vga256

vga256, 8 days ago (edited 5 days ago) to gaming

i'm always surprised at how overlooked Inherit the Earth is by the adventure gaming crowd.

i can understand why: it doesn't fit cleanly into the sierra-lucasarts design dichotomy, all of the characters are animals/"morphs", and the game switches between isometric and theatrical perspectives constantly.

all of those reasons alone are enough to make me enjoy an adventure game. but what stands out to me today is just how unique it all feels. the gameplay freely moves between mystery, exploration, treasure hunt and social squabbles without falling too deeply into the genre traps that have plagued adventure games for decades

even after three decades i'm surprised every time at how fascinating this little world is. i wish the dreamer's guild and talin/david joiner had be given more time and money to make games like this.

edit: he's got some very touching blog posts about his days building ITE and Faery Tale Adventure which I linked to here:
https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/110840512207550271

#adventuregames #retrogaming #dosgaming

vga256, 9 days ago (edited 6 days ago) to IBM

time for fairly obscure canadian retrocomputing history

IBM Home Computing seems to have been a canada-only chain of retail stores that sold IBM products. it didn't last long here - maybe 5-10 years - before it disappeared in the early 2000s. we had a single location in downtown Edmonton City Centre Mall in the mid-90s.

it wasn't the place to go for the best deals on hardware and software. everything was sold at retail prices, and i remember seeing very few sales. i remember buying my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold at the downtown location as a first-year university student for the princely sum of $300.

as you can see in the last photo - buying an IBM in 1994 was a major investment. you could buy three used cars at the time for less than a pentium desktop. 😬

does anyone else remember these retail stores? did they exist in the US, or was it a canadian chain?

update: according to this page, there were 29 stores in canada
https://en.everybodywiki.com/IBM_Home_Computing_Stores

and it did indeed close chainwide in 2002-2003:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/ibm-canada-to-shut-stores-as-result-of-shrinking-retail-sales/article1021826/

#ibm #os2 #history #retrocomputing #yeg #yegdt #canada

vga256, 10 days ago (edited 6 days ago) to retrogaming

okay so this is badass

one of my most cherished and irreplaceable retrocomputing devices is my peerless Roland SC-55.

while the MT-32 has been emulated quite well, the SC-55 always lagged behind in emulation - most attempts at it sounded pretty terrible, even using good soundfonts.

(and hauling around my SC-55 + midi & 3.5mm & usb cables just to play games in dosbox was painful)

in comes Nuked-SC55: it is a chip-level emulation project that just nails it.

it took about 30 seconds to build with cmake. i'm now going to try integrating it with dosbox, so i can finally play 90s DOS general midi games! (ultima viii pagan, here i come)

demo songs with the LCD screen (which is also accurately emulated!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Z5y2otJqY

nuked-sc55 source:
https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-SC55

windows binaries:
https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-SC55/releases

fwiw to compile (requires cmake):
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

#RetroGaming #retrocomputing #midi #roland

vga256, 10 days ago to amiga

re: previously boosted live amiga mod video recording, link here to the file (Hallucinations):
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=58827#texts

#amiga

vga256, 11 days ago to retrogaming

i love visiting rural towns. went for a day trip with my mom just to get out of the city for a few hours.

inevitably, i found big box games at their thrift store 😅

and now i’m doing the most 12 year old thing possible: reading the seawolf manual on the ride home 😂

#BigBoxGames #retroGaming

vga256, 11 days ago to animals

once a week henry goes what is termed in the literature nutsyfurbuttsy

#CatsOfMastodon #catstodon

vga256, 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago) to food

after two pretty borked sourdough loaves, i finally got my act together and got the right consistency for a perfect rise.
#food #bread

vga256, 13 days ago to books

kim stanley robinson’s Red Mars still stands out to me as the finest piece of science fiction i have ever read

recently found out that he had written another trilogy set in a post-nuclear california, and i was skeptical. i’ve had enough derivative mad max crap to last me six lifetimes.

i am very happy to be proven wrong. this decidedly turned out to not be fallout apocalypse porn. robinson spends his time imagining the human joys and freedoms found in inhabiting a world turned into wildlife and wild country. no idiotic fights over gasoline or nukes. instead a concern with fishing, building community, repairing old railroads, and figuring out who else lives beyond the village boundaries.

