Oldskooler Ramblings

the unlikely child born of the home computer wars

Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

« Previous Entries

20 Years of MobyGames

Posted by Trixter on February 28, 2019

MobyGames turns 20 years old on Friday March 1st, something I am overjoyed to witness. It’s occasion enough for me to come out of semi-retirement and tell my side of the story of MobyGames’ humble beginnings: A tale of two friends starting up a company to fill a void in the gaming community.

MobyGames was created in a figurative basement (an apartment, actually) during the formation of the first Internet Bubble, and somehow stayed alive and grew once that bubble popped. It has become the de-facto source of historical data of the game industry, for people both inside and outside that industry. It is frequently cited as the source of material for tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles on video and computer games. It has achieved and surpassed the goals I originally had for it, and I’m grateful to everyone who volunteers their valuable time to contribute to the database, even more so by all of the admins who edit and audit all of the information for accuracy and authenticity. I am humbled by all of their efforts, past, present, and future.

Before I go any further, I want to make one thing very clear: While I’m writing this article from my perspective as the person who dreamed up MobyGames, the real hero is Brian Hirt. Brian was the other co-founder at our inception, and MobyGames simply wouldn’t exist in any usable form without his many years of dedication getting it off the ground. A lot of people don’t really understand what goes into making a new online product and a company to support it, and it was even harder in the 1990s when the web was still young; there simply weren’t many off-the-shelf components and established standards you could use to jumpstart the process. Brian did just about all of the gruntwork, from establishing the business entity, to writing all the code, to working on MobyGames full-time for many years. Some of those years, Brian didn’t earn a living wage, while still somehow managing to invest a substantial amount of his own money into keeping MobyGames afloat (hardware, rack space, and network bandwidth aren’t free). Everyone who has gleaned use out of MobyGames owes a huge debt to Brian. I, for one, will be eternally grateful to have worked with a good friend who believed in my idea.

I’d also like to thank Rob Lim (cornpopper), who was an early contributor that became such an approval powerhouse that we hired him on as an employee. He took on more than was asked of him, and kept MobyGames data flowing during some of its darker times — a thankless job, but one I do thank him for.

This article is, by necessity, subjective; it’s based on my personal recollection of events. Others may remember events differently; I speak only for myself. Also, I’m not going to write about anything that didn’t go smoothly in MobyGames’ history — I don’t want melodrama to detract from the achievement MobyGames is today. Finally, it’s customary to remind readers that my opinions are my own, and do not represent the current ownership, staff, admins, or contributors of MobyGames.

So, what led to the birth of MobyGames? Now that the statute of limitations has long expired, I can formally confirm that the idea was born out of software piracy. Wait, what? Read on, true believer:

A Software Pirate Reforms

In 1997, I operated a website dedicated to classic games for the IBM PC. (My site was one of the original 10 Abandonware sites that started the Abandonware movement, but that early history warrants its own article for another day.) Why classic games? Early games hold a certain charm for me because they were pioneers of a new art form — interactive electronic entertainment — and the IBM PC fascinated me in particular: A business machine attempting to entertain instead of crunch numbers. While there was no shortage of early console and arcade games before personal computer games, the IBM PC had fairly bad graphics and sound, so creating an immersive entertainment experience on that platform was particularly difficult. I admired any effort to do so, and wanted to share this admiration with the rest of the world, which I did with voluminous amounts of information per game, including what kind of game it was, who made it, other games like it, what it looked like, and a personal review of the gameplay. All of this information was presented in a quasi-database format, with crude searching and organizing capabilities. It was a proto-MobyGames, and, amazingly, you can still view it thanks to the Internet Archive, who was covertly spidering the web for years before offering their archives to the public in 2001.

There was only one problem: What I was doing was illegal. In my quest to educate people on the merits of early IBM PC games, I became overzealous and included download links to the actual games themselves. At the time, I thought that if other people could enjoy them in the same way I had years ago, they would gain a better understanding of the art form. The ESA (back then known as the Interactive Digital Software Association, or IDSA), rightly so, quickly made me aware that what I was doing was illegal with a cease and desist letter sent in October of 1997. Discouraged, I took down the entire site and shelved the idea of documenting the history of early PC gaming.

It was in 1998 that I was motivated to revisit the idea. Fueled by nostalgic curiosity, I had attempted to search for some information on older games that I wanted to play or learn more about, but kept coming up short in all of my searches. I wasn’t being totally unreasonable; I was searching for answers to questions like these:

  • Who composed the wonderful AdLib music in Continuum, and what else have they worked on?
  • Did that old Cinemaware samurai game ever come out for the PC?
  • Everyone on the newsgroups talks about Star Control 2; will it run on this old Tandy I have lying around here?
  • Speaking of which, what other games will take advantage of my Tandy’s sound and graphics?
  • I like racing games; what other racing games were made for the PC?
  • I am completely stuck in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis; where can I get a hint or walkthrough for older games?
  • Speaking of which, what other games are like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis?
  • I’ve never played King’s Quest 7; what does it look like?

I was coming up short again and again, day after day, and I kept thinking that there had to be some place you could go to for answers. Usenet provided information with some quality control (whenever someone posted bad info, someone else corrected them) but the results were partial and scattered. Various websites were a bit more concise, but had absolutely no quality control. While the wiki itself had been invented two years prior in 1995, this was 1997, and Wikipedia wouldn’t launch for another three years. The more I searched, I kept thinking there should be a single, complete, audited resource for gaming information — and eventually, I became determined to create that resource.

In January of 1998, I began work on an extension to my old hobbyist website, http://www.oldskool.org, that would be an online database of gaming information. My website experience at the time was PHP and standard Apache server-side includes and CGI, so I naively thought I could build the entire database out of a quasi-relational database system of my own design using a Perl/PHP mix and text files. (You can stop laughing now.) I brainstormed for a week and created a design document for the project, which is the true original kernel for the design of MobyGames.

Seeing as this design document is the first milestone in MobyGame’s history, I have kept it online for your amusement. While it is mostly humorous to see just how different MobyGames is today from that original design — and how naive I was in thinking that the proposed design could scale to millions of unique IPs per month — it is interesting to see how similar MobyGames today is to the original vision. Even the hacker slang term “Moby” is in that document, as the search function was going to be called MobySearch.

The work involved in programming a custom system of that scale was beyond my capabilities at the time, so I decided to bone up on PHP and Perl to develop the system. However, the entire idea was put on the backburner as I got distracted with real life (new job, newborn son, etc.) It was in December of 1998 that the real surprise came.

“Go here.”

