Yeah, with those early machines it was inevitably about lookup tables, and producing the illusion of doing work which was otherwise impossible in the number of cpu cycles you had available. I did lots of this sort of thing for the C64, where similarly CPU cycles were short, and then you end up scratching around trying to find enough spare memory...
It's great to see people still exploring and pushing the boundaries of what these machines are capable of. Coding this on a more modern machine, getting the effect right, then back-porting to the Spectrum seems like a smart move and would have been a game changer during the prime of these machines!
Lots of commercial Spectrum games were coded on a 'more modern' machine, often an IBM PC with a better keyboard and a cross assembler to generate Z80 code.
It's a very common feeling and I'm no stranger to it as a solo game developer. But remember that the "grass is always greener on the other side". Chances are that, once you go back to the "nice job" at the end of the day, you'll miss the peace and ownership of your solo building days.
I always enjoyed chatting with my coworkers and learning from them. I do miss that. But I don't miss anything else from that environment, to be honest.
I've been remote and essentially on a solo projects even though I work on a team with 50+ offshore devs that it physically pains me when I have to get on a call and talk with coworkers.
Yeah, if it serves OP as consolation I've been in full time employment 9 yrs. Sick of 'socialising' and I'm building my own thing with 0 people to take with me. I need full agency, I'm done with death by thousand feedback. The grass is indeed greener and I'll probably miss working with people... in 2-3 years. We'll see.
I think text-only games have a certain special power that modern games can't quite emulate. Modern city planners are more accessible and better in most ways, but there is a raw gameplay elegance in games like Sumer that I think could make a comeback one day. Perhaps the game equivalent to vinyl records.
Awesome! You can also find great art made with Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. The limitations from early computers in resolution and, most importantly, palette, create unique art styles:
They have more color but way less resolution, thus less detail. Pretty much what you would expect to see, given that the original Mac and Amiga came out around the same time.
Both Motorola 68000 machines, typically 512K-1024K of RAM. So similar underlying constraints, under which they made very different choices for how to prioritize graphics.
They seem to be old Mac games. Old Macs are already being emulated and out of Apple's reach of you own an old copy of the OS. You can play these games forever even if Apple or the game makers go out of business.
My uni had these, as I mentioned in a reply elsewhere on the thread. I'm curious to know what kind of Serious Work people here saw back in the day.
I was a student so I had relatively rare access to the high end stuff... Most of my time was spent in cheap-ish sun terminals. Later on, as a last year student, I became cooler and got access to the RISC 6000s and started hanging out with the graduate students.
Most of the Serious Work I saw was email. There was some limited running of simulations and research software from other universities, but little that required a lot of processor power on an ongoing basis. I think these were generally more useful due to their native networking capabilities and software availability than their raw CPU power. In a sense, you had to have them because everybody else had one.
This is cool story! My uni's lab was all SGIs, IBM Risc 6000s and Sun workstations.
But I visited the lab for the first time in 25 years last week and everything got replaced by cheap PCs... :(
The 90s was perhaps the last gasp of high end, branded PCs. Man, these were some good looking computers. Try keeping your SGI in good shape, perhaps it will find its way to a museum one day.
I think Microsoft QBasic in particular was the sweet spot. It was an easy to pick up language and runtime that was powerful enough to make real productivity applications and games. It shipped with 2 great demo games, Nibbles and Gorillas, that were fun to play and easy to understand. It had a pretty good IDE and most importantly, easy to browse, beginner friendly online help. I couldn't imagine a better introduction to programming during my childhood. Best of all, it was installed by default in MS-DOS 5.0 and later.
I'm really hoping that it gets open sourced by Microsoft in the near future.
After decades of thinking I was so much more 31337 by learning other languages -- OO, functional, etc. -- I can't help but agree. BASIC is the sweet spot for introducing what programming is and the fundamental concepts. I kind of laugh when I hear talk that LLMs will finally enable nontechnical people to build their own apps, when BASIC did that back in the 60s.
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