First Games Machine

[TordelBack]

Playing the likes of Knightlore, Starquake, Colony, Dizzy and Rex was probably why it was years before I even thought of getting a console...

Same here. In fact, writing completely rubbish games and supposedly homework-assisting utilities for the Acorn Electron kept me busy and away from girls for simply years, and when the muse failed me I copied the bloody things either from the text listings in the magazines or via the hallowed Double Tape Recorder (only ever owned by a friend's older sibling, a choke point on the supply chain), to the point that I became a terrible anti-console snob (in fact, and on-topic, the first and only console I ever bought myself was an old X-Box, which I still divert myself with quite happily). What was the point of a machine if you couldn't mess about under the hood?

For me the great thing about the Home Computer market in the early-mid-80s was the diversity: within my peer group at one point we had access to an Electron and a BBC Micro, an Oric, two flavours of Spectrum, a Vic20 (terrible, terrible machine), a Commodore 64 and a lowly ZX81 (actually great fun to program), with one lonely and probably quote aged Apple IIe in school that boasted the only known printer in existence.  I can still hear the disk drive warming up.   So however limited the opportunities on any one machine, between us we had worlds of novelty.

With reference to the supposed investment our struggling parents made in our technological eductaion, of that little group of owner-operators one is now a bigwig in Sun Microsystems, one was in at the start of Iona Technologies and then went on to run his own operation, and one is a mover and shaker in mobile telecoms networks in the middle east.  Mind you one became a lecturer in Classics,  and then there's me, the runt of the litter, who became a parasite on the buttocks of society.

I blame the Electron.

[GrinningChimera]

First console owned was a Sega Master System. I can still, all these years later, remember playing Aztec Adventure on Christmas morning. In fact, 20 something years on I can even still hum you the music from the first level.

I must have played that game to death. I miss the good old days when all you needed was a d-pad and 2 buttons. None of this kinnect crap or online requirements. Plus them cartridges were built to last. I never had one that couldn't be fixed with a bit of a blow.

[NapalmKev]

First console owned was a Sega Master System. I can still, all these years later, remember playing Aztec Adventure on Christmas morning. In fact, 20 something years on I can even still hum you the music from the first level.

I must have played that game to death. I miss the good old days when all you needed was a d-pad and 2 buttons. None of this kinnect crap or online requirements. Plus them cartridges were built to last. I never had one that couldn't be fixed with a bit of a blow.

Sega Master system was my first games machine also. I remember playing Psycho Fox to absolute death, finding all the secret warps and all that jazz.

I agree about the cartridges. They bounced off walls pretty well and still remained playable. And the instruction books that dedicated a whole page to "how not to treat games cartridge" - do not submerse in water, do not hit with hammer; etc.

Cheers

[ThryllSeekyr]

Because I was sick and away from school a lot during the year of 1982. My grandparents got me a Atari 2600 as a present.....



It came with two joysticks.....



Two paddles.....



and a Combat game. It is a series of skirmish's where you and the other player each had  tank and you had to manoeuvre it around obstacles to get a clear shot at the other player's tank.



There was also similar game with warplanes as well.

Later that year and in the following months and other years my parents and my grandparents brought me other games......

Superman.....



Which I completed on numerous occasions.

Breakout and Super-Breakout to both be played with the paddles.....



I came pretty close to beating this one.

And very reviled E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.....



Which I also completed on numerous occasions and really enjoyed.

I was given some other games like China-Syndrome based on the movie, but nothing like it really.....



Challenge of Nexar you had to shoot at other space-ships before as they flew or floated towards you and you could move the shooting cross-hairs all around the screen and then when you shot them all you would warp to the next level screen.....



I never quite made it to Legion of the Chosen in that Game.

These are the classic Atari games I missed out on.....



Star-Raiders is supposedly the legendary fore-runner to Elite.

I still have the Atari 2600 console to this day in box somewhere wrapped safely in bubble plastic bag with out the joysticks because I ruined them on the C64. It still has the paddles. Sadly I don't think the machine would work with the television sets of today and the games are now no longer anywhere to be found.

[ThryllSeekyr]

In fact, writing completely rubbish games and supposedly homework-assisting utilities for the Acorn Electron kept me busy and away from girls for simply years, and when the muse failed me I copied the bloody things either from the text listings in the magazines.....

I once copied a program from a supplement fill with program for little games written by some well know game writers. It was for the C64 and it was from well known gaming magazine called Computer + Video Games.

Rox-Deluxe written by Lamasofts Jeff "Yak" Minter and it was in the B.A.S.I.C. language. I think it took me nearly a week to copy and I practically wiped from the computer's memory by accident before saving it to a floppy after nearly finishing it before starting all over again.

It worked as well, eventually.

Unlike the small game written by Tony Crowther which in Machine Code and never worked.