In mid-December 1998, I worked up the courage to begin the gaming database project again. In trying to take a stab at programming the database system, I had run into a lot of problems, and called my longtime friend from high school (and best man at my wedding!) Brian Hirt, a higher-order Perl and SQL god, for advice. I had difficulty explaining the problems I was having, so he asked for a view of the big picture: What was I trying to accomplish? What system was I programming it in? We talked for almost an hour, with me explaining my idea and the motivation behind it, the way I wanted it to navigate, how I wanted it to appeal to the user, etc. and with him asking related questions for clarification. We then talked about other regular stuff, like games, family, etc. and then hung up, and that was the end of it.

About two days later, he called me up and said mysteriously, “Go here,” and gave me a URL to follow. To my utter amazement, it was a mock-up of my idea — and scarier still, it was a functional mock-up! He had already created a basic relational SQL database, and a basic web front-end to browse through the database. My jaw hit the floor. It was the fastest, most functional prototyping I have ever witnessed, but equally surprising and wonderful was that Brian was very excited in the idea and wanted to co-develop it with me.

The next six weeks were a blur as Brian and I went back and forth over email and the phone, working out the basic structure and navigation. The original idea was to develop in PHP shelling out to SQL for the data, so that I could help develop it, but early on Brian did some scalability tests that showed PHP was not up to the task of scaling properly. (This was before the days of Zend, p-code, and JIT compilers.) In early February of 1999, the development system of Apache serving up a large monolithic Perl program was finalized, and we refined what we wanted MobyGames to be. Finally, a few days before March 1st, Brian added the first game ever to the database: X-Files. And on March 1st, I started posting to Usenet announcing the grand opening of MobyGames.

Open for Business

It is at this point you would expect me to say “and the rest is history” — but in fact, things were only just starting to heat up. The entire month of March 1999 had Brian and me exhausting all of our free time entering games into the database, and fielding email containing new database submissions and corrections. By the end of March 1999, there were over 200 games in the system; some strategically chosen to exploit the database engine’s ability to cross-link from entry to entry, and others chosen simply because they were our favorite games. I was personally spending at least 3 hours a night entering information into MobyGames — entering data, scanning covers, playing the game to take screenshots and write a review, etc. — and it simply wasn’t growing fast enough. I was initially resistant to the idea of opening up MobyGames to outside contributors because I wanted to control the quality of the information in the database. Brian had to convince me, over many weeks, that it was painfully obvious we needed a way for willing users to help out without our direct intervention.

(I should take a moment and point out that all the scanning, screenshots, etc. may have seemed like unnecessary work in getting MobyGames off the ground — just get the basic data in there, right? But they were necessary, because the whole point of MobyGames was quality over quantity. Sure, we could have just scraped the Killer List of Videogames, or Dadgum’s Giant List of Classic Game Programmers, but we would then have a database that was a mile wide and an inch deep. There’s no value in looking up a game only to see four or five things about it, barely confirming its existence. There were (and still are!) databases like that out there, like the Universal Videogames List, but it is the depth of information about each game and attention to detail that makes MobyGames the resource that it is today.)

Much of the time Brian spent on development in the first six months of MobyGames’ existence was developing a way for users to submit information for review and inclusion into the database. Brian had the idea of walking the user through the process, allowing them to contribute anything they wanted yet still requiring a few key pieces of information like title, developer, publisher, release information, genre, description, and rating categories. He came up with a practical method of doing this, virtually holding the user’s hand through the process and allowing them to go back and correct mistakes before submission. The benefit to the database was that it ensured the data was normalized and conformed before it was comitted. This became the Add Game Wizard, which is still in use today.

Along with the wizard, a method of motivation was needed to help entice people to contribute to the project, and help existing contributors continue adding information. Enter human psychology: Earlier in life, I’d contemplated going into marketing and advertising, and for a year I took classes to that effect. While I didn’t follow through with that as a career path, I did take away some basic knowledge that I applied to MobyGames. I came up with a point system for contributors: 4 points for an entry, 2 points for a screenshot, etc. The more you contributed, the more “contribution points” you got, and that number was proudly displayed next to your name, which itself was displayed on the same page as the information you contributed. This made MobyGames, itself, a game: You could watch your own progress grow, and also identify other users just as passionate as you. It was an early form of website gamificiation, years before Nick Pelling coined the term in 2003.

The earliest browsable archive of MobyGames available online is from around this time that same year (November, 1999). I haven’t seen that form of the site in nearly two decades, but even at that early stage, I’m reminded of how useful it was even before it was a year old.

Opening the Gates

The Game Wizard was a success, but it was a blessing in disguise: We found ourselves under a steadily increasing load of approvals instead of content entry. Approval of an entry is not something to be taken lightly; it may need to be fact-checked using whatever resources you have available to you (old game lists or magazines, the web, Usenet, game binary code or manuals, etc.). Even if we could approve about half of the entries without any research because of our strong backgrounds in gaming, it still left the other half to research. We found ourselves getting overwhelmed.

Luckily for us, we had struck up email dialogs with ten or so dedicated users who were friendly, prolific contributors. They had expressed a desire to help, so Brian got to work on a hierarchial approval system, where people could “weed out” the easy approvals and send only the harder ones up to us. This system worked so well that we felt it was time to open up the floodgates to multiple platforms.

Multiple platforms? Yes, for the first two years of MobyGames’ operation, our sole coverage of games was on the IBM PC platform. This limitation seems unfathomable, but was actually my fault. I was very much against multiple platforms from the beginning, because I wanted to ensure quality of submitted information, and I felt limiting to the DOS/Windows platforms was the best way to do that because it was the platform Brian and I were the most familiar with. Brian wanted multiple platform support from day one, and being limited to DOS/Windows for the first two years was something we frequently clashed over. It took a third informed opinion from someone else before I finally realized the value of covering the entire electronic entertainment landscape. It’s one of a few things I regret about how I handled MobyGames’ development and growth.

With an approval system in place and users manning the content entry battlements, we started adding platforms. The first choice for new platforms was (then) modern consoles: PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Nintendo 64, Xbox, Dreamcast, and Game Cube. Adding only the latest platforms at the time was intentional, to ensure a large, growing library of games to be added, which had a secondary benefit of working out kinks in the new system.

Keeping Up Appearances

We figured out early on that the data in the database was the way for MobyGames to grow in value, and growing in value meant more visitors, more advertising revenue, and more opportunities to turn MobyGames into a full-time business for all involved. To that end, we printed up promotional materials and manned booths at several events, to spread the good word. The largest three I personally attended were:

Classic Gaming Expo 2003, August 9–10, Las Vegas, Plaza Hotel: This was my first time in Las Vegas, and while that experience was somewhat overwhelming, the actual show and manning our booth was a blast. We got nothing but great comments and feedback, which was vindication of our work and idea. One of the problems of trying to promote an internet-only business in 2003 was lack of internet connectivity — whole-event wireless was not yet a thing, and they couldn’t run cables to every table, so how do you show off a site on the internet if you have neither? Brian solved this by working up a portable version of MobyGames we dubbed PortaMoby(tm), displayed on a custom-milled aluminum stand.

