krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
Keeping 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.
ExpandReturning to the rescue )
krpalmer: (anime)
The hobby shop a long walk down the road from me where I bought a flying model rocket last year contains plenty of other model kits. It shouldn’t be a surprise in this day and age that those kits include “science fiction robots,” and of course a good number of those particular kits are Mobile Suits from Gundam. I had started seeing those kits in other hobby stores years before without this shaking my conviction that my days assembling model kits were now decades in the past. In this store, though, I did notice a particular kit I’ve seen enough about “Gunpla” to understand as a no-tools, no-paint, no-stickers, no-glue endeavour perhaps suitable for the rust-caked returner too. It was also the Strike Gundam from Gundam Seed, and perhaps a sense of defiance in the face of general fan judgement nudged me towards buying it. Of course, defiance can be foolish.
ExpandPlastic fantastic )
krpalmer: (apple)
On some level I’ve always been a bit distanced from most computer and video games. This stretches all the way from the low-resolution TRS-80 and four-colour Color Computer knockoffs of games for other platforms to the modern complaints that Apple never does enough to get developers putting games on its (conventional) computers. In these recent days of getting my hands on Apple Silicon myself, though, I did start thinking about certain claims about a program I’ve used for less demanding things (including running a particular Color Computer 3 emulator, if not so much to “play games” for it these days...)

Once I’d installed the Steam client at last in CrossOver, I turned to some games I hadn’t been able to play since (or hadn’t got around to playing until) “32-bit support” was taken out of the Macintosh operating system. The first one I took a chance on was Portal, which I had finished and replayed before, but may remain the latest “now that’s a real game running on real computers” game I’ve taken on. That it worked at all was something. There were occasional unfortunate moments where the program would freeze as a fragment of sound looped endlessly (the most unfortunate after managing at last a string of “place new portals with seconds to spare”), but I was able to get my computer to where I could “force quit” the game. In the end, too, I got to the closing credits of the game, still a little conscious of my computer’s cooling fan having to speed up to where I could hear it. I’m not sure how many more Steam games I might be able to get running the same way. At the same time, I’m aware of having faced “not playing a lot of computer games” through frittering my time away in different ways.
krpalmer: (Default)
Having marked the last time I revamped my home page with a post here just might have wound up a nagging reminder of how much time has passed since then. Beyond the problems of “linkrot,” the home page did just happen to contain a comment about “new promises of even newer Star Wars movies.” After a long time, I did start to wonder about whether I could reshape the home page into “narratives of how I became interested in some of the things I post the most about on this journal”; some time later, I had the body text written and the HTML formatted. Even if I’d led off with a casual comment about “Web 1.0,” I had picked up a further trick or two with CSS.