It was supposed to be game like Defender.

Which Reminds me I missed out on getting that Atari game as well.

[Albion]

The Atari 2600 was our first. I remember myself, my Dad and my brother taking shifts and having an all day game of Missile Command. 

After that I had a ZX Spectrum that got upgraded to a Spectrum+, then a Sega Mega Drive, a Playstation 1, Playstation 2 and then the Wii.

Now I mostly play games on the iPad and occasionally play on the Wii when the grandsons come round. The Wii is used more for Netflix at the moment.

[JamesC]

Some great art on those old Atari games. Quite imaginative when you look at the actual graphics!

[Professor Bear]

I recall buying games based on their amazing cover artwork alone and thinking it probably took longer to make the artwork than it did the game.  Odd that as games have progressed in visual complexity to finally catch up with the old game covers, actual game covers have become so uninspired and lacking in character.
Although they sell by the buckets now, so maybe people prefer cgi pictures of some bloke holding a gun.

[pictsy]

This forum never ceases to amaze me.  Where are the kids and their XBox 360s, Wiis and Playstation 3s????

[shaolin_monkey]

I blame the Electron.

Solidarity Brother.  My story is almost identical - all my mates had different machines too, BBC Micro, Speccy etc, and they're all doing really well.

I loved my Electron though. Loved it to ferkin bits.  I was programming on it all the time. Over about two years I built up a massive collection of manuals and magazines that taught me everything, which I used as reference constantly. I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up, focussing on computer graphics, which I really had a knack for.

Then, as punishment for not tidying my bedroom when told, my dad threw out the lot. I was incredulous. I sneaked them out of the bin, but my dad found them really quickly, gave me another bollocking, and three them out again.

I was destroyed. I had poured my heart and soul into that machine. I wish I'd been stoic about it, and just started again, but I just felt so shattered I didn't have the heart to spend another two years building it back up.  My dreams of following that path were shattered. 

Bah.

[TordelBack]

I was destroyed. I had poured my heart and soul into that machine. I wish I'd been stoic about it, and just started again, but I just felt so shattered I didn't have the heart to spend another two years building it back up.  My dreams of following that path were shattered. 

Ouch, that's pretty damn awful. I have no such excuse, I'm just too damn slow when it comes to anything like proper programming -  I did a study of commuting patterns by writing unbelievably long macros for a pre-GIS pre-WYSIWYG thing called GIMMS for my final year dissertation in college, and while it eventually worked really well, it genuinely took me the entire year, and was only worth (I think) 15% of of my overall marks.  I remember handing it the day before my final exams and realising that though I had sweated blood all year I hadn't done a tap of work on anything else. That was when I decided programming wasn't for me, even though the department subsequently offered to take me on to do a PhD to expand the project. If it took me a whole a year to do what I did as part of BA dissertation, how long would a doctorate take me!  I had a life to live, man!  Fool that I was.

Must say it was the graphics stuff on the Electron that really had me hooked - my particular sisyphean boulder was writing a game where you operated one of the gunner stations on the Millennium Falcon, blasting away at TIE Fighters which zoomed ever closer.  I could never get it to work properly, probably because I had to keep the redrawing the vectors for quadlaser and the targeting reticules as they moved, as well as changing the line art TIEs constantly as they got larger - no Sprites for me! - and calculate all their relative positions for hits etc., so I imagine the poorly nested code was just grinding the memory down and down with every subsequent loop.  Looking back it was a hell of a thing to try, since Cylon Attack was probably the closest example on the platform (this was before I got hold of Elite!), and it was nothing like as complicated.  But boy did I love animating vector art!

[shaolin_monkey]

A friend of mine and I worked on exactly the same kind of thing! A targeting reticule and a Tie Fighter!  We struggled with the issue of how to move both the reticule and the Tie, until we were seized with a genius idea - the reticule didn't have to move!  Instead we kept it fixed firmly in the middle of the screen and wrote an adjustment to the Tie's movements, so it was dragged closer to the reticule dependent in the movement key you pressed, as well as allowing it the pre-programmed flight path.  This gave the illusion of a reticule homing in on it, which also saved us a headache of coding and memory usage.

It reminds me of the issue programmers had creating a 'Pole Position' style racing game.  The Electron just didn't have the power or memory to redraw the whole frame at every curve of the track.  Instead, they eventually had the genius idea of only redrawing the edges touching the outside of the track itself. Saving so much memory meant we finally got a decent racing game - I think it was called Crazy Biker or something?

I loved the fact you had to think incredibly concisely to get your vision across with such limitations on graphics, processing power and memory. It meant some incredibly inventive thought!

[ThryllSeekyr]

This forum never ceases to amaze me.  Where are the kids and their XBox 360s, Wiis and Playstation 3s????

