house we lived in when I was born. My Dad designed their present house and had it built. The basement was unfinished. He put in ceiling tiles and sheet rock and hordes of other things to finish the project. But the ceiling tiles in the northwest bedroom had never been completed. About a month ago I cut and put those tiles in. I finished the house.
The mountain contained a variety of computers, many were the classroom computers I had purchased from the school system. I have been able to start catching up on the makes and models I actually have. Many have been posted on TACS and eBay. Some have gone to Canada, Hawaii, Virginia, and other places.
While the mountain was fun, it was hard to get to everything. Things got sorted out long before the dismantling, but it wasn't as organized as I had hoped. I was only going to store them there for a couple of months, not the large span of time they came to occupy the space. There was much more there than I had realized.
Meanwhile, in my garage I have set up my first set of Gorilla Shelves. I have managed to locate and identify most of the unknowns from the mountain. The specific computers I originally bid on I got, but many of the other computers were not what the manifests stated them to be. It is just as well, there were lots of clones listed and I didn't want to get any more clones.
I actually have fewer clones than I used to. Tandy and Commodore are the two clones I like best. Both have some amazing features. I still have my portables, but as you have probably guessed, I prefer other computer types.
Missing from, but coming to The Archaic Computer Gallery are such wonderful machines as the DEC Rainbow 100, Epson QX-10, Kaypro IV, commodore B128, Timex/sinclair 1500, to name only a few.
2000 has been a hot summer (literally), and it looks to be a waycool winter for NC. So in the fine worn- for- wear tradition, I'll say, more as the story develops....
Update: August 19, 2000:
I have donated several of the Printers and Monitors that I decided I didn't want to take the time to sell. Don't panic! I took them to a second hand shop that sells all kinds of computers new and old. I actually had a couple of postings go smoothly this morning, and got a couple of systems packed for the posting. Things are finally going as planned over two years ago! And I still have time to do non-computer things, which, especially at this time of year, are real important.
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
I recall when I joined the Treasure Valley/Boise User Group, the local commodore club. I had been a stay- at- home- parent for a while; it was a time in my life when I had no real community. The house we had bought was surrounded by rentals. Whenever we'd start to get to know anyone, they'd move away. Most didn't have kids and lead very different lives with different paths. I was in need of some "adult conversation," as they say.
Someone recommended that I join a club or find an activity to get me out of the house and away from the baby. Two things popped into my head -- Theatre and TVBUG. Theatre demands a lot of time and dedication, "The show must go on!" Even if I laid low and volunteered as a carpenter, I would still be needed more than I could deliver. When your family gets ill your priorities are different.
When I was at BSU I was using a Banana Gorilla printer, ProText (loaded via datasette) and a commodore 64. My printer was a great work horse that could do wonderful graphics as well as text. But the text didn't have true descenders, and many teachers wouldn't accept computer print- outs without true descenders. Well, none of my teachers cared (you'd be surprised how many techno heads there are in theatre arts), but I really needed to improve my output.
I went to the Commodore Computer Center to get a new printer (one of the few times I had money to get anything for my computer back then). The owner asked if I had heard of TV/BUG and she gave me some info on it.
Well, I can recall my first RUN magazine. It was the issue with the guy sitting at the computer with others gathered around. The picture was taken from the view inside the monitor looking out at the group. It was a User Group meeting. That was the image I had of computer user groups. A table or three with people at computers doing things.
I had decided to join the user group. I must have lost the info, because I had to go back to the commodore store to get it again, it must have been 1992 when I finally joined. The club had around 75 members, and while many drifted astray, new ones (like me) would show up all the time.
The club librarian taught Community Ed every year at Jackson Elementary. He had classes on The Write Stuff and The Illustrator. People would attend these classes and get hooked on the commodore 64. It was one of the biggest channels that brought in many people every year. We had auctions every October. There were times when we were transient as a group, we must have changed meeting places 4 times in one year, but we persisted.
I have always had a hard time getting to meetings, even when I was President of the club, I'd have to call the Vice President or others to make sure the group was prepared in my absence, getting the DEMO info and so forth to everyone that needed it prior to the meeting.
Sometimes I feel like I missed the computer revolution. I once let my Compute!'s Gazette subscription laps, because it had too much advertising in it (!). I didn't have much extra monetary- wise when I was in school, to spend on my 64. It was a long time from when I got the 64 until I got a datasette and an even longer time before I got a disk drive. All the cool type-ins were for the VIC20, then the 128, or so it seemed.
