Tag Archives: nostalgia

My computer and video game history, an abridged edition

0

Posted on by

Inspired by a thread on Broken Forum (and an idea I had for a post ages ago) here is a nearly complete list of every video game console and computer system I have owned, with dates (where I can remember).

The Computers

1982: Atari 400. With membrane keyboard! This was really just a video game machine for me but it was awesome. It came with four (!) joystick ports, took cartridges and provided far better sound and graphics than any comparable video game system back in the day. I almost considered buying the kit that replaced the membrane keyboard with actual keys. Instead I held out until I got my next system.

[IMG]
Open the hatch, insert Star Raiders cartridge, lose rest of day.

1984: Commodore 64. The C64 shipped in 1982 but it cost $600 then and I couldn’t afford it. By 1984 it was selling in huge numbers and had been reduced to a mere $200. The one I got in the early part of 1984 was one of a notoriously unreliable batch (I recall about a 25% or so failure rate) and had a bad keyboard. The replacement worked fine, though and having a keyboard you could touch-type on was neat. This marked the first time I bought productivity software for a computer, a $130 word processor that I’ve long forgotten the name of. On the C64 you could create files about 2.5 pages long before you had to use dot commands to chain the files together for printing. It taught me brevity. I still have some of the data disks. I wonder if they would still be readable? In addition to being my first computer used for non-gaming stuff, it was also the first that I got peripherals for, namely an Epson dot matrix printer (designed to misfeed paper as soon as you turned your back on it), the 1084S color monitor and the infamous 1541 floppy drive. The first game I bought on floppy disk was Lode Runner. I actually picked it up before I even had the C64 and marveled over its floppy diskness. This was also a game machine, of course, with most games running from floppy and the best ones making use of Epyx’s Fast Load cartridge.

I still recall playing Infocom games and knowing I’d successfully figured out a puzzle because the 1541 drive would start clattering away (the game apparently kept the YOU HAVE DIED moves stored in memory).

[IMG]
Not shown: 1541 floppy drive a.k.a. Is It Supposed to Make That Noise?

1987: Atari 520ST. I had it with the monochrome monitor, so it was for Serious Business. I had WordPerfect 4.1 and WordWriter ST. I still played Phantasie on it, though. I eventually got the color monitor and tried and disliked King’s Quest III. I still remember where this computer sat in my apartment on Nelson Street in Vancouver and even recvall writing specific stories with it. This was the first computer where I had dual floppy drives. I was clearly moving up.

[IMG]
A built-in floppy drive, a 2-button mouse and numeric keypad. Future: now!

1989: Amiga 500. Ah, the Amiga. I loved this computer. It felt sexy and modern and had tons of games and lots of other interesting and useful software for it. I had ProWrite, excellence and I think maybe one other word processor. Some people collected games, I collected word processors. I stuck mainly to ProWrite. I eventually upgraded the Amiga (my first computer upgrades ever) to AmigaDOS 2.1, 3 MB of ram and a 52 MB hard drive. This let me call up ProWrite nigh-instantly. Black Crypt also installed to the HD, which was nice. I kept the Amiga until I finally made the jump to PC and to this day regret selling it. Although pictured below, I did not have an external floppy drive for it.

[IMG]
Like the Atari ST but better.

1994: PC with Athlon 486-40Mhz CPU and 4 MB of ram. I eventually added a 2x CD-ROM drive to it so I could play Myst.

It starts blurring after this but along the way I had:

- Pentium II 120Mhz. I mostly remember playing Quake II on this with a Diamond Monster 3D video card (Voodoo 1 add-on card).
- Celeron 500 (for about two weeks before it got stolen from my apartment — three days before Christmas, ho ho ho)
- Athlon XP 1800. This was clearly a better system over equivalent Pentiums at the time.
- Athlon 64 (first 64-bit system, though it only ran 32-bit Windows XP)
- Intel Core 2 Duo 6850 with Nvidia GTX 8800. Back to Intel. I still have this system, though it is just parts at the moment.
- Intel Core i5 2500K (quad core). This is my current rig and it dates back to January 2011. 8 GB ram, Nvidia GTX 580, Windows 7. Pretty standard now but still runs everything nicely.

Video game systems

Atari 2600. It was still called the VCS when I got it in 1980. I probably had 30+ games on the system (I had a list somewhere at some point) and favorites would include: Adventure (duck dragons!), Superman, Video Pinball, Canyon Bomber, Circus Atari, Night Driver, Demon Attack (which I thought looked amazing for a 2600 game), Kaboom!, Asteroids (a surprisingly decent port) and a bunch of others I’m forgetting. For its primitive hardware, the system had some fairly captivating, if obviously simple, games.