#books #bookstodon #solarpunk

vga256, 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago) to art

i waited for over 12 years for artist Lyndal Osborne’s handcrafted imaginary bio organisms to come back to the Alberta Gallery of Art, and they finally did. she taught at UofA, and her works always give expression to the oceanic palette of her childhood home in NSW, Aus.

this exhibit is composed of handmade seeds, blown up 10000x their size, as if through a microscope

if you happen to be in edmonton, drop by the AGA to see this piece - it is up on the third floor.

#art #yegdt #yeg #painting

vga256, 16 days ago to random

@ThreeOhFour i am crazy excited about this rpg source book, which i just found out about and ordered a copy of

vga256, 16 days ago to movies

the first 3 minutes of Waterworld, presented on a 4:3 9-inch sony trinitron CRT, exactly as the director of photography intended

#movies #film #crt

A white sony trinitron television shows the first few minutes of Waterworld. An empty VHS tape box sits beside the tv.

vga256, 19 days ago to apple

gasp

when @radiofreelunch extremely generously offered to send me a "couple" old Newtons, i balked. i had an old MP2100 years ago, and it was tough to get software loaded on them, even with all the correct hardware

driving home an hour later, i thought: what the hell is wrong with me, i'm turning down a free newton?! 😅

a week later, this amazingly heavy bundle of Newtons and Newton peripherals arrived. thank you good sir :D

Pictured:
Newton MessagePad (+box/software)
Newton MessagePad
Newton Message Pad 110
Newton MessagePad 120

Newton Fax Modem (battery-powered!)

there is extensive battery leak/corrosion from the AA batteries on each of them, so they'll spend the next few months getting some TLC. hopefully most survive!

#apple #vintageApple #newton #retroComputing

vga256, 20 days ago to retrocomputing

as promised, i'm archiving this 42 year old D&D campaign building software on cassette

warning: loud/annoying modulation sounds 😆

#tandy #trs80 #cassette #retroComputing

A cassette titled "Fantasy Gamer" by Prickly-Pear Software is inserted into a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer Cassette Recorder. The owner hits play, and it begins playing back modulation sounds recorded on the tape.

vga256, 20 days ago to random

also archived today: these two plastic baggie distributed games for the TRS-80

Dunkey Munkey
https://archive.org/details/dunkey_munkey

Tower of Fear
https://archive.org/details/tower_of_fear_documentation

vga256, 20 days ago to retrogaming

i have fallen in love with the mail order/ziplock bag era of software publishing. this piece is 42 years old, and came from a TRS-80 owner that I inherited it (and dozens of other software/hardware from) fifteen years ago

the original owner of Dunkey Munkey for the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer ordered it from a home business called Intellitronics, based out of Smithtown, NY, USA.

play as luigi 😎

what stands out to me is the cover art. this would have been created using a font stencil and paper cut-outs, hand-placed and then duplicated with a four-colour printing press process. i'd love to know if anyone into printing recognizes the technique/machinery that might have been used to duplicate it.

#retroGaming #tandy #trs80

vga256, 20 days ago to InitialD

ah i can finally play ataru and taitoo classics like abscondee and aim cruise

#arcade #retroGaming

A mini arcade machine with a dizzying number of ripoff games that bear titles similar to, but not quite close enough, to what they were trying to ape.

vga256, 21 days ago to edmonton

irene parlby park is in full bloom 😻

#yeg #yegdt #flowers #bloomscrolling

People talk excitedly as they take photos of one another under the cherry blossom trees.
A closeup of cherry blossoms wide open. They are grapefruit pink.

vga256, 22 days ago to random

to the russian shithead who stole my #328747 account 20 years ago: icq is shutting down in one month

https://icq.com/desktop/en#windows

😆

vga256, 23 days ago (edited 23 days ago) to retrogaming

this illustration was commissioned for a type-in program called Islands for the commodore 64, in the august 1988 issue of RUN magazine.

i am in love with the line-art/woodcut style, painstakingly inked and coloured. it was a different age in which a work of art could be commissioned for a BASIC game that a handful of people in the world would bother to hand-code and play.