Classic Gaming Expo 2004, August 21–22, San Jose, McEnery Convention Center: For the much-larger CGE2004, we had a double-size booth area, and set up both a gaming lounge as well as a projector showing off a trivia game that you could find the answers to on PortaMoby: Play the game and we gave you a free soda; get all the answers right and earn a T-shirt. For more details of what it was like, you can consult the blurb I wrote about CGE2004 at the time.  Better yet, you can skip right to our booth footage at the 4m40s mark in this video retrospective I shot and edited in 2004:

Game Developer’s Conference 2007, San Francisco, Moscone Center: I developed a 103-degree fever right when I arrived on Monday that lasted for 3 days. I don’t have a consistent memory of that week, but can recall a few notable (for me) events:

  • People kept coming up to the booth and asking us what we were doing there. I was confused by this at first, thinking it was a put-down or an insult, but it turned out to be a gigantic complement — everyone in the gaming industry already knew about us. In other words, there was no need to advertise MobyGames because it was already an established resource for the professional gaming industry. It was a huge moment of validation.
  • I am video compression nerd, and when I realized RAD Game Tools was only a few booths away, I stole some time to talk to Jeff Roberts and tell him what an admirer I was of both Smacker and Bink. He was impressed I had reverse-engineered parts of them, but then laughed because Bink was constantly changing for new platforms and there was no way reverse-engineering Bink was viable year after year. (He was right!)
  • On the Wednesday night awards show, we were seated at the intersection of two walkway rows. After accepting an award, Shigeru Miyamoto headed back to his seat, and he chose the walkway closest to where we were seated. He got so close that Chris, an intern working for MobyGames at the time, stood up and got him to shake our hands. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have shaken hands with someone when I had a 103-degree fever, but hey. Chance of a lifetime.
  • On Thursday morning, I felt well enough to attend the IGDA Game Preservation SIG’s kickoff meeting, also on the premises, and met Henry Lowood and Frank Cifaldi during the roundtable discussion. Henry and I have written sporadically a few times over the years, and I reconnected with Frank in 2021 via Twitter.

Regrets? I have a few

A lot of people have asked me over the years why I didn’t stay active with MobyGames. The first two years, I put every single hour of free time I had — and several day job hours, something my employer never found out about — into the site. By 2001, I had two young boys, one of whom was developing some very severe developmental delays. My wife was overwhelmed; I had been neglecting the family a lot during that time, and she needed help with our son who was starting special therapy and undergoing a battery of tests. I was the sole wage earner, and MobyGames didn’t make money its first few years, so I couldn’t make it my full-time job. I started to pull back my involvement, and only dedicate truly free time to MobyGames (ie. after everyone was in bed), which amounted to about 60-90 minutes per evening, with a few hours on weekends. This had a detrimental effect on Brian’s ability to support the site, because he had to take on additional community manager and approval duties that I had mostly owned. Thankfully, we had additional professional interest in the site at that time, who joined on and was able to help as I spent less and less time on MobyGames.

Because of pulling back, I never had the chance to help Brian code up one of my most ambitious goals for MobyGames: Discovery based on a pure gaming taxonomy. I wanted MobyGames to be the ultimate game discovery engine, and my idea for achieving that was to define a very clear gaming taxonomy/heirarchy that every game could be classified under. That structure is somewhat intact even today; if you go to the Game Browser, you can see some top-level classifications like Genre (Action, Sports, Adventure, etc.), with sub-genres and additional branches of the taxonomy, perspective in particular (top-down, 1st-person, etc.). One of the ideas behind the discovery engine was that you could pull up a game you liked, and based on its individual components, could recommend other games that were similar. For example, let’s say you pulled up Ultima 6. Based on “Adventure”, “Role-playing”, “top-down perspective”, “DOS”, etc., the engine could return the results of a database query that would show you similar games. Of course the other Ultima games would be returned by such a query, but also games like Wasteland, Times of Lore, Hard Nova… other games that share the same classification attributes, but possibly in completely different story settings, possibly some you’d never considered before. The Game Browser, as well as the Collaborations area of any Credits section, come closest to this vision today.

I didn’t communicate this taxonomy idea very well with the broader MobyGames community, which is why I fought against a 2006 vote to create Role-Playing as a main, top-level genre in the database. My argument was that all RPGs were Adventure-class games, which is technically true, but not a view shared by most gamers due to unfamiliarity with what I was trying to achieve, as well as the changing nature of language. I was faced with sticking to my guns in support of a pure taxonomy while alienating many valued members of the contributing community… or letting go of the idea to keep the community together. I chose the latter, but it was a blow to my ego that contributed to me pulling away from MobyGames even further. By 2007, I was technically still a partial owner of the company, but I wasn’t involved in the day-to-day running and administration of MobyGames any more.

I regret how I handled some of these situations. My home life was turbulent at the time (my son was eventually diagnosed with autism, and things only got harder after that), but even still, I could have found better ways to communicate and at least stay in the loop, rather than just fading out.

Legacy

Remember those questions I was trying to answer back in 1998? MobyGames can easily answer them now:

  • Who composed the wonderful AdLib music in Continuum, and what else have they worked on? Frédéric Mentzen, and he stopped writing game music shortly after MobyGames was founded.
  • Did that old Cinemaware samurai game ever come out for the PC? Nope!
  • Everyone on the newsgroups talks about Star Control 2; will it run on this old Tandy I have lying around here? Not unless it has an 80286 and VGA, no.
  • Speaking of which, what other games will take advantage of my Tandy’s sound and graphics? Over 800!
  • I like racing games; what other racing games were made for the PC? For DOS? Over 250.
  • I am completely stuck in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis; where can I get a hint or walkthrough for older games? While gamefaqs cornered the market for walkthroughs, we implemented basic hints that users could contribute.
  • Speaking of which, what other games are like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis? Whether you meant like Indiana Jones or like SCUMM games, MobyGames has groups for both.
  • I’ve never played King’s Quest 7; what does it look like? Like a cheap cartoon, unfortunately.

Some of the more fun stuff include questions that I couldn’t dream of answering back then that I can now, like:

And so it goes. And in the capable hands of the current owners, with all of the tireless efforts of dedicated admins and contributors, I look forward to another 20 years using MobyGames.