My old comments about Marathon slipped out altogether from my “old computers” section; wondering if I could mention one more thing on the page, I decided to say something about Peanuts for all that I don’t go to very many links on that subject. I also went to the point of reformatting my old Saga Journal essays, trying to make up for how I don’t go to very many Star Wars links now either. As for the links to other subjects, I decided to cut out editorializing, even managing to think this might make it a bit easier to revamp them in passing.
krpalmer: (kill la d'oh)
As the Love Live School Idol Festival All Stars mobile game wound down over a span of months, I did know a new rhythm game in the multimedia franchise had started over in Japan. Aware of how much time out of a day I could sink into these games to collect their “daily items,” I told myself I was very resolved not to try that new game when it became available over here the way its predecessors had.
ExpandAn unfortunate announcement, an unfortunate temptation )
krpalmer: (apple)
Happening on an “Apple news site” post a little while ago about how to emulate the original Apple I single-board computer using a system-specific program I’ve had installed for some time was a bit of a surprise. I did get to thinking, though, how having already tried out OpenEmulator’s emulation of that computer did add something to an awareness of certain dark comments about the survivors (who in this case haven’t played by “hacker rules” for years) having written the history books and the Apple I not being all that useful regardless of the lovable “Woz” having designed it. It could, I suppose, do a bit more than an Altair 8800 with no expansion cards (I gather the earlier computer in that unenhanced state couldn’t do much more than blink its panel lights and produce RFI interference capable of evoking musical static from nearby AM radios), but rather less than an Altair or other “S-100 bus” machine well equipped. When I got to the point where the article mentioned how to get an Apple I version of Wordle running, though, my interest picked up and I resolved to start up that particular option in OpenEmulator once more.
ExpandA squashed-down game )
krpalmer: (kill la d'oh)
Two months ago I was tapping in as usual to the Love Live School Idol Festival All Stars mobile game when, in the course of reading the news updates, I ran into an announcement the game would be shutting down. Having plugged away at the game since it became available in English, the news was a bit of a jolt. No more than a few moments later, though, I was at least telling myself the game really was a time sink for all that I liked it well enough to keep playing, and through an intervention of sorts I’d be getting that time back even if only to fritter away on an assortment of things now. I’d also been thinking that in the summer I’d be at a point at last where I wouldn’t be able to tap into the game every day and would just have to deal with missing out on the daily and weekly items for a while. Having the game shut down altogether before that at least settled things there for me.
ExpandShutdown preparations )
krpalmer: (Default)
A few months ago, I stopped in at last to a hobby shop that I’d been passing for a while. Noticing it sold flying model rockets among other things to assemble, I took a closer look at what was available, then started thinking about just perhaps getting back to one more pastime.
ExpandBlasting off once more )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
In experimenting with “getting recent text adventures running on ‘8-bit computers,’” I found the resolve to at least try something other than programming exercises. One game using “PunyInform” caught my eye just for offering its source code as well. However, when I tried out a fresh-made Color Computer 3 disk image in the XRoar emulator, which had added support for that advanced model not that long ago, I found myself facing something I might only have noticed during spot-checks of the hacked Infocom game interpreter before. The text displayed as yellow characters on a green background; it was pretty hard to read.
ExpandAn adventure in itself )
krpalmer: (apple)
The moments of late when I might be readiest to spend them on the diversion of Wordle are moments when I don’t have online access. After having happened to find a version of the game programmed for my family’s onetime home computer, though, I was at least tickled again to come across one programmed for a memory-constrained Apple II. At first I could only get it to run in one particular emulator, but then revised versions got it running in another program with a fancier screen display. For all of the programming tricks documented to squeeze it into less memory than most Apples wound up, though, I did get to noticing how long it needed to work through a guess. Then, I just happened to discover a further elaboration on it that demanded more memory but ran faster.

“Two versions of Wordle for two different old computers” might have been ample, but I then happened to run across yet another version of it for the TRS-80 Model 100, which makes a point of calling on a word list extracted from the original game and using the computer’s internal calendar to pick its single game for the day. As much as I merely acknowledge how some people are very attached to that portable’s keyboard and replaceable AA batteries, I was ready to suppose this would make the game “portable without online access”; my family’s Model 100 isn’t ready to my hands, though.
krpalmer: (apple)
Nudged by a mere indirect reference, I turned back to a particular “first-person shooter” from the mid-1990s. Although I’d played Bungie’s Marathon for quite a while, I know it’s been some time too since I last really dove into its action. Replacing both the “Aleph One” open-source engine now used with the old game files and the all-in-one bundles of the original games also available, I noticed the date stamps on the old programs were from before I’d got my current computer, and it’s been around for a while itself. I suppose that disconnection had to do with starting to use wireless keyboards without numeric keypads, which had provided me Marathon’s movement keys. Intent on at least trying “the way everyone says they’re playing these sorts of games these days,” I tried out the default setup of the game bundle, which moved ahead, backed up, and sidestepped with keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard and turned left and right and looked up and down with your “pointing device.” My trackpad, though, did seem a bit too sensitive that way.
Expandsomewhere in the heavens... they are waiting )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
Dipping once more into the archive of a Color Computer mailing list, I noticed a few messages referring to Wordle, and my interest picked up at once. Soon enough, I’d been pointed to the code repository for the program, and soon after that I had it running in emulation. It does help there that a “cross-platform” emulator long offering the “CoCo 1” alongside the Dragon (a Welsh computer that used the 6809 and Motorola graphics chipset, but wasn’t quite a “load your cassette and go” compatible so far as I understand) added the “CoCo 3” not that long ago. Before then, I’d had to either take on the overhead of Wine or pick my way through the unique interface of MAME.