Now our user group has 3 or 4 at meetings, we must total around 5 or 6 of us local, 3 long distance. The school, long ago, gave away their commodore equipment. That librarian, now does web stuff on a PC.
The core people, are still pretty much the same. We still have great meetings. We haven't gotten a newsletter out since last December and our DOMs (Disk of the Month) have turned into DOQs (Disk of the Quarter), but we still meet with enthusiasm and dedication. The PC SIG has vanished, the Amiga SIG has come back, and the commodore group is ready to face the new millennium.
Storm is really brewing up out there. I'm glad I got the house closed up, the wind is really whipping it up. Ahhh, a nice quiet evening at home -- alone. I don't get that often. Maybe I'll work on my AC update for this month. Man, is it dark out there. Hope the family is safe.
Open up Wordworth -- wow that was some crash! That storm is here! Maybe I'd better write this on the 128, I think it's safer. I'm on surge and UPS there. Well, I'd better load BB Writer, with no RAMLink, it's like running GEOS on a Timex/sinclair 1000....
Oh, they're home. So soon? Maybe the storm turned them back, I'll go up and see.
Hmm. No one here, cars not in the driveway. That's weird. I heard them walking across the floor, you can't mistake that, these hardwood floors don't even let you tip toe. Maybe the house is cooling from the storm -- wow that one was close! I hope they made it there ok. I could feel the rumble of that one. It's like all the lights were on and it was day. I used to think that was so cool, now, on this night, it seems like something final.
Oh, there went the power, better shut down -- that UPS will only give me 5 minutes. Boy, these stairs are dark when there is no light down here. I guess it's one of those dark, dark nights. Ah light! If only temporary, at least I could see I was at the bottom step. Nothing quite like trying to take a step down when there isn't one.
OOOO, another flash -- after I shut down, I'm gonna go up and watch the storm. Maybe I'll chance a call on that corded phone that tends to hang up on ya and give them a call to make sure they made it there ok.
Another brilliant flash and a moving shadow, in the basement -- "Who's there!?!?" Another flash and more movement, there is definitely someone here! The car was not in the drive and no one could have come down here without me knowing it.
-- The flash light! I'll get the flash light and expose whomever it is lurking in the shadows.
There, now I've got you -- click! "AAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!"
Archaic Computer
Brian Crosthwaite
Well, I should have a UPS in the next few days or so. Having a battery backup for my RAMLink is no longer the only necessary precaution. Last year Boise had a brownout. It took my FD4000 out along with it's power supply. I think after the move I got the RL and FD PS mixed up. The power supply took out my RL and now I am without both. Major bummer!
I have never had any success with getting RBOOT to work on the 128D for GEOS128. I shouldn't complain. There are people who have to turn off the SCSI access via @P0 to make GEOS boot from their HD. I never even turned it off to make my boot files. I know the SCSI works, because I've turned it off and used it and it was slow. In fact, it feels dirt slow now that I have no RL hooked up.
Once the system is up and running however, it pops! I am using a commodore REU and working from within it is super fast! That part is nice. But I miss my booting off the HD. You see, I don't want to reconfigure things since it really is a rather well customized setup and I don't have room for a commodore style partition to make a non-RL version of GEOS. So I boot from a 1541 II. Now, wait, it gets worse. This drive has no JiffyDOS and I have to run a custom unit renumber program to swap out the 1571 first. Why? The 1571 needs the Duane fix.
The 1571 drives have a little problem that pops up on some (I've seen two do this plus Duane's), the drive basically losses track of where the head possession is because it pops off of something or other. Anyway, Duane has a fix for it. We plan to apply it to the drive at the next club worknight. I'll have more specifics after that. Basically, the drive becomes useless. It'll work sometimes when it can get itself together, but most of the time it will not, unless you leave a disk in the drive at power up. And we all know what that means on a 128. A longer boot time as the computer/drive searches for an auto boot flag.
So things seem dreary? Not really. I will eventually get things fixed. In the meantime John, is sending me a UPS for the system. Something that could have saved my system from this series of events leading to a RAMLinkless and FDless state.
In the meanwhile, I have been playing with a SuperCPU. Wow! It is truly amazing. The commodore club's President has been showing us the ins and outs of GoDot. Everything works lickety split! Meanwhile, without the full-power of my system the article for the club's newsletter sits in limbo.