5th-year Anniversary Testimonials

Portions of this article were originally written in 2004 for an unpublished piece praising MobyGames’ 5th-year anniversary. At that time, I solicited some comments and testimonials from various users of the site as well as industry professionals, and am happy to finally reproduce them here:

“MobyGames has developed its content so professionally that it’s an invaluable source of information on dates, companies and people. I particularly find the cross-referencing of information incredibly useful — finding out what games certain people have worked on throughout their careers. It’s the IMDB of the PC gaming industry — a site that every gamer should have bookmarked.” — Rob Smith, Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer magazine

“Imagine my surprise and astonishment when I stumbled upon mobygames a year or two ago… here was a system that was working to catalog games! Not just release information (still more than I had done already) but also interesting things to set any one game apart from all the others… things like trivia, screenshots and it’s cover art. A magic spark went off inside my head because here was something that someone else had dreamed up that was suspiciously similiar to my own dreams and disjointed design scribbles on notepaper…” — WildKard

“Its shining glory .. compiling data about game developers and their roles. Nowhere else on the internet can you find that. Movie and theater cast members … but never for games.” — Jeanne

“There are many sites with plenty of information about games, but none of them can even be compared to MobyGames, for two main reasons: Scope and personal involvement. No other game catalogue website allows the user an unlimited involvement in its development, together with countless other contributors. The feeling of growth and of challenge — so many games are still not documented, so many entries are still incomplete, what about finding some rare games to add, screenshots that are tricky to capture, credits that are not documented anywhere except in the game itself, interesting trivia, personal and involving reviews? — is one of those things that make MobyGames so great.” — Unicorn-Lynx

Random Trivia

  • The first month of MobyGames’ existence, it lived on a 200 MHz Pentium II server in Brian’s apartment, and was connected to the internet via a 128K ISDN line.
  • The first game ever entered into MobyGames was The X-Files Game. This was not because it was a great game, but rather because Brian was testing the system and it was the first game within arm’s reach. The second entry was by myself, for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It was, also, the closest game within arm’s reach for me; I’d grabbed a smattering of titles from my collection to start populating the database with. The third entry was more proper for a historical database on gaming: Wing Commander. (As of today, these last two entries still retains their original contribution date of March 1st, 1999.)
  • The first developer entry fleshed out with a Bio and picture was Michael Berlyn.
  • In the 1990s and early 2000s, whenever someone on a Usenet binary piracy newsgroup wanted to refer to a game without giving away its title, it was common to see the game represented as “gameId,11970”. This is a reference to the game ID embedded in the URL of early game entry “Rap Sheets” (summary pages) on MobyGames.
  • One of the earliest funny and most blunt developer-contributed pieces of trivia would have to be John Romero’s recounting of why the low-res graphics mode was present in Doom but omitted in Doom II: “160-pixels horizontally looked like ass so we removed it.” This trivia item is no longer in the database for some reason, but I’ll never forget it.
  • California Games’ gallery of screenshots for DOS contain a few shots called “CGA ‘MORE-color’ mode” that are technically impossible to capture by dumping the screen buffer on the original system, because the additional colors were created with realtime scanline tricks. The screenshots in MobyGames that depict this mode were hand-edited to match the original graphics mode, and were matched side-by-side with an original IBM PC for authenticity. Today, in 2019, both emulators and homebrew TTL-to-RGB converters make it possible to capture more true CGA output regarless of what tricks were used, but back then we had to massage the raw screen dumps/captures for tweaked modes like this. I even wrote a screen-capture TSR to help contributors take shots of the more difficult and odd CGA DOS games.

Posted in Gaming, MobyGames | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

It’s been fun

Posted by Trixter on December 26, 2018

My vote for the most subtle-yet-cruel entry in the category of brain mis-wirings is Imposter’s Syndrome. (It is also a first-world problem; apologies if this offends you.) I have it fairly bad, and it’s gotten worse as I age. It has prevented me from starting projects, finishing projects, and having normal levels of self-confidence. I am, thankfully, able to praise and mentor other people as necessary, but I cannot provide that for myself. Combine this with yearly instances of FOMO and you end up with someone who goes through waves of trying to join the party, only to feel sheepish once they get there.

This must end. Not in the manner in which my friends and fans might have hoped, but it simply has to end if I’m going to be available for the people who matter (including, most importantly, myself). So, it ends today. It ends with a list of things I’ve achieved in my life by my own skill, intelligence, and volition. I’m granting myself permission to be proud of everything on this list.

And, most importantly:

  • Met my wife, became a better person for her, and started a family

That is truly my greatest accomplishment. It has directly touched hundreds of lives, contributed something positive to the world, and will outlive me by many decades, if not centuries.

But this person is going away, and this is the third-last post I will be writing on this blog.

Posted in Demoscene, Digital Video, Gaming, MindCandy, MobyGames, Programming, Vintage Computing | 3 Comments »

Using a Sound Blaster in a PC/XT-class system

Posted by Trixter on August 3, 2018

I’m asked this a few times every year: Can you put a Sound Blaster in an IBM PC, PC/XT, or otherwise 8088/8086-class system?  If you can, is there anything that can use it on that class of hardware?

The quick answer is yes and yes:  As long as there are no hardware conflicts, you can put any of these:

  • Sound Blaster 1.0
  • Sound Blaster 1.5
  • Sound Blaster 2.0
  • Sound Blaster Pro
  • Sound Blaster Pro 2.0
  • Pro Audio Spectrum 8
  • Pro Audio Spectrum 8+
  • Pro Audio Spectrum 16
  • Thunderboard

…into any system and it should work fine.  You’ll be able to use the onboard joystick port, and have Adlib/FM sound effects and music.

The longer answer has a caveat: There are less than a hundred sound-enhanced games that will run, and less than 20 of those will use the digital sound channel.  The Sound Blaster was commercially available to consumers in 1989, which was right as the 8088 era was coming to a close.  Only a handful of games were produced around that time period that supported the Sound Blaster and could still run on 8088-class hardware and supported the CGA graphics typical of 8088-class systems.

But, if you have a souped-up NEC V20/NEC V30 XT, you’re feeling adventurous, and you really want to hear some sampled (“digitized”) sound come out of your system, you can try running these:

Commercial games:

Legend:
1) Used the Activision OmniMusic driver. There might be more games compatible with 8088+CGA that use this driver.
2) Need the rare “16-color” version of this game which supports CGA 640×200 2-color mode

Shareware games:

Demos:

 

There might be more than the above, but this is all I can remember personally testing.

For possibly much more comprehensive information on this subject, you can do no better than to check out Great Hierophant’s Nerdly Pleasures blog, which performs deep technical dives into these and other subjects.