And it came with two joysticks and two paddle controllers. That’d be $150-180 extra these days!

Intellivision. I didn’t know who George Plimpton was but I knew I had to have the Intellivision. I got it on cheap thanks to my brother’s wife’s employee discount at Woolworth’s. I never had as many games with it as I did with the 2600 but some were classics, even if that thumbwheel proved to be less than optimal. The Intellivision is also where I (more or less) learned the rules of American football. Favorites include Microsurgeon, Skiing (falling was especially painful), Armor Battle, Sea Battle, Astrosmash (this was almost zen-like in the way you could keep racking up a score as the shapes tumbled down from the top of the screen) and Major League Baseball (Yer Out!)

From the era when fake woodgrain was on everything.

Atari 5200. I had this around the same timeframe as the Atari 400, which was appropriate, because the 5200 was pretty much a 400 re-purposed as a game console. The joysticks were wacky non-centering analog things that worked great for games like Missile Command and not so great for games that required precise changes in direction, like Ms Pacman. One of the neat things was how the system would switch to a blank screen when you turned it off to switch cartridges, instead of blasting you with the sound of a static-filled TV display. I never had many games for this, mostly some arcade ports but it was a decent machine. The cartridges were massive.

This sleek design still holds up 30 years later. That joystick…not so much.

ColecoVision. This had the potential to be the ultimate console but it came out just before the whole market crashed in 1983. I still enjoyed it for what it was: a machine that consciously improved in many ways over its predecessors. The joysticks were better than the 5200′s, the keypad and buttons better than Intellivision. Graphically, it offered the closest to arcade-style graphics at the time. It also had an awesome pack-in game: Donkey Kong (this was before Nintendo locked it up forever). Most of the well-known arcade hits were already licensed to other companies so Coleco had to go with more of a B-list but there were some excellent games among them, if less known: Venture, Looping, a Smurf game that featured so-so gameplay but astonishing graphics for 1982, Carnival, Lady Bug and Mr. Do! The load screen was annoyingly long — apparently in an attempt to get the ColecoVision name permanently embedded in young and impressionable minds.

Kind of cheap-looking but the games were good!

After the ColecoVision I turned to computers for the next 20 years. It wouldn’t be until 2003 that I would pick up an Xbox. Three years later I got an Xbox 360 but found I used it so little I ended up selling it off. Today the Xbox is still hooked up to the TV and dusted off occasionally. I have a Nintendo DS but it has largely sat idle since I got an iPhone last year. It’s so much easier to not have to switch cartridges around. The DS is a better platform for crossword puzzle games, though.

The official ‘old enough to remember Pong when it was new’ post

0

Posted on by

Let’s Play PONG.

In 1973 the population of Duncan, British Columbia was about 5000. Today, nearly 40 years later, it is still around 5000. Duncan is a small town, but it struggles to maintain that small town feel with outlying municipalities springing up subdivisions like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The tiny footprint of the city — all of two traffic lights on the Island Highway as you pass through — is being stamped with every kind of franchise imaginable, from Burger King to Home Depot to casinos and multiple McDonald’s.

But it wasn’t always like this. In the early 1970s the outlying area around the city was largely undeveloped. You could ride your bike (with banana seat, of course) on trails that ran for miles along the Cowichan River. The annual exhibition took place on agricultural land that existed within the city limits. When that first McDonald’s opened in 1978 it signaled the end of an era.

In 1973 one of the popular local eateries was an Italian restaurant called Romeo’s. To my young eyes it was a place of mystery and intrigue, an ‘adult’ restaurant with subdued lighting that made me think of a coal mine (the aesthetics were more appreciated when I got a bit older). The small lobby area, like the rest of the place, was dimly lit and had everything you’d expect — a coat rack, some seats, the stand where the hostess would greet you and take you in. But one day we went in and something new was there. It was a machine unlike any I’d seen before.

I’d heard of Pong and now I was staring directly at it: a cocktail table-style cabinet housing a TV screen, with controls on two sides that consisted of simple knobs. The surface of the table was glass. I watched the strange phosphorous glow of the display, simple lines and a small square of light gently arcing back and forth between two rectangular blocks or ‘paddles’. This was like something from Star Trek. I had to try it!