So what is the point? Get a UPS. I still have not gotten one setup yet. But I hope to soon. Your trusty commodore will thank you.
The Dilemma.
Well, there I was, walking down memory lane on the C128D super charged with a SuperCPU, Simons' BASIC loaded, a program I wrote in another lifetime, when the thought hit me --- no, I was away from the computer... let me start from the beginning.
Years ago, back before I had access to a Datasette, I had wanted to do the HIRES graphics thing with more speed and more options, like circles and boxes -- that sort of thing -- rather than poking each plot and having to calculate shapes that would make up other shapes, etc. Enter Simons's BASIC. It was a hundred years later (felt like, must have been a couple of weeks) that I received the package from my brother, that my dad had sent, that contained the Datasette. Anyway, I was well into the programming I wanted to do, and having storage was something that allowed me to build on my previous endeavours, since all I had to do was load up and continue (rather than re-entering all the code again that was hand written in a notebook from a previous session).
Well, time passed and when I got my disk drive, I was able to quickly combine things in a more pick and choose manner, or at least with a lot less searching and queuing of tape. Of course, the story has much too many more facets and tangents to allude to here, but suffice it to say, I got married and had a baby.
Now, having a family is probably the biggest change a person can go through. It is an amazing change, more so than simply getting married. First you are blindsided, then whiplashed, then slowly, ever so slowly, the smoke clears -- just a little -- and you think you can see again. Eventually, the smoke does clear and you've missed the bus and there you stand lost. But then, when you really look around, you start to see who you were (a little), who you are and who you may become (a bit).
That's about the time I remembered what I had done. I took several programs written in SB and put them all together. It was something I'd run at parties to add a little changing -- picture to a room. SB would draw a box, blue transparent, techie, and totally computerized, then a kaleidoscope, a mountain scene, a castle, a widget (a circular, three ended object made from a square rod bent in the shape of a U -- quite Esheresque), and many other things. It debuted at a party that had many, many kids of all ages. Even some parents, but all the kids were mesmerized by the bright images that appeared before them.
I had written many short programs over the years that displayed some sort of graphics -- a color clock, a sinal nexus, what have you. It were these programs I dug out to see at high speed. I looked at the many The Tool PRGs I had written, programs that flip an image over, a slideshow I wrote to see LOADSTAR pictures, all at 20MHz. Some of them, written to process an image, were slow, but not too slow. I couldn't image having to bear the wait I had to endure so long ago. That's when it hit me. I was at the Amiga 1200 doing something. I thought, Am I warping, taking away, or in another way spoiling those memories?
Was I no longer using my commodore as it was meant to be, somehow taking away from the experience? After all, I wrote all these programs on a 1MHz commodore 64. And there I was, flying along at the speed of light -- I wasn't walking -- I was running down memory lane! Or was I?
The average dream, that lasts what seems like countless hours, zips by in less than 10 seconds in the awake world. We are able to assimilate information at an alarming rate. Cartoons that have complex story lines with many twists and turns, often have two stories in a half hour span, not to mention all those commercials that occupy much of that half hour. The original data compression!
No, I wasn't committing an abomination on the face of commodore. I have too little time for such activities -- the SuperCPU gave me more time. The programs all did what they had before, they took me to the same places, but I would have spent more than a week exploring all that I looked at, and may have simply gave up to try and come back to my walk at an indefinite time off in the future. No, I was able to saunter to many places from my computing passed, and if I was curious as to the time frame I had endured back then, all I had to do was flip a switch and the computer would run at the normal speed.
The sounds were all the same, the rendering time was less, the execution time was less, the time I was there was less, but the pictures seen, all the events in the time I spend were more. When I was sitting at the computer, it had the same screen on the same monitor. It was the same experience, only more so.
I went through 5 boxes of disks and saw all. There were treasures there I would have missed if I felt pressed for time. I saw them all, had time, and was relaxed. With three children finding time and relaxing is -- well, let's just say it's hard sometimes.
b y
n o e s i s 0
What would be on a commodore gamers wish list? Just about any of games I read about in the January 2000 issue of GO64!. Looks to be a promising Christmas! I don't know the status of these games as I haven't caught up on my reading. There have been many, many things occupying my reading time -- reading non-computer type stuff. Information on identical twins and twin to twin transfusion syndrome, home schooling gifted children, to name only a few. Some of the stuff I read made me see what other people go through when I talk computers as much of the medical stuff tried my brain. I'm lucky, I've had lots of science (mostly physics) and so I could dredge much of the Greek and Latin from the cobwebs of my brain.
But back to the reality at hand (or eye). I recently ran across the ALIEN Destruction Set by CRL at our local commodore shop. The instructions are on audio tape, but the PRGs are on disk.
I wasn't sure of what I was buying. The packaging is simple a typical space fight airbrushed scene that would look nothing like the game, with a banner on the side that said what it ran on. Not a box, but a piece of cardboard with the picture paper next to it, a floppy and unhoused cassette shrink wrapped. Simple. I guess I thought it was a game maker. It had the illusion of being a complex system that required audio instruction in a step by step manor to get you started.
The loading instructions are quick and simple "...type load, quote asterisk, quote, comma, eight, comma, one." From there the narrator speaks of the powerful war ship, Ecliptic, lost for over 20 years, being rediscovered and the mystery surrounding what happened to it and the fleet it lead. He speaks of the science and the scientists of the 27th century who worked for two decades to retrieve the info from it's ship's memory storage units and the 4 ships in it's fleet discovered in those data banks. From the screen you can select which ship's history you want to play back.
These historic playbacks are the games you play. They appear, at first, as your basic shoot em ups. The style is very much like Xevios (the arcade version). I wonder if the blurbs in catalogues talked of four distinct games. They are all similar at first, but are in four different loads, that you have to reset the computer to get out of.
Yeah, but are they fun? In a word? Yep!
The action will keep your thumb busy on the fire button, for sure. The Thundercross is the easiest on the thumb. You simply hold down the button all the time and aim the joystick in the direction you want the majority of the fire to go as it spreads wide and around most the ship.
Smooth scrolling graphics with multi-sprite explosions as your ship is in constant threat. Random pods give you certain things like shield points, etc. Shooting enemy ships gives you more power and once you reach a certain power level you can board an enemy ship. You have to start shooting right away and keep at it until you can enter the ship, but all odds are against you, as you have to use power to move, and once you enter select mode, if you move your pointer over a ship or enemy fire, you will loose power. Once you're on the ship you have to find the engine room and get the hidden engine component. If you loose all power you get auto-teleported back out of the ship.
The game manual on tape keeps with the story telling we come to expect from written manuals, along with the game play info. Not the most convenient for the user/player, but certainly original. This game set promises to keep us busy blasting and exploring.
Possibly more as the story develops -- I won't promise anything ;)
I also ran across Spider-Man from Questprobe. It is an amazing mix of multi-color hires pictures and text adventure. Antony helped test this one. We didn't get a whole lot of "I don't know how to ____" -- my least favourite thing and the first thing text adventures pop on the screen upon typing my first instruction. Definitely a unique comic book adventure where you become Spider-Man. You must unravel the mystery of the Chief Examiner while staying alive. We tested the game by telling Spidy to kill a bad guy and were quickly informed the Spider-Man is not a murderer. And he doesn't fly -- I stopped watching Super-Friends when I was a kid because they made Batman fly (like Superman).
A winner? Antony hates text adventures as much as me and he stayed at it for an hour, in fact, he might have stayed at it longer had chores not called.
Yet another interesting item I came across was the Home Video Producer (ok, not a game) from Epyx. This actually is fun to use. It is video titling software. You enter frames of events with a story-board editor that's easy to use. Even though, I didn't like the fact that after doing something from the pulldown menus the cursor (a flashing square) would move down to the story board area of the screen. However, it was consistent and always went to the same spot.
It is easy to use and is full of features. There is quite a selection of fonts, pictures (clip art you can move on screen), and backgrounds. You can edit colors, screen positions and swipes. My only real complaint is the ripple effect all the moving graphics suffer from. Perhaps, it has the ability to play movies (that's what they call them) without the editor and they may work more smoothly (I'll post any new info I have time to discover). The memory must be pushing it on the 64 version, there is a nice sized reserve for your movie and an onscreen memory usage indicator. The Apple version requires 128K and the PC 256K. Fortunately the C64 is a hardware based computer, so all they had to do was program it's sprites, etc. But the movement could look better. Even their demo movies have a cheesy quality to them because of this ripple.
Maybe there will be more soon, possible some after the first day of Christmas ;)
Happy Holidays!
Copyright 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2020 Noesis Creation. All Rights Reserved.
