gxd

I finished all Infocom games during covid (and read all Digital Antiquarian articles since then). Despite being very interested in the games, I knew I wouldn't have energy to literally beat them. So I played with walkthroughs, stopping to examine things and enjoy the scenery, so to speak. There was no challenge, but I still had fun. Somewhat like visiting a museum.

I think they will still do it. Steam has a ton of games with local storage and modding is highly encouraged in many of them. Additionally, there's a growing interest in classic gaming, in particular NES/SNES, even from people who didn't live through the early generations. These games will remain eternally hackable.

Haven't thought about this game in ages. I remember seeing it in ads but never played it.

It's odd that it became so obscure considering it was released by a major, even if then declining, game company.

The Apple II+ was my first Apple. My second one was a Macbook Air M3!

The Apple II has a very interesting and quirky software collection. Quite a few weird little games made by bedroom coders, along many of the earliest titles of the big names.

I highly recommend anyone who's interested in "retro games" to explore the Apple II collection. Many are unplayable by modern standards, but you can use walkthroughs and save states to see what these games have to offer. Today "retro" is largely about consoles, but there are only so many times one can watch NES speedruns on Youtube!

I had Slackware CDs in the nineties! They had a minimalist label and came with no jewel case (rubber band if I recall correctly).

I've been meaning to rediscover the CICA and Simtel collections. Maybe that's what I needed!

I created a program like that back in the day. In my case, I recorded my voice through the "MIC" input and played it back through the TV. A few seconds of sampled audio required the entire available memory. While I fully understood what was going on, I thought it was magical that the Spectrum could "speak with my voice".

I think a proper manual for a modern computer at the same detail level as the Commodore one would be much bigger than a car manual! It's not as much