Posted in Demoscene, Gaming, Vintage Computing | 25 Comments »

The first 256-color game on the IBM PC

Posted by Trixter on October 1, 2017

In April of 1987, IBM announced the PS/2 line of systems. This was their advancement of the PC standard, but also an attempt come up with a new architecture that could not be cloned without paying a license fee. Of the new features announced, one of the most significant was the addition of MCGA, which created the 256-color mode 13h that we are so familiar with today. VGA was announced at the same time, which emulated all previous color standards including MCGA’s mode 13h.

This background is necessary to answer the following question: What was the first 256-color game on the PC? This was posed recently on a vintage gaming group on Facebook, but it’s a loaded question because it isn’t specific enough. It could mean any of the following:

  • What was the first PC game to use MCGA’s 256-color video mode (ie. mode 13h)?
  • What was the first PC game to use mode 13h to display more than 16 colors onscreen simultaneously? (Many early MCGA games physically used mode 13h only to reproduce the existing EGA/Tandy 16-color graphics the game shipped with, instead of taking full advantage of the extra colors mode 13h provided.)
  • What was the first PC game to fully take advantage of mode 13h to show (nearly) 256 colors onscreen simultaneously?

The aforementioned facebook group conversation devolved into relying on memories and friendly arguments. This is always dangerous, because our minds are not static records. To get an answer out of memories, you need a very large group of people coming to a consensus; even then, that’s not guaranteed to be the correct answer, just an agreed-upon answer. (Some historians would argue that collective memory is the only record that matters, but a discussion of archiving history is out of scope for this article.) In that facebook conversation, and previously reported in various places like Wikipedia, the answer was 688 Attack Sub. The latest executable file date in that game is 1989-03-04. (For reference, all dates in this article are of the format YYYY-MM-DD). That seemed a little late to me; tech adoption moved a little more slowly back then, but even still, it seemed odd that it would take two years for the first game to come out to take advantage of a new graphics standard. Was 688 Attack Sub really the first to support the 256-color mode provided by MCGA and VGA?

Research!

Thanks to MobyGames and various archives floating around the internet, we can perform actual research to answer these questions, instead of relying on memory and friendly arguments (which is what the facebook conversation eventually devolved into). I co-founded MobyGames for many reasons, but the biggest reason was to answer questions like this, so I immediately took up the task. Here was my methodology:

  1. I started at MobyGames by looking up all games that support VGA and MCGA in the years 1987, 1988, and 1989. Because MobyGames contributors are awesome, all of the search results provided screenshots, so it was easy to weed out any game that claimed VGA/MCGA support but was just displaying the same EGA 16-color graphics the game already had. In other words, for a game to be considered truly taking advantage of mode 13h, it had to display something other than the stock 16-color EGA/Tandy palette.
  2. I then analyzed screenshots to determine the number of unique colors in the screenshot. This was mostly used to determine if a game was actually displaying more than 16 colors, or just showing 16 and changing the palette via VGA color registers.
  3. Once I had a list of candidates, I then grabbed all revisions of the games in question and compared file dates of the executables, and used the latest file date as a “supported here first” date. (This is not the same as the game’s release date, ie. the date that the game was distributed by the publisher — those are much harder to verify due to lack of archived software publishing trade information, and besides that’s not the question I’m answering. I’m answering “who was first to support the tech”, not “who got their game into customer’s hands the quickest”.)
  4. Finally, I discarded everything after 1989-03-04, the executable file date of 688 Attack Sub, our known control point.

Here’s what I found, in chronological file date order:

1987-06-08: Thexder‘s earliest shipped revision shows a date of 1987-06-08 on a file named MAINPS, which is the executable overlay that provides “PS/2 graphics support” (ie. MCGA, ie mode 13h). This was surprising to learn, as I assumed Sierra’s AGI games would have supported it first, but the first AGI games to support mode 13h to display graphics of any sort have VG_GRAF.OVL file dates of 1987-11-16 or later. Thexder uses mode 13h to display graphics using 16 custom colors chosen to approximate how the game looks when running in its “best” mode, EGA 640×200.

Thexder-MCGA-mode

1987-12-16: Rockford: The Arcade Game displays 32 colors onscreen at once. (32 is significant; see Conclusions at the end of this article for an explanation.)

Rockford-title

1988-02-04: DeluxePaint added support for MCGA 256-color graphics in a version with an executable file date of 1988-02-04. While this isn’t a game, it played a large part in mode 13h support in games afterwards.

DeluxePaint-256

1988-10-05: Dream Zone uses digitized 16-gray-shade graphics as part of gameplay, then managed to eek out using one additional color when drawing the interface, for a total of 17 colors onscreen. This game is included here not because it is a serious contender in our research, but rather because it was the earliest PC game I could find that used digitized graphics that also used the MCGA palette registers to create a custom color palette — or, at the very least, used any of the default 256 colors that are created when mode 13h is initialized. (This beats out Moebius on the PC which has a later executable date.) Dream Zone is also notable in that it was created by the founders of Naughty Dog when they were 20 years old.

Dream-Zone-brother-room

1988-10-15: F-19 Stealth Fighter rasterizes the 3-D graphics using mostly the same 16 colors as as EGA during action gameplay, but when playing the game using MCGA, it uses the extra colors to draw the cockpit graphics using many color shades. This brings the number of colors up to 52 onscreen at once in typical gameplay.

f19-gameplay

1989-03-04: 688 Attack Sub starts off with a 210-color title screen and then uses many colors throughout gameplay: The Soviet control room (also pictured below) uses 73 colors; other screens produce a 16-color interface while an additional 16-element grayscale digitized picture is also shown; all elements of gameplay use a custom palette.

688-Attack-Sub-Title688-Attack-Sub-Soviet

Conclusions

Based on the above, let’s answer the questions we originally posed:

  • What was the first PC game to use MCGA’s 256-color video mode (ie. mode 13h)? Answer: Thexder.
  • What was the first PC game to use mode 13h to display more than 16 colors onscreen simultaneously? Answer: Rockford: The Arcade Game.
  • What was the first PC game to fully take advantage of mode 13h to show (nearly) 256 colors onscreen simultaneously? Answer: 688 Attack Sub.

Historical Context

Based on the above research, and my personal experience during this time period (if my own memory can be trusted), I can expand on these results with a little historical context. Consider this the “trivia” section of the article.

