Return to Fractalus
Jan. 24th, 2025 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerKeeping up with a sort of digest of “Color Computer news” (it was where I’d learned about the regional antique computer exposition I went to last year), I saw a pointer to a video promising a detailed look at a game ported to computers including the “CoCo 3,” Rescue on Fractalus. The game (an early work from Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts) was a sort of science fiction flight simulator where you flew down valleys and over mountains generated via what was just becoming a buzzword, “fractals,” shooting alien gun turrets off the ridges and landing to rescue crashed pilots. While my recollections have my family only buying the game during the final closeout sales at Radio Shack on Color Computer software, by which the state of the art for people who’d bought more expensive computers had become Wing Commander, I’d played Rescue on Fractalus enough to take some interest in the video.
The promotion did make a point that while the video maker had recorded game footage with the port set to the wrong palette, tripped up by how the “CoCo 3’s” sixty-four colours were organised in different ways depending on whether you were using video out of the composite jack on the back or out of the RGB port on the bottom, the rest of the criticisms of that particular port (very limited sound and a certain sluggishness) weren’t that egregious. After taking a look at the video myself, I could tell it was most enthusiastic about the original version of the game, which was for the Atari home computers. That was a group of machines which I might have started thinking of as a last frontier to be investigated after dabbling in CP/M, but now I could suppose it’s never too late to get started.
After settling on an emulator installed via “Homebrew” and launched from a command line, I managed to get the game loaded without too much trouble. Controlling it was a little trickier given I don’t devote desk space to a keyboard with a numeric keypad. Setting the joystick to the handiest keys on the left-hand side of my keyboard would knock out my controls to switch off my shields and open my airlock; using the comparable keys on right-hand side would disable out my control to land; the arrow keys would take out my throttle. After trying to get used to a diamond of punctuation keys at the extreme right edge, I happened to think of a joystick I’d bought some years ago. It looked like “the Atari joystick” if with a USB interface, but I’d found it only worked through the “USB Overdrive” utility as something that sent keypresses. That did make it suited for this case.
While trying out this latest version of the game, though, I did get to thinking about how the video had mentioned (and criticised) a very recent “fan remake.” I went ahead and tracked down that game as well, managing to configure all of its controls into a more elaborate game controller I also have. The criticisms of the video aside, there was something engaging about this new version too. I can think a bit of the other computer games I play via emulators as now amounting to “casual games”; in a way it’s kind of nice to play something with more or less “modern” graphics but which doesn’t make an elaborate deal of micromanaged controls, complicated missions, and lengthy campaigns. On noticing that it got to the “day-night cycle” sooner than the older game had, I went back to the emulated Atari game only to still not happen on it by jumping to a higher level. I resorted to the Color Computer version as well, and couldn’t enter night either. That, though, might just mean I’ve been distracted from delving further into the Atari home computers beyond certain plans to start putting covers from some of the magazines covering them up elsewhere.
The promotion did make a point that while the video maker had recorded game footage with the port set to the wrong palette, tripped up by how the “CoCo 3’s” sixty-four colours were organised in different ways depending on whether you were using video out of the composite jack on the back or out of the RGB port on the bottom, the rest of the criticisms of that particular port (very limited sound and a certain sluggishness) weren’t that egregious. After taking a look at the video myself, I could tell it was most enthusiastic about the original version of the game, which was for the Atari home computers. That was a group of machines which I might have started thinking of as a last frontier to be investigated after dabbling in CP/M, but now I could suppose it’s never too late to get started.
After settling on an emulator installed via “Homebrew” and launched from a command line, I managed to get the game loaded without too much trouble. Controlling it was a little trickier given I don’t devote desk space to a keyboard with a numeric keypad. Setting the joystick to the handiest keys on the left-hand side of my keyboard would knock out my controls to switch off my shields and open my airlock; using the comparable keys on right-hand side would disable out my control to land; the arrow keys would take out my throttle. After trying to get used to a diamond of punctuation keys at the extreme right edge, I happened to think of a joystick I’d bought some years ago. It looked like “the Atari joystick” if with a USB interface, but I’d found it only worked through the “USB Overdrive” utility as something that sent keypresses. That did make it suited for this case.
While trying out this latest version of the game, though, I did get to thinking about how the video had mentioned (and criticised) a very recent “fan remake.” I went ahead and tracked down that game as well, managing to configure all of its controls into a more elaborate game controller I also have. The criticisms of the video aside, there was something engaging about this new version too. I can think a bit of the other computer games I play via emulators as now amounting to “casual games”; in a way it’s kind of nice to play something with more or less “modern” graphics but which doesn’t make an elaborate deal of micromanaged controls, complicated missions, and lengthy campaigns. On noticing that it got to the “day-night cycle” sooner than the older game had, I went back to the emulated Atari game only to still not happen on it by jumping to a higher level. I resorted to the Color Computer version as well, and couldn’t enter night either. That, though, might just mean I’ve been distracted from delving further into the Atari home computers beyond certain plans to start putting covers from some of the magazines covering them up elsewhere.