Of course, I have two out three of those right now.

I have every Playstation console except the latest and the handheld one. I think it's called the Vista. I have also kept all the games for them. Funny thing about the Playstation One is that I brought it not long before Playstation Three came out. I think, I'm not sure. This was way back in 2001 and not long afterwards I brought the Playstation Two on a whim. This would have been within a few months of buying the first one and I since I now have the computer PC and the Playstation Three which I had brought early last year. I have kept these first two consoles along with the Atari 2600 in storage for sentimental reasons. Actually, the Playstation Two has not been put back in it's box yet and is still on the table in my room. Anyway, when I had brought both those early Playstations when I had been living on my own in small rural town on the N.S.W. and Victorian border called Deniliquinn and had worked for seven out of eight months as a labourer in a Abattoir until I could hack it no more and moved to the city of Sydney to look for more work. Cleaner work. This was where I spent the next three years living out of my Ford Ultitlity, in a caravan and then on the streets without work until I started casual window cleaning cars, vans, utes, trucks, campervans, bus's in traffic for spare change while I kept all my gear in a storage room. That was the best job I ever had and also the most lucrative. As I was soon making $70-$80-$100.00 AUD a day while the more window cleaners would be actually making about $250.00 AUD a day.

Then I had to return home and I brought all my gear with me.

Did I mention I sold my Ford Ultility for about $600.00 before I left the caravan park.

Sorry to go off subject, but it's a story I love telling.

I blame the Electron.

Solidarity Brother.  My story is almost identical - all my mates had different machines too, BBC Micro, Speccy etc, and they're all doing really well.

I loved my Electron though. Loved it to ferkin bits.  I was programming on it all the time. Over about two years I built up a massive collection of manuals and magazines that taught me everything, which I used as reference constantly. I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up, focussing on computer graphics, which I really had a knack for.

Then, as punishment for not tidying my bedroom when told, my dad threw out the lot. I was incredulous. I sneaked them out of the bin, but my dad found them really quickly, gave me another bollocking, and three them out again.

I was destroyed. I had poured my heart and soul into that machine. I wish I'd been stoic about it, and just started again, but I just felt so shattered I didn't have the heart to spend another two years building it back up.  My dreams of following that path were shattered. 

Bah.

My dad has been at me to get rid of a lot of now out of date computing magazines (And Girly Magazines) from under the a huge desk in my room. They are all behind this old Television V.C.R. (That's where I keep all my old C64 games.) cabinet on wheels which sits under my desk also. They are all quite dear to me, but dad had told me that keeping stuff piled under my desk like that is too tempting for vermin like rats and cockroaches. So, they all have to go and soon. Because I'll have to justify getting a new computer by cleaning up that corner of the room and my dad and mum were never really happy about me buying and keeping so many porno mags.

So, is anybody interested in piles of computer magazines, and other types of magazines? I will find the shipping costs and send them over to the person who will take good care of them. As I would hate to see them thrown out. I must get rid of them.

Don't worry, they are for free. I just want go see them go to good home, but not too good a home (Porno Mags, remember) and please be patient as I have got around to removing and cataloguing them yet.

As for learning how to program, I was once determined to learn everything I could about B.A.S.I.C. and then perhaps Machine Code, but I was never a student of advanced maths or even any kind of advanced computer programming.

Now languages and everything is in C++ and different now.

Did you know that the game memory that went the original Elite was about the size of what could be fitted inside a small e-mail today?

Speaking of which I had recently won all this from Ebay.....



And this.....



About the acquisition of the original Elite game. Well, all that I can find of the my original copy of the game I had saved up for and purchased back in 1986 was the old almost tattered The Dark Wheel novella. I had found the box cover some time last year in the downstairs shed inside a cupboard in a box of old stuff and fail to remember where I put it afterwards when I brought it upstairs. As for the rest of it, perhaps it's all with the rest of the old C64 games in the cabinet under my desk. Along with disk floppy copy I made of the game. I seemed to have lost the original game disk as well.

Yes, I had a terrible habit of not looking after my things when I was younger and I'm paying for now.

That most recent acquisition of the boxed Elite game with the manual, and other physical media including the Leroy-Help-Guide and this cost me nearly $200.00 AUD after the price went up higher in a bidding duel. $200.00 was my maximum bid.

Funny thing is that as I had shown my winnings on Frontier Forums and the other person who bidded against me recognised the picture of the game with it's Leroy-Help-Guide as the most distinguishing piece of the collection.

So, he contacted me through the forum and told me he was after that game with all it's stuff, as he was collecting Elite memorabilia as reference material for a coffee table book he has been given permission by Frontier Developments (David Braben's new company working on Elite -Dangerous) to produce. He didn't seem cross at me for winning and I wasn't mad at him (Okay, I was alittle) for pushing the price up to nearly $200.00 AUD. He just wanted scans of the game box cover, front and back, a scan of the front of the floppy disk, and a complete scan of the entire Leroy-Help-Guide including the front and back cover. He actually told me he only wants a few pages of the help guide and not the whole book. Though, he has never seen or read this guide and doesn't know which few pages he wants. So, I am scanning the whole book for him. Although, I was a bit reluctant about this at first and told him so. He only has permission from Frontier Development to make this coffee table book and not the author of that help guide. I don't really want to steal or assume credit but, he has offered to give me a mention in the book, if I do this for him. Though, that sounds too good to pass up, I will check first with my older brother as he is a successful lawyer. He should know about these things.

Anyway, I showed this treasure to my father this morning. Telling him this was the original game we had problems with, but eventually succeeded in copying onto another blank floppy disk along long time ago. No, we weren't pirating it. We just wanted a extra copy of the game for frequent usage and worried that the original would be eventually ruined if I kept playing it everyday like I was. So, we eventually managed to copy it with some software called Disk-Dissector Unfortunately, as I had mentioned earlier I had apparently lost the original disk somehow and now only have the copy along with the save disk where all my saved games are kept or it may be in some forgotten plastic floppy disk container somewhere. I do know I put it somewhere for safe keeping after making a copy.

Anyway, as I said, I was showing this new treasure to my father this morning. So he can copy the help guide on his copier. Which only he knows how to use. He takes the box off of me (This was a bad move on my part) and opens it and shoves his fingers and thumbs inside. Getting at the Ship I.D. Chart which was sitting folded on top. My father did some damage to it in his ignorant clumsiness. The philistine oaf. He had left a mark where he had stuck his thumb and bent it in order to lift it out of the game box in order to find the guide. It's okay to bend things as long as they don't get folded over and creased in the process like he had done. I didn't yell at him and I haven't had a argument with dad in years and didn't want to start one now. I just quietly took the box from his grasp and carefully removed the folded chart as I had done twice before by gently tipping out the contents into my other hand. Getting the desired help guide for him to copy. Watching my father like a hawk, to see he wasn't blatantly folding the guide in half. He was bending it a little, but I didn't raise my voice.

Well, the Ship I.D. chart has gone from Very Good to Good in a matter of seconds.

My dad just doesn't understand the concept of Mint, Near Mint, Very Fine, Fine, Very Good, Good and Ruined. I actually go to great lengths he never handles any of my good comics or books.

I should have known better.

As I recall showing my dad a couple of the official souvenir photo guide books regarding the The Hobbit : The Unexpected Journey books late last year. I have been collecting them all as well as the official calendars and I had handed a few of the books to him as he proceeded to thumb and finger through the pages like he was counting dollar bills. He had left noticeable crease marks on the few pages he had thumbed through. He also picked up my official calendar from a table one day and did the exact same thing.

He's got no idea about how fragile paper and photo-paper really is.

I had got my older brother a large bumper book on the Australian Cricket Team nearly two years ago as Christmas present. As he loves the game and used to be cricket captain in his younger days himself. Dad once had a look through the book before I gave it to my brother and at the time he had been handling and eating a orange and put sticky finger marks all over some of the photo pages.

Despite this, I do respect him and won't yell back.

Anyway, I'm watching my dad handle the help-guide right now. He is copying it. Damn he is bending the cover a little while handling it.

Philistine 

  He should perhaps have credit for scanning the book 

P.S. The poster, the Space-Ship I.D. chart was already slightly damaged when I got it. Not my fault. The photo side of the paper where the Transporter ship is picture is badly chipped away. I have now noticed from further examination of the photo (Shown above) that the original owner had provided. He had carefully hidden this defect by placing the game box cover over/in front of it.

The sneaky devil 

[ThryllSeekyr]

No I was wrong, on closer inspection of that photo, the defect was not hidden at all. It is quite clearly shown just in front of where the box cover is standing.

That was my bad.

[I, Cosh]

I blame the Electron.

Solidarity Brother.  My story is almost identical - all my mates had different machines too, BBC Micro, Speccy etc, and they're all doing really well.

Another Electron owner whose progressive but less than wealthy parents bought into the educational hype. I had mine from the age of around eleven to 17 or 18 when people finally stopped writing games for it but, as mentioned elsewhere, only after wringing astounding levels performance and sophistication from its miniscule interior.

My dad and I also spent many long hours attempting to grasp the rudiments of programming. My lack of any artistic ability meant graphics were never something I invested much time in, so hats off. Overly complex D&D character generators? Now that's a different story entirely. Not sure how much help any of that was, but my day job now does involve a modicum of programming.

Despite being a keen games fan, I didn't personally own any console until the PS2, relying instead on friends and flatmates for my Amiga, Megadrive and PS1 thrills.