The “VGA” support in Thexder is truly MCGA support; this is reflected in the name of the graphics overlay, MAINPS, the PS part referring to mode 13h support as “PS/2 graphics” before the rest of the industry just started calling mode 13h “VGA graphics”. But if VGA also supports mode 13h, why don’t you see MCGA graphics when running Thexder on VGA systems? This is because the game is programmed to prefer EGA graphics over other display standards. Thexder’s native graphics are 640×200 in 8 colors as ported over from the original NEC PC-8801 version, which the developer emulated by running the game in EGA 640x200x16 mode. The developer felt the game looked best in its original graphics, so it shows the game that way on any system that can support EGA — and early PS/2 systems didn’t support VGA, only MCGA. So, the only way you can see the MCGA code/colors kick in is if you run it on an IBM PS/2 Model 25 or Model 30-8086, the only systems with MCGA graphics. If you don’t have one of these systems, you can force MCGA graphics to kick in by making a copy of your disk and then copying MAINPS to MAINEG, which will replace the EGA graphics code with the MCGA graphics code.

Rockford: The Arcade Game uses exactly 32 colors. Why is this interesting? Because it shows that the graphics were composed on an Amiga (most Amiga games were 32 colors), and instead of downconverting them to 16 colors like most PC ports did in the 1980s (see Airball for a typical example), the developer decided to support mode 13h so that all 32 colors could be displayed exactly. (Interestingly, the Amiga version of Rockford was released after the PC version.)

F-19 only barely supported mode 13h. It was a nice touch to draw the instrument panel using 32 shades of gray, but this is the only place in the game where additional colors are used. It serves the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law.

688 Attack Sub makes use of DeluxePaint fonts on all versions of its title screen, which means it used DeluxePaint during development. Also, an earlier demo of the game while it was still being developed (date is 1988) shows that it originally did not fully support 256-color graphics (in the linked screenshot, the background uses multiple colors, but the foreground elements were definitely drawn to the default 16-color palette). Was support of mode 13h in 688 Attack Sub considered only after a paint program existed they could use to create such graphics? Hopefully John Ratcliff, Michael Kosaka, or Wilfredo Aguilar can clarify the development timeline.

Disclaimers

I referred to 256-color mode as “mode 13h” because that’s the exact MCGA video mode in use for all games listed above. Later games used VGA’s flexibility to create 256-color modes in higher resolutions, or with multiple video pages, or split-screen, etc. but these were truly limited to VGA, and didn’t show up until 1990 or later. So I chose the exact technical term because it defined a consistent scope to use for comparisons. (If you want to do your own research down the rabbit hole of “What was the first game to tweak VGA into new video modes?” then you can use MobyGames to start that journey.

All of these answers are to the letter of the law, but not necessarily to the spirit of the law. In my completely subjective and unscientific opinion, the first PC game to truly show off MCGA with 200+ colors on every single screen is Mean Streets (because most of the screens were digitized in some way). Coupled with crude video sequences, and the ability to run at a decent speed on an IBM PS/2 Model 25, it’s a great early game to show off what MCGA was capable of.

MobyGames information may not be complete for the time periods researched. Given the nature of recording history, it may never be complete. If you feel I missed something, please contribute the missing game(s) to MobyGames so that future research can be more accurate.

Posted in Gaming, MobyGames, Vintage Computing | 17 Comments »

The failure of the Dreamcast

Posted by Trixter on March 22, 2017

The Dreamcast had a very short life; officially less than 3 years, although it felt like 4 because the Dreamcast continued to be sold in the US after it was officially discontinued.  I was recently part of a discussion where someone asserted that piracy was the major contributing factor to the failure of the Dreamcast, and I disagree.  The Dreamcast failed to achieve long-term acceptance, in my opinion, primarily because of the competition of the PS2.

The PS2 followed a long, very successful run of the PS1 and had more pull with Sony fans (Dreamcast sales dropped sharply in the USA when the PS2 USA launch date was announced).  Additionally, the PS2 was backward compatible with PS1 games, and was also a DVD player, both of which were very appealing.  Finally, some major developers and publishers did not support the platform (most notably Electronic Arts and Squaresoft), having been burned by Sega’s mismanagement of various aspects of prior consoles (such as announcing the Saturn early, which killed 32X sales, and also by the Saturn being very difficult to write code for due to its use of multiple processors).

If you were a brand-agnostic consumer with a choice between the PS2 and the Dreamcast, and you were trying to figure out which one was more special, you had a choice between a console that could play games on the internet (something only computer gamers cared about in 1999), or a console that could play hundreds of the previous generation’s games as well as DVDs. That was a one-two punch that the Dreamcast could only overcome through brand loyalty to SEGA, and it did so, admirably, for 3 rough years. Piracy was a problem for Dreamcast only after the Dreamcast was already on its way out, not the other way around.

I don’t view the Dreamcast as a complete and utter failure, but rather as a console that had a shorter-than-expected lifespan.

Posted in Gaming | 4 Comments »

Beyond Economic Recovery

Posted by Trixter on January 11, 2016

The phrase “Beyond Economic Recovery” is one of my favorite phrases because it succinctly describes how to determine if you can safely share an old program, manual, game, etc. online.  Please note that safe != legal.  It is always illegal to share things you don’t own and you are responsible for any repercussions if you break your country’s laws.  This post isn’t about whether it is legal.  This post is about whether or not you should be overly worried that you will be pursued by some IP holder’s legal department and sued into the ground.

This would be a good time to mention that I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Unless you are a large-scale pirating operation already under government investigation, what usually happens when infringement is discovered is that the infringing party is notified through a cease and desist letter.  Quick compliance with the terms of the letter is almost always enough to avoid further action.  But what if you are on a Quixote-like mission to share this rare vintage content with the world and really, REALLY want it to stay publicly available?  That’s when you apply The Phrase.

“Beyond Economic Recovery” isn’t my phrase; it was uttered to me in more than one interview I’ve had with lawyers on this specific subject.  Here’s how to use it:  Let’s say you want to share a 30-year-old game on the web for others to grab.  If you’re worried about legal repercussions, perform some due diligence and research if the company is actively using the work (the code, its trademarks, its intellectual property, etc.) to earn money, or has immediate or announced plans to do so. If so, such as in the case of Super Mario Brothers, don’t share it. But if not, as in the case of something like Space Strike, you have almost nothing to worry about.  When a company is made aware of infringement (usually discovered via automated google searches and machine learning), they perform a quick check of whether or not they would lose money sending the infringing party a cease and desist letter.  The average cost of a C&D letter, accounting for all time and services rendered, is roughly $4000.  If the company has an internal legal department or prepares communication in batches (or both), that number can be a little less, but it’s still thousands of dollars. So the mental check is essentially “Can we make more than $4000 on the asset or intellectual property this person is threatening to dilute by giving it away for free?” If the answer is “no”, they don’t bother sending a C&D letter.

