First Games Machine

[TordelBack]

Beautiful artefacts those, TS - who knows where my own old versions are?  And don't be too hard on your Dad: books, toys and such things exist to be used, with all the wear that entails, not safely locked away from smudgey fingers.

[Tiplodocus]

Overly complex D&D character generators? Now that's a different story entirely.

Yeah - I wrote Character generators and Treasure generators for D&D. I got the WHOLE of the players manual (every table and chart and stat and shopping list and guided you through the whole character generation) into the feeble 48K on offer on the Spectrum. I even added a user defined pause at the start just to ensure that the random numbers were genuinely random.

Growing up, the family had an ATARI 2600 (I think) and used to rent games for it from the local video shop. Loved the Empire Strikes Back one and an Indiana Jones one (which I tried to recreate on the Spectrum).

Naturally I also wrote my own version of Space Invaders (but with Tie Fighters and X-Wing), a Death Star Trench run thing (where I simply used the FLASH command to simulate the trench whizzing by) and a version of a fantastic arcade game I once played where you were a pig firing arrows at foxes who were trying to fly up a cliff in balloons so they could drop a boulder on your head.

I then went on to do Computer Science at University (and for years was in software development). Interesting to see that Tiny Tips covered a lot of our first year syllabus while he was in Primary 7.

But the first CONSOLE I owned and bought outright was a NINTENDO 64.  This had SUPER MARIO 64 (genius), PILOT WINGS 64 (genius) and SHADOWS OF THE EMPIRE (more like SHITE OF THE EMPIRE but the Hoth levels were fun). Along with an import cart of Goldeneye so the whole set up cost me around £700 - which 20 years ago was some amount of beans.

[Dandontdare]

Overly complex D&D character generators? Now that's a different story entirely.

Yeah - I wrote Character generators and Treasure generators for D&D. I got the WHOLE of the players manual (every table and chart and stat and shopping list and guided you through the whole character generation) into the feeble 48K on offer on the Spectrum. I even added a user defined pause at the start just to ensure that the random numbers were genuinely random.

My mate got his computer science O level largely by creating a D&D random gem generator for the Spectrum. He also some good money helping a local games developer - when I say good money I mean a  couple of hundred, but when you're 15 and it's 1984, that made him the richest kid in class!

[Tiplodocus]

Yeah - I wrote Character generators and Treasure generators for D&D. I got the WHOLE of the players manual (every table and chart and stat and shopping list and guided you through the whole character generation) into the feeble 48K on offer on the Spectrum. I even added a user defined pause at the start just to ensure that the random numbers were genuinely random.
...
Naturally I also wrote my own version of Space Invaders (but with Tie Fighters and X-Wing), a Death Star Trench run thing (where I simply used the FLASH command to simulate the trench whizzing by) and a version of a fantastic arcade game I once played where you were a pig firing arrows at foxes who were trying to fly up a cliff in balloons so they could drop a boulder on your head.

Having re-read this, i do wonder why on earth I seem to be filling out spreadsheets for a living. I used to be quite creative...

[TordelBack]

My mate got his computer science O level largely by creating a D&D random gem generator for the Spectrum. He also some good money helping a local games developer...

I could have used his help and all.  My own D&D character-and-treasure generators* were a bloody disaster.  The Electron's RND function was (in the way of these things) not random at all, but reset to the same sequence of numbers every time you switched it on.  There was a way of looking up the internal clock to start the sequence at different times and thus 'randomise' it, but I'd almost given up on the whole thing by the time I discovered it.



*I was 18 before I did it with a lady person.

[Devons Daddy]

My father bought a pong machine from Tandy. Circa 1978/79
Black and white but damn it was awesome!!!

Led me upon my trail of constant gaming as soon as I could afford such things myself.

[Radbacker]

mmm, I'm pretty sure it was one of those Multi Pong type machines first, you know Football, Tennis, shooting Gallery all in built.  Then we got a Atari VCS, wood grain 6 switch version for xmas in 82, ah I loved that thing and I don't care what anybody says ET was a good game, it must have been I finished it several times.
My first computer was a TRS80 Color Computer 1 (CoCo1) (note the US spelling, it was an import machine similar to your Dragons but had wonky colour on our TV system (PAL) but still worked) , It was a modded up beast of a machine, 64K upgraded from 4k, extended MS Basic we had a Disk Drive (which cost my dad a fortune and had to be imported from the US and converted to our power system to work) and buckets of games (though most were rip offs, like Gantlet(Gauntlet), Scrumble(Scramble) though it did have a really good official version of Zaxxon).  I also typed in a hell of a lot of listings from Rainbow (US Tandy CoCo Mag) and even started to learn basic but found programing to be just too much effort. 
My first machine I brought myself was a second hand Master System with about 15 games, I delivered junk mail to save for that and then I brought A MegaDrive on release. 
I love old game systems (I collect now, all the systems I wanted but couldn't get when i was younger and generally anything I can find at a good price) and sitting in the cabinet next to me right now I have Atari 2600, Master Syetm 2, 2 x Megadrive (an original and a Megadrive 2 which is for my Mega CD 2), Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, 2 x NES (Grey Box original and a Dog Bone type), Super NES, N64, Game Cube, Wii, Original Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance SP, DS, Amstrad CPC464 (green monitor damn it)de and joy a Vectrex.  All these systems work and most have lots of games but a few (Mega CD) I'm always on the look out for more.

CU Radbacker