25 cents for one play. In 1973 and to someone who had yet to hit double digits, 25 cents was a lot of money — more than the cost of a whole candy bar! I rarely had any money on me. My older brother did, though. He regarded me as his personal slave, so it seemed unlikely he’d give or loan me the money to try it out. To my good fortune it turned out that Pong required two players. My brother would pay then ‘force’ me to play against him, keeping the hierarchy of owner/slave intact. Win-win, as far as I was concerned.

I don’t remember how that first game went. I’m going to say I won due to that intuitive little kid video game sense that so many little kids seem to have. What I do remember is how the simple act of turning that knob, seeing the paddle on the TV move in reaction and then hit that little square of light was magic. Magic.

A few years later we got a home Pong unit. My brother, who liked to tinker with electronics, managed to take the controls that were hardwired to the console and break them out into handheld units, allowing us to play without being three feet in front of the TV. We still played sitting three feet in front of the TV because that’s what you did but we had the freedom to move if we wanted to.

Pong led to the first video game system I owned myself — no negotiating with the big brother required! — the Atari VCS (later renamed the 2600). It didn’t come with Pong. The new world of video games moved quickly and already Pong was passé. It didn’t matter. Those early days of ‘electronic tennis’ had already confirmed that I had a new lifelong hobby, one I didn’t even know existed until I saw that glowing screen in Romeo’s when I was nine years old.

(reposted from a thread on Broken Forum)

Exhibit C on why I do not write poetry

0

Posted on by

(You can see Exhibits A and B here and here, respectively.)

Back in ancient times I wrote poetry because I had to.

Which is to say in my college creative writing class one term consisted of writing poetry. Though we had computers even back then (with snazzy dot matrix printers) I chose to write most of my poetry on one of the clunky typewriters in the library. The typewriters were all in a sealed room for obvious reasons. Just one of those 50 pound behemoths clacked thunderously, let alone a room of them. With my typing style (three fingers, strongly) the noise level was that much higher. BANG BANG BANG POETRY.

This is a scanned copy of the original. An unfinished draft of another poem called The Island is visible on the other side of the paper. As with most of my poetry, Pretty Bunnies and Happy Flowers was written in a single session with little thought and no attention paid to rhyme, meter or really anything that a poet should pay attention to. It was also not one of my submitted projects, probably because I knew better than to cultivate an unwanted reputation as a weirdo by letting others read it. Twenty-three years later the poem strikes me as less creepy and more stupid, a mockery of ‘serious’ poetry, which was my secret way of admitting I couldn’t write the stuff worth beans!

Travel with me back in time to Saturday, January 24th, 1987

0

Posted on by

Here, for your amusement, is my entire journal entry for January 24, 1987. I was 22 years old. As the journal was handwritten I often scribbled footnotes at the bottom of the page or in any other available space. I have attempted to mimic the effect here as best I can.

The most amazing thing about this and so many of the journal entries is how insanely thorough they are. It seems if I sneezed, I wrote it down. Also, do skates come in different sizes than shoes or do feet keep growing into your 40s or what? Because there’s no way I’d fit into a size 7½ these days (I wear size 8½).

***

Saturday, January 24, 1987. 11:33 p.m. A bad night is better than no night at all.

I blissfully, though (oddly) somewhat guiltily, slept in till around eleven this morning¹. After I got up I moved around the apartment lazily, carefully ignoring anything that needed to be done (laundry, dishes, etc. etc. and especially etc.)

Finally I sleepwalked to Pacific Centre, browsed for awhile and came home around five p.m. I ate a gourmet bachelor’s meal (Kraft Dinner and sausage) then went to the Youth Group meeting, even though I knew there was a skating party and that I probably wouldn’t go and would end up just sitting at home alone with nothing to write about.

But some people did show up, including Alex, who had obviously forgotten it was the skating party tonight². After a bit of talk and an umbrella demonstration courtesy of Don, five of us piled into Wayne’s scary old car and headed off for the Kitsilano Arena, secure in the knowledge that we were all fairly inept on ice skates. I didn’t wear a seatbelt (couldn’t find it) and that’s usually when I’m in a car accident. Tonight I lucked out and we arrived safely.

After forsaking my shoes and donning a pair of 7½ skates, I took my first few steps on the ice. I didn’t fall. Good. Now if I could maintain this consistency for two more hours, I’d be fine. I glanced over to the metal pushy things (hell if I can remember what they’re called) but decided I was approximately 15 years past the age where you can still use them without suffering through extreme embarrassment. Fortunately I did not fall during the entire evening. I almost hit the ice a few times but tried to disguise my slip ups as dramatic flourishes. I was not very convincing.

Wayne fell. So did Alex. Oddly, they both fell (at separate times) right in front of me. Am I a jinx or was it just a coincidence and they were actually so nauseated by the AWFUL music on the PA that they just plain fell over in disgust? (The music was 90% of all the country music you never, never wanted to hear.)

After some square dancing on ice (featuring a bearded man in a large dress similar to a can-can dancer), we abandoned the rink for the lounge upstairs. Much to my chagrin, no one, save for Peter and Wayne, from the group stayed. I stayed — for a few minutes, then decided to trot down to West Broadway to catch the bus. Lo, there was Alex!

We rode the bus together and walked a couple blocks up Davie, to where we had to turn off to get to his place. We talked about the group and he told me how it was difficult fitting in because he’s not very outgoing. That’s a problem (?) we both share. I asked him if he had any plans on doing anything. He said no, which was fine because I didn’t really want to go to a bar or similar establishment. So we went our separate ways and here I am thinking (and writing) about him.

A part of me (yes, I’ve set up a great joke for all the perverts out there) is attracted to him sexually but mostly the attraction is deeper, more substantial, something wildly profound like that. (author’s note — 25 years later I can verify that if you reverse the types of attraction listed here you’d have a more accurate picture) I haven’t found out anything about him yet that I don’t like (which is the quickest way for the bubble to burst. Imagine meeting someone you really liked only later to discover something downright putrid about them — such as they smoke or go to the bars a lot, two things I’d put on my list of “turn-offs”, right after nuclear war and static cling). But it’s too early to get a clear picture so I shall say no more (and besides, this isn’t supposed to be a diary. I’ve already divulged WAY TOO MUCH personal-type stuff. Tomorrow it’s going to be nothing but financial reports and stock market predictions).

RANDOM NOTES: I’m liking Gaudi more and more. It may be APP’s best album since Eye in the Sky. My laundry is threatening to slither out of its bag and attack me, so I’ll do it tomorrow. Also, the Great Canadian Dishes Saga will be concluded. Watch as Mr. Fork and Mrs. Knife go for a naughty dip plum-naked in a sink full of dirty utensils. Thrill to the excitement of plates clinking together underwater!

Hmm. It would appear I’ve run out of viable subjects to discuss. Perhaps I’ll say goodnight now.

Goodnight.

Log off: 12:23 a.m.

¹ this sentence deserves some sort of award for being so hideously, horrifically and otherwise badly structured.
² I had asked him previously if he was going and, as Mike crudely put it, he wasn’t exactly “shit hot” on the idea. I discovered he had not skated for 13 years moments before we hit the ice. This, perhaps, explained his lack of unsuppressable excitement.

Me: 1974 and 1975

0

Posted on by

These two images were taken a year apart, the first in July 1974 and the second in July 1975. I was 10 and 11 years old, respectively.

In the first photo I am at Disneyland, standing in front of Monstro, the puppet-swallowing whale from Pinocchio that serves as the entrance for the Storybook Land canal boats ride. Even as a little kid the ride was cool because the miniature models work on the same level as model trains, slot car racers and other things shrunk way down in scale. To a kid — to a boy, well, to this boy at any rate — these things take on a certain kind of magical quality when made miniature.

And speaking of cool, look at the self-assured pose I’m striking, as if to say, “Yeah, that’s right, I’ve got it, baby.” All while ignoring the fact that my jeans are several inches too short. What can I say? I was growing.

In the second photo I am at the San Diego Zoo, dressed remarkably similar to the year before. And look how I’ve grown! This time I am fitting the jeans a bit better. Perhaps by then my mom was buying ahead of the curve. This picture also reveals the early stages of my Big Hair, a phase that I wish I could go back in time and apply George Lucas-style after-the-fact special effects to because my Big Hair was also Bad Hair. Try telling a kid his hair looks ridiculous and his answer will likely be a thumbs up and “Right on!” As I type this my head is completely shaved.

The most noteworthy thing in the picture has to be the strange grip I have on that poor semi-domesticated animal. Am I trying to choke it? Preparing to kiss it? There are no good answers here. The little girl in front of me is wisely beating a hasty retreat. Perhaps I am trying to stop the animal from going through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door behind us, to keep it from getting into trouble. Yeah, that must be it. Not the choking. Or the kissing.

Lands of Lore: no laughing matter (Get it? Get it?!)

0

Posted on by

Good Old Games is in the midst of its 50% holiday sale and I took the opportunity to pick up a game I had on my first PC back in the olden days of 1994 when PCs still came with floppy drives and monitors were massive 14 inch wonders.

That game is Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos and when I first had it I made it all the way to the climactic battle against the evil Scotia but never quite finished the game. I’m not sure why. It may have been that I ended up getting a new PC and moving saved game files was sometimes a tricky thing back then. Or it could have been an obscure, game-stopping bug that was never patched (that was also a tricky thing back then. I still recall 1998′s Baldur’s Gate as being the only computer game I owned that truly and utterly defeated me. It would consistently crash 10-15 minutes in no matter what I did. I eventually gave up and shipped it off to a friend who, of course, played it without issue). Whatever the reason, I didn’t complete the game and used this as a handy excuse to justify the nostalgia in picking it up, knowing full well the chances of me completing it now were pretty darn slim.

Much to my surprise, once I set the game to windowed mode and shrank it down to 800×600 it ended up not looking too bad. The pixelated graphics are quite acceptable when shrunk down appropriately. Even better, the actual game is is easy to pick up. The interface is clean and straightforward and the copious voice work helps to compensate where the graphics falter. For example, most signs are just a bunch of VGA scribbles (unreadable) but clicking on one results in your party leader reading it aloud in a crisp tone. Handy!

I still don’t know how far I’ll get. As you can see in the shot below I am just starting out and only have one of the eventual three party members. At this point I’ve solved one simple puzzle, beat up an attempted thief, beat up a mean boar and had the castle guards tell me to get lost. Not bad but not exactly saving the world — yet!

I’ll follow up within a month’s time to report on whether the purchase (a whopping $2.99) boiled down to an hour or so of play or whether I’ve actually made real progress. Odds are it will be the former but every once in a while you can go back.

1979 (not The Smashing Pumpkins song)

0

Posted on by

Here’s a photo of myself, my cousin Dan and some midget dressed up as Mickey Mouse. Those red pants with the big white buttons always bugged me. That may be why I’m not smiling, because I’m thinking how much those stupid giant buttons are bugging me. Dan is holding a pack of cigarettes. Okay, maybe not. I believe his t-shirt is a depiction of birds in flight whereas mine is a groovy rainbow-colored advertisement for Zion National Park, which was a pretty cool place, even for a relatively lazy out-of-shape kid like myself (I was 14 at the time the picture was taken).

Dan’s big smile is ironic because he came down with a nasty 24 hour flu bug that same day and threw up in the Circle-Vision theater as it was playing the film “America the Beautiful”. As far as I know he was neither making a politcal statement nor trying to start an international incident. He was just throwing up.

I was going to recount some of the highlights of 1979 but the Wikipedia page on the year is entirely depressing. McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal and smallpox was eradicated. Other than that it appears 1979 mostly sucked.

Also, that is hair on my head, not some small furry animal.

 

I’d buy that for $18.99

0

Posted on by

It was 24 years ago that I bought my first CD. It cost $18.99 and I got it at Duncan Radio & Electronics, which according to Google still exists as Duncan Electronics. Given the move to big box stores and the nature of change, I am astonished this little store has apparently made it well into the 21st century.

That CD was Songs From the Big Chair by Tears For Fears. I still have the disc today, though it’s actually a reprint with bonus songs. I am a bit surprised that the format hasn’t been replaced by something else in the quarter century that it’s been around. Oh, there have been a few attempts — the Super Audio CD and DVD Audio come to mind — but neither gained any traction, probably because a) the average person couldn’t hear a difference and b) the discs were the same format as CDs, which again leads a lot of non-technophiles to conclude “How could it be better?”

But the CD has been effectively replaced in many ways by the digital music file, typically the MP3 (or MP4/AAC format that Apple uses on iTunes). I normally kept my MP3 purchases to a few one-offs that I had a nostalgic hankering for but when Apple removed the DRM from most purchases earlier this year and doubled the bitrate from 128 to 256 (which is close enough to CD quality than anyone but an audiophile is likely to be satisfied), I started buying whole albums online. I do miss the physical media mainly due to the absence of liner notes (some albums include a PDF file which includes them, which is nice) but on the plus side,  I can get an album in a few minutes with no travel and typically pay less, as well.

I still hate that godawful faux brushed metal look on iTunes, though. Apple’s interfaces tend to be sublime or pretty awful. iTunes would fall into the latter category.