The Internet Archive enjoys both non-profit status and various DMCA exemptions, which allows them to make various historically-relevant software works available online — but a DMCA exemption doesn’t prevent companies from sending them C&D letters to protect their trademarks or intellectual property.  (It also doesn’t succinctly define what is covered under the exemption, as it uses words like “obsolete” without defining what time period “obsolete” refers to.)  Some works that used to be public on the IA have since been hidden at the request of the IP holder.  For everything else that is still public there, The Phrase is the principle that “protects” those software portions of The Internet Archive; they are simply Beyond Economic Recovery.

Posted in Gaming, Software Piracy, Vintage Computing | 1 Comment »

Comedy gold in the Handy specification

Posted by Trixter on August 12, 2015

The Atari Lynx is my favorite handheld console.  Planning and design started in 1986, long before the Nintendo Game Boy, but development took long enough that it was actually released half a year after the Game Boy.  Whether or not that makes it the first or second handheld console is up for discussion, but it was definitely one of the first two.

History shows that the Lynx had an unsuccessful run compared to other handheld consoles of the time, which includes the Game Boy, Game Gear, and TurboExpress.  Lynx’s failure in the market was split fairly evenly between three culprits:

  1. Price: $179 vs. Game Boy’s $100
  2. Battery life: It took 6 AAs to power the unit for only 4 hours
  3. A lack of compelling licensed or original titles

The first hardware revision was also somewhat large, but as a guy with large hands, that never bothered me.

There were some killer arcade ports to the Lynx that really showcased what the system was capable of, such as Road Blasters, Stun Runner, and Klax.  But these were ports of Atari games; Lynx never got the “big” licensees such as Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter (a double shame considering the Lynx supported true hardware multiplayer linkups).

I recently sought out the Lynx hardware specification so that I could reminisce, sadly, about all of the untapped power Lynx had that was never realized.  The Lynx was so powerful that it shamed other handhelds for nearly a decade after it was discontinued:

  • 4096-color palette
  • Unlimited sprites with scaling, clipping, and collision (multiple modes!) all performed in hardware
  • 4-channel stereo sound supporting both algorithmic and sampled waveforms (in other words, it could play both pure-hardware chiptunes and Amiga mods)
  • Multiplayer cable connections up to 8 simultaneous players/units
  • Supported left-handed play via the ability to flip the screen

There were other cool bits for the time it came out too, like a limited 32-bit math-coprocessor (used for some true 3-D polygon games like Hard Drivin’ and Steel Talons).  It wasn’t perfect; the system would slow down if you pushed it too hard (too many sprites, too many sampled sounds playing simultaneously), but it was creative and ambitious.

The Lynx started life as a hardware project by Epyx, initially called “Handy” (because it was to be the first handheld console).  Ex-Amigans RJ Mical and Dave Needle were involved in the design, which is why Handy feels like a tiny Amiga.  The initial specification was written in June of 1987 by Dave Needle.  Reading through it, two things are immediately evident:

  1. The designers of Handy had a passion for creating a fun device with as many progammer assists as possible
  2. Dave had a wry sense of humor

I will now reproduce for you some of the comedy gold hiding in the Handy specification.  I’ve truncated some sequences for brevity, but the words are all Dave’s:

The human input controls consist of a 4 switch (8 position) joy stick, two sets of 2 independent fire buttons, game pause button, 2 flablode buttons. power on, and power off….Flablode is a Jovian word meaning a device or function that we know is required or desired but for which we don’t have an actual definition (noun: flabloden, verb: to flablode).

3. Software Related Hardware Perniciousness
(or why some software people hate some hardware people)

There are certain things that the software ought not to do to the hardware. While these things are not physically destructive on their own, they will cause the hardware to act unpredictably strange, which may cause the user to be physically destructive. While we certainly could have protected the system from many of the following problems, I doubt that we would have found them all. In addition, the act of software doing one of these things means that there is a problem in the software anyway and the intended function would probably not happen. Additionally, this is only a toy. If this unit were a bio-medical device I would have found a safer solution.

3.1 Don’t Do These Things.

If you do any of the things that I tell you not to do, the hardware will act unpredictably and will not be expected to recover without a complete system initialization. So don’t do them.

3.1.5 Palettes and Page Breaks

This one is an actual hardware bug of mine…(much technical info removed)…Pen index numbers C,D,E, and F will be incorrectly unchanged. Sometimes I am such a jerk.

3.2 Please Don’t Do These Things.

There are also things that software people do that merely annoy the hardware people rather than annoy the end user. This includes seemingly harmless activities like sub-decoding bit values from byte descriptions (sprite types, for instance), or assuming address continuity between areas of hardware…Please don’t do them. It would be difficult to list all of the possibilities, so I will list the general considerations and ask you to be sensible about them. In addition, please feel free to submit a request for an exemption-on a specific case. If it is granted, we will change the specification so as to make the special case forever legal. The price will be small.

3.3 Do It This Way

Some of the hardware functions, as designed by us mindless brutes, require special handling. As we discover these requirements, I will list them here.

4.3 CPU Sleep

BIG NOTE: Sleep is broken in Mikey. The CPU will NOT remain asleep unless Suzy is using the bus. There is no point in putting the CPU to sleep unless you expect Suzy to take the bus. We will figure out how to save power some other way.

All hardware collision detection is done with the data in the collision buffer, not the data in the video buffer. This has obvious advantages and will be explained at seminars and in newsletters forever….In addition, the software can either do its own collision detection, or use the contents of the collision buffer for some weird collision detection algorithm. In either event, I will be mortally offended.

In addition, this means that when some of the bytes are not reloaded, the length of the SCB will be smaller by the number of bytes not used. If I have said this in a confusing manner, then I have.

Well, I finally found the bug that required a pad byte of 0 at the end of each scan line of data. But, It is actually 2 bugs. I have fixed one of them, but the other requires an extensive change. Too bad, I am out of time. Therefore: There is a bug in the hardware that requires that the last meaningful bit of the data packet at the end of a scan line does not occur in the last bit of a byte (bit 0). This means that the data packet creation process must check for this case, and if found, must pad this data packet with a byte of all Os. Don’t forget to adjust the offset to include this pad byte. Since this will only happen in 1/8 of the scan lines, it is not enough overhead to force me to try to fix the bug. Sorry.

This bit can be used to pause the sprite engine. The ‘unsafe’ condition of the internal registers is not directly affected by this bit.

I need to think about how to use it.

Receive parity error can not be disabled. If you don’t want it, don’t read it….We have just discovered that the calculation for parity includes the parity bit itself. Most of us don’t like that, but it is too late to change it.

