Is this sad or what?

[leech]

So I recently upgraded my computer....

I now have a AMD 64 3200+ winchester, 1gb of PC3200 Corsair memory, a eVGA 6800 GT and what do I do?

PLAY 8 BIT GAMES!!!

Was playing Jumpman yesterday, never did beat that game.

A question. Anyone remember if Ultima 3 and 4 were in black and white on the Atari 8 bit? All the emulators I've tried show them both as being black and white, and I clearly recall Ultima 3 having red water and Ultima 4 having blue. What emulators would everyone suggest?

I have tried Atari800 (linux), Atari++ (linux), Atari800win (windows (how could you guess).

I also was going to give Ace a try (linux) but I don't think I ever got around to setting that one up. All of them so far that I have tried displayed Ultima 4 as black and white (and I'm pretty sure that in Jumpman the diamonds were white.)

Leech

[agallag]

Love your avatar. Bruce Lee was an awesome game. Used to play it all the time on my Commodore 64.

[High_Jumbllama]

Nope. Sad was a friend at college's girfriend playing Solitaire all day on his brand new 486DX4 100 and even sadder is seeing some do that today on a P4.

I really want to install BOINC on these machines.

[Marshmallowman]

Don't forget to force as much AA as your card can handle, it makes those older games look slighly better.

As I recall the ultima stuff I played in my atari days were colour(may be thinking ST).

Also if you run an atari 400/800 at the uber resolution of 320x240 you have will be forced to use monochrome. (not counting the artifacting technique)

[spadnos]

Originally posted by Marshmallowman
Don't forget to force as much AA as your card can handle, it makes those older games look slighly better.

As I recall the ultima stuff I played in my atari days were colour(may be thinking ST).

Also if you run an atari 400/800 at the uber resolution of 320x240 you have will be forced to use monochrome. (not counting the artifacting technique)

Well - you could only use two colors per line, but they could be changed on every line using an interrupt. That was how all those fancy high-res "rolling shaded tubes" demos worked. (disregard this if that's what you meant by "the artifacting technique" )

- Steve

[Paddy]

I loved Bruce Lee on my Amstrad..

[leech]

:-) Bruce Lee rocked. Byock and I will walk around and just go "wah, wah" like the Chubby Green Yamo would do when you pushed down on the controller. Which made me think of putting it on as my avatar. (maybe now I should animate it...)

If I recall correctly, one of the first games (if not the only game) to use the 'high' resolution was Autoduel.

Oh, and while talking about old games with my brother, I realized that iD isn't the one that came up with or even had the first First Person Shooter... well, ok, it wasn't what we'd call an FPS today, but it was First (Pod) Person and you would shoot stuff.... and it was 360 degrees movement...

Ball blazer!!! That game just rocked! I still have the music in my head!

I'll see if I can play around with the res and such to get color in the Ultimas. I did remember the hi-res being only two colors.

Leech

[leech]

Sweet! That was indeed what I needed to enable, was artifacting mode. In the Atari800 emulator, under Artifacting mode is listed; none, blue/brown 1, blue/brown 2, GTIA and CTIA.

Blue/brown 2 was the proper colors. Otherwise the water was brown and the forest/ground was blue...CTIA even made it green.

Now to play with some other games. I wonder if part of that was why Ultima 3 had off colors when I played it back in the dark ages....

Leech

[Marshmallowman]

There was one even ealier it was called something like flag capture, and it was proper 3d , however it could only every run at half screen size, but it did have a two player split screen mode. and ran very smooth(as i recall with rose tinted glasses)
It predated ball blazer by at least 2 years, and blew my socks off at the time.

Ball blazer used paralax scrolling stuff, and turned 90 degrees at a time, not proper 3d , but a very fun game

The arifacting techique involved picking the exactly pixels spacing between pixels. It relied on the fact that pxels on TV screens blurred and merged the rgb pixel bits for a single pixel. Very dodgy and would proably not work on modern TV's

[Jon P. Inghram]

LoL, just saw your new avatar while reading the new PCI-e card thread and couldn't help but laugh, I remember playing Bruce Lee on the C=64 too.

[Elie]

I used to have a Sinclair ZX Spectrum + and it was great and the time, but still liked the commodore games a bit better.
The prgramming was another story LOL

[leech]

Originally posted by Marshmallowman
There was one even ealier it was called something like flag capture, and it was proper 3d , however it could only every run at half screen size, but it did have a two player split screen mode. and ran very smooth(as i recall with rose tinted glasses)
It predated ball blazer by at least 2 years, and blew my socks off at the time.

Ball blazer used paralax scrolling stuff, and turned 90 degrees at a time, not proper 3d , but a very fun game

The arifacting techique involved picking the exactly pixels spacing between pixels. It relied on the fact that pxels on TV screens blurred and merged the rgb pixel bits for a single pixel. Very dodgy and would proably not work on modern TV's

Now I'm curious as to what this flag capture game is. I recall playing one called... oh crap, can't recall the name either, I think it was banner something... but it was two player, split screen, but it wasn't 3D at all. That's going to bug me, I'll have to ask my brother what that game was, since we used to play it all the time. It was quite fun.

Ball Blazer sure looked like it was pure 360 degrees. What about Dimension X? There were a few others. A great classic (which if I knew how to program, I'd remake) is Rescue on Fractulus. That game rocked.

Leech

[Nappe1]

leech: as far as I can tell, that's not sad.

I already passed the phase where you are now: playing old games with emulators. I am now on next step: I had to buy C64 back!
here's my "hardware":



(picture is missing around 300 floppies. I just placed few boxes as example. I don't have much special HW, but X1541 adapter, which allows you to connect 1541 on stadard PC LPT port for disk image transfers and Video port kit, that gives standard composite out and Monoaureal sound output. If I have time, adding 10Mbps Ethernet and 16MB memory expansion could be possible in future. Kontiki (multi threaded OS for 8 bit cpus with full TCP/IP stack.) runs a bit slow right now.)

and I love it. No emulator can replace the real thing.

[az]

OK well I'm not quite in the same league, but I just finished UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-Com: UFO Defense for you non-europeans) yesterday

AZ

[leech]

Sweet, actually the sad fact is, I AM with you there, Nappe1. I was telling my brother that I'm wanting to connect my old Atari 8-bit(s) up to his 55" widescreen TV. Would that be about a centimeter per pixel or something? I have a 800XL, 130XE.. and somewhere I have a XEGS as well. I'd have to dig... I have at least 4 floppy drives as well, even the infamous IndusGT and the LOUD 810. These are unmodded though. Maybe I should get that USB cartridge for 8-bits.

I think we're just sick in the head!

Leech