That this version of the game runs in BASIC might suggest how simple it is to implement, even if it’s not quite as elegant as the original web version. Still, “getting something from recent days running as if in some alternative universe from years ago” always amuses me. A while ago, I found a program for the original TRS-80 that could create Sudoku puzzles; a while after that, I found a program for the Apple II that could solve them. So far as “getting something running on the Color Computer out of the many other old computers” goes, though, it didn’t surprise me too much when, after a bit of searching, I turned up references to quite a few other versions of Wordle for other antique machines.
krpalmer: (apple)
The news Microsoft was buying Activision for a fabulous sum did show up where I couldn’t miss it, but also had me supposing that not owning a video game console or even being able to play “PC games” (from this side of the millennium, anyway) detached me a bit from the moment. There’s a danger in looking too askew at “video game narratives,” though, or at least in making too big a deal of that. A few weeks later, there was an announcement Sony was buying Bungie, and with the games Bungie made on the far side of the millennium a few more thoughts drifted through my mind (although I’m at least aware Activision wound up owning Infocom.)
ExpandA few Bungie games brought up )
krpalmer: (Default)
Most of the time I don’t seem that fast at getting around to “the latest thing online.” This might go all the way back to the apparent paradox of when I volunteered to “connect a Macintosh” to the first Internet Service Providers to start up in my home town... if in the summer of 1995, two years after references to the Internet as available in bigger communities started popping up in computer magazines I could notice. Sometimes, perhaps, it pays off in a certain way, as when I never got around to signing up for Facebook the first time I saw it mentioned because I was too lazy to “select a profile picture.”

This is just an extended way of getting around to saying I noticed a few references to Wordle before looking up its web site. References to the coloured pegs of “Mastermind” aside, one of my thoughts was of “Jumble” in my newspaper, and how I keep looking at its scrambled letters without them reshaping into words in my head; I’m more likely to solve the final puzzle just by looking at the comic and letting familiar sayings bounce around. I did have a bit more luck with Wordle, and being limited to one puzzle a day is downright refreshing given some of the mobile games I’ve installed. I haven’t yet got around to “playing every day,” though, and while the option to “post your squares” to Twitter would mean something other than links here on my months-old account it might only amount to an “either-or” alternation I’m not quite enthused about either. The reports of the game being sold for a handsome sum to the New York Times have generated some uncertainty (and a comment about “the strains of success”), but as it turned out today I did see a suggested way to “save the game to your computer.”
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
Seeing a bit of attention paid to "old computers" from an unexpected but notable direction did get me thinking of the home computer games I'd actually played when I was young (instead of managing to get around to them years later), and which of them might be called "personal standouts." I thought of the Pole Position imitation I would load and then twiddle the TV's tint knob until the blue "artifact colour" of the backgrounds changed to "green grass" (although the Radio Shack Color Computer 2 could start up with its blue and red artifact colours switched, which made for a different experience again), of the "first-person perspective maze" our disk had gone bad for unfortunately early on so that long years later it became one of my most notable pushes towards getting emulator programs working, and of several illustrated adventures, some easier to play all the way through than others. After remembering those and other Color Computer games, though, all of a sudden I reminded myself that before it my family had started out with a TRS-80 Model I. Even with its low-resolution black-and-white graphics (converted to black-and-green with a thick piece of green plastic foam-taped to the converted RCA surplus TV that served as its official monitor), we had some games for it. Two of them that came to mind right away were the Berzerk imitation "Robot Attack" and a "swoop a spaceship over an enemy base and through a cavern" game from a "software every month" cassette magazine, both of which I'd got working on emulators in recent years. That double revival, though, had also got me thinking of a third game stuck in my mind but which I hadn't been able to find in these latter days...
ExpandThe third game, and some illustrated proof )
krpalmer: (Default)
Once again, I'm trying to craft a post around a video game I've started playing of late. As an unofficial open-source adaptation of a board game (or, at least, a game played with "map boards"), it's not a multimedia extravaganza, but it does give a chance to try out something I've been aware of for a long time. The game's called "MegaMek," and it's a computer version of "Battletech."

I started noticing Battletech game modules in hobby stores not that long after starting to watch Robotech, and as with other people the similarity in names and art left me wondering who was ripping off who. (Maybe it was more complicated than that, but of that a little more later...) With what little I could remember from the backs of those packages about the ravages of future war, I tried sketching out a timeline with the thought it might even turn into a story, one that only ran a few centuries into the future and had two sides facing off on a post-apocalyptic Earth. It was a bit later, the story unwritten, that I learned the game was set a full millennium in the future, and extended my timeline only for it to still end up with two sides facing off on a post-apocalyptic Earth. By then, though, there were Battletech novels on the science fiction shelves of bookstores, and I started learning what the real story was...
Expandtech versus tech )

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