this is better art than 90% of the physical big box games i own

update: as it turns out, there is not merely emulating etching/woodcut with inked lines, it IS an etching by artist doug smith who was famous for this style.

more of his work here: https://richardsolomon.com/artists/douglas-smith/

#retrogaming #art

vga256, 23 days ago to animals

what do canadian men do during playoff hockey intermissions?

argue referee calls? trash each others teams?

let out-catting each other be the gold standard for masculinity in 2024 😂

#catsOfMastodon #nhl #canada #hockey

Text message one: orange tabby beaming as his chin is scratched. Text reply: a grey-brown tabby smiling as his neck is preened.

vga256, 24 days ago to retrocomputing

i'm finally opening up boxes of software from my archive that haven't seen the light of day in 15-20 years. today, i found a program that has never been archived or probably seen in over 40 years.

i absolutely adore this dungeon mastering program for the TRS-80 that was distributed in ziplock bags in 1982

i can find only one mention of it on the web - the august 1982 issue of TRS-80 Rainbow magazine that advertises it for $19.95 + S&H

happily, i found the cassette, which has never been archived anywhere AFAIK. i am scanning in the printed documentation, along with making a recording of the tape.

#gamePreservation #trs80 #tandy #retroComputing #retroGaming

The rear page of the game's cover, printed on tan-coloured stock. It describes the different programs included with the software: Rooms I - "This displays 99 different rooms on the screen in hi-res graphics." Character Generation: With this your color computer will make the tedious job of rolling up new characters for players and non-players a breeze The Dungeon: A completely mapped and keyed two level dungeon designed for use with the ROOMS I program. Monster Generator: With just a touch of a key, a complete set of random monster characteristics The dice Bag: Simulate 36 different rolls of polyhedral dice instantly. It will make your old dice bag obsolete.
A hand-drawn map of a dungeon schematic (from the top-down), with a cave-like entrance, into a series of interlocked passageways and rooms. It has hatched shading marks to indicate dungeon walls.
There is obviously a great deal of interest in fantasy and included, with the numbers of the rooms supplicd. role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons™ That is. Module Two allows for the creation of both player and ‘one of the reasons we carry regular column on the sublect. non-player characters...

vga256, 24 days ago to Canada

someone in yellowknife is selling this 1977 Lake Buccaneer 😻

there was never a more beautiful amphibious casket

#canada #aircraft

vga256, 24 days ago to retrocomputing

when i was a kid, buying a new game was serious business. it meant saving up my weekly farm-chore allowances of $2.50 for six to eight months, before I could afford a brand new computer game. this usually meant about one new PC game a year, along with whatever I got for christmas.

among the lost pieces of canadian computing history are the retail prices for computer hardware and software we swallowed in the 1990s

buried in the archives was this Softwarehouse catalogue from 1994 - an Edmonton-based computer retailer from the 80s and 90s.

enjoy skimming through the eyeball-gouging prices we paid back then, like an $80 copy of Isaac Asimov's Science Adventure for DOS. this was mostly due to a crushing US-CAN exchange rate at the time.

ps: anyone else remember visiting Softwarehouse in YEG? it was at 102 ave and 108 st :D

#retroComputing #gamePreservation #1990s #yeg

Prices for games: Dark Legons - $57.95 Isaac Asimov's Science Adventure - $79.95 Myst $74.95
Prices for desktop publishing software. CorelDraw 5 - $799.95 FrameMaker - $929
Prices for computer games. Myst $74.95 Microsoft Flight simulator $59.95 Doom $64.95 Spectre VR $59.95

vga256, 24 days ago to retrocomputing

just discovered this Wordperfect 6.0 ad from 1994 and it's making me wonder if i ever really lived

#retroComputing #1990s #design

vga256, 24 days ago (edited 16 days ago) to retrocomputing

before these all go to ebay, are there any TRS-80 enthusiasts who want a massive collection of Radio Shack/Tandy Rainbow magazines, from 1984-1990?

will pass them on for a fraction of the ebay price. shipping from canada will be uncheap, but far less than shipping individual issues. would like to see this go to someone in the retrocomputing/archival community!

update: thanks to @shawn6809 the entire collection is now spoken for! :)

#retroComputing #bbs #tandy #trs80