11.7 Unusual Interrupt Condition

Well, we did screw something up after all. Both the transmit and receive interrupts are ‘level’ sensitive, rather than ‘edge’ sensitive. This means that an interrupt will be continuously generated as long as it is enabled and its UART buffer is ready. As a result, the software must disable the interrupt prior to clearing it. Sorry.

11.8 left out

I left something out. I know what it is but by the next time I revise this spec, I may have forgotten.

I have forgotten.

12.1.4 Bugs in Mathland

BIG NOTE: There are several bugs in the multiply and divide hardware. Lets hope that we do not get a chance to fix them.
1. In signed multiply, the hardware thinks that 8000 is a positive number.
2. In divide, the remainder will have 2 possible errors, depending on its actual value. No point in explaining the errors here, just don’t use it. Thank You VTI.

12.4 Qbert Root

As a compromise between the square root and qube root desires of the software people, and the schedule desires of the management, we have decided to incorporate the function of QbertRoot. The required steps are:
1. Start a 16 by 16 multiply.
2. Immediately write to ‘E’ which will try to start a divide.
3. Read the result from “D,C,B,A’.

(editor’s note:  I can’t tell if QbertRoot is an actual function, or trolling.)

16. Known Variances From Anticipated Optimums
This is a list of the known bugs in the hardware.

…It will be OK to write to the twentyfour 16 bit registers of the Suzy SCB PROVIDING that you only do it via the MACRO PROVIDED TO YOU BY RJ MICAL. In addition, you must understand that the contents of this macro may change if future revisions of the hardware so require. In addition, you must understand that future hardware may make the process not work and therefore the macro will be changed to be a warning that you can’t use it anymore.

Don’t cheat.

My personal favorite, saved for last:

7.3 Stereo

The 4 audio channels can be individually enabled into either of the two output drivers. This is not now in the hardware. It may never get into the hardware. After all, I hate music. However, since I acknowledge that I am wrong about some kinds of music (in the right circumstances, with me not present) I have graciously allocated one entire byte for the possible implementation of another useless and annoying sound feature.

(For the record, that feature did go into the hardware, in the second hardware revision of the Lynx.  If you have the later hardware, some audio is in true stereo.)

If all hardware/technical documentation was written this way, I’d be an embedded systems programmer by now.

I’ve scanned and OCR’d the full Handy specification for anyone wanting to learn more about the Lynx.  There’s a compo-winning demo hidden in the hardware, just waiting to be found.

Posted in Gaming, Programming, Technology, Vintage Computing | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Gone Home’s horrifying alternate ending

Posted by Trixter on February 2, 2015

(This article spoils Gone Home, so if you haven’t played it and want to, stop reading.)

Last year I played Gone Home, and loved it — not for its gameplay (more on this later), but for its near-perfect capture of teenage girl angst in the 1990s.  It’s a wonderful mental snapshot that is difficult to evoke in more traditional visual media; it raised genuine emotion in me, which is rare for a game.

Or, rather, narrative.  Gone Home only barely qualifies as a game; it’s more of an interactive narrative where the pace is controlled by the player and can be explored non-linearly.  To qualify as a game, the user’s actions would have a bearing on the narrative; for example, actions would dictate branching paths, alter the choices given to the player, the ending would be different, etc.  The developers changed the Gone Home page at some point to describe it as “A Story Exploration Video Game”, maybe to mitigate some of the (admittedly very small) criticism from journalists and gamers who point this out.

What’s interesting is that you actually do have a single choice to make, and it can change the ending completely.

Credit for finding this one goes to my wife Melissa, who stumbled into this completely by accident.  The narrative towards the very end of the game flows essentially like this:

  1. Sam loses girlfriend
  2. Sam gets girlfriend back
  3. Sam apologies to sister that she’s leaving

(#3 implies that she’s running away from home to be with her girlfriend again.)  These are told in the form of journal entries that you click on as you navigate the game world.  You have to find and click on them to activate them, or you’ll never read/hear them.  So what happens if you skip journal entry #2?  The narrative now becomes:

  1. Sam loses girlfriend
  2. Sam apologies to sister that she’s leaving

That last part is the end of the game, and is portrayed with the following text as somber grunge music starts to play:

Katie… I’m so sorry.
That I can’t be there to see you in person.
That I can’t tell you all this myself.
But I hope, as you read this journal, and you think back, that you’ll understand why I had to do what I did.
And that you won’t be sad and you won’t hate me, and you’ll just know…
that I am where I need to be.
I love you so much, Katie. I’ll see you again. Someday.

Without knowing why Sam is leaving, this reads like a suicide note.  Imagine the horror in my wife’s face as she missed the relevant journal entry by accident and arrived at this ending.

The good thing about this unintended consequence is that Gone Home can now officially be called a “real” game, as a player choice can result in a second ending.

Well, there’s a third ending too, but you’ll need guns.  Lots of guns.

Posted in Gaming | 2 Comments »

Fun for the feeble-minded

Posted by Trixter on October 26, 2014

As a teenager in the 1980s, I loved using computers, and also building things, and especially loved building things with computers.  Naturally, I adored Music Construction Set and Pinball Construction Set.  The version of Music Construction Set for the PC floating around in the wild was mine; it comes with 30+ tunes more than the original diskette had, mostly covers as I learned to use the program, or learned my music lessons, or transcribed tunes I heard on other computers (the “power bots” MCS tune should be familiar to Apple II owners).  My Pinball Construction Set tables were not as enjoyable, so they stayed with me.

The more I built my own tables, the more I wanted to see how other tables were built.  I acquired a copy of Night Mission Pinball from a friend, and played it for hours, jealous of how much more it did than PCS:  Sound was more “authentic”, more complicated scoring, better graphics.  I ended up playing it exclusively and stopped using PCS.

Unfortunately, I played it so much that the disk wore out and wouldn’t boot any more.  Worse, my friend no longer had a copy to make for me, and I was too broke to buy it proper.  What to do?

Build my own in Pinball Construction Set, obviously:

mynight_000

I did this from memory just from playing the original game for so many hours.  It’s not perfect, but when you compare it to the original, I think I did a pretty good job:

pinball_000

If you’d like to play the amateur horror that is Jim Leonard’s Night Mission Pinball, you can now do so.

Posted in Gaming, Vintage Computing | 1 Comment »

Hey, a podcast appearance

Posted by Trixter on September 23, 2013

I had a great time talking with Anatoly of the DOS Nostalgia Podcast a few days ago, and what do you know, I’m capable of speaking into a microphone.  We spoke mostly about the first decade of PC gaming, and conclude with some games that were notable for being so well-programmed that they perform some amazing things on your 8088 that it really has no business doing.  Snag the episode here, and let him know what you think.

Posted in Gaming, Podcast, Uncategorized, Vintage Computing | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries