A New Old Game
Jun. 22nd, 2014 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhile fiddling around with a directory full of emulator programs for old computers could be grandly described as a way to "understand them as systems," I would have to say that more often than not when I start one of them up it's to play an old game. Because the Apple II emulators I are easy to use and have some interesting features, I do seem to concentrate on a computer that's long been described as "not as audio-visually impressive as the other big models" (although I can indulge myself in a TRS-80 game or two every so often, and the TRS-80's graphics were just slightly advanced from "ASCII graphics"), and out of the Apple II games I've tried I seem to find Lode Runner particularly interesting.
For all the convenience of emulators, I do daydream about acquiring another actual old computer or two to complement the Color Computer 3 (passed down through the family) and Macintosh Plus (acquired at an estate garage sale) tucked away in my basement most of the time. The possibility that in one certain case I might not have to do that, though, came up when I managed to overhear someone was starting an effort to port Lode Runner to the Color Computer 3. He'd also planned at first to port the Apple II game to the TRS-80 Model 4 with high-resolution board (complementing an earlier port of a slightly different version he'd also done), but found early on that the Motorola 6809 in the Color Computer offered more and more useful instructions than the Zilog Z80 in the Model 4. I'd long overheard comments of the Color Computer's CPU being the best thing about it, but this was an interesting illustration of that.
The first simple "beta" of the game, tried out on my emulators, was enough to whet my appetite and start me daydreaming about bringing my Color Computer up from the basement and loading the game on actual hardware using "Drivewire." The programmer wanted to try that too, though, and he didn't already have the serial cable needed to link old hardware and new server, which made for a bit of a wait for everyone else for the second beta. It did turn up, though, and with a feature or two more than might have first been expected. With the game coming together nicely, running it on an actual old computer is amusing (although I suppose I'll need my dining room table for other things soon enough...) In the speed of this thoroughly unofficial project, though, I do get to wondering about the whole issue of a handful of "third-party games" from "big-name" developers being sold in Radio Shack stores when the Color Computer 3 showed up, by which point Lode Runner was probably too old to be much of a catch to port, and yet another suspiciously named "clone" being programmed beforehand.
For all the convenience of emulators, I do daydream about acquiring another actual old computer or two to complement the Color Computer 3 (passed down through the family) and Macintosh Plus (acquired at an estate garage sale) tucked away in my basement most of the time. The possibility that in one certain case I might not have to do that, though, came up when I managed to overhear someone was starting an effort to port Lode Runner to the Color Computer 3. He'd also planned at first to port the Apple II game to the TRS-80 Model 4 with high-resolution board (complementing an earlier port of a slightly different version he'd also done), but found early on that the Motorola 6809 in the Color Computer offered more and more useful instructions than the Zilog Z80 in the Model 4. I'd long overheard comments of the Color Computer's CPU being the best thing about it, but this was an interesting illustration of that.
The first simple "beta" of the game, tried out on my emulators, was enough to whet my appetite and start me daydreaming about bringing my Color Computer up from the basement and loading the game on actual hardware using "Drivewire." The programmer wanted to try that too, though, and he didn't already have the serial cable needed to link old hardware and new server, which made for a bit of a wait for everyone else for the second beta. It did turn up, though, and with a feature or two more than might have first been expected. With the game coming together nicely, running it on an actual old computer is amusing (although I suppose I'll need my dining room table for other things soon enough...) In the speed of this thoroughly unofficial project, though, I do get to wondering about the whole issue of a handful of "third-party games" from "big-name" developers being sold in Radio Shack stores when the Color Computer 3 showed up, by which point Lode Runner was probably too old to be much of a catch to port, and yet another suspiciously named "clone" being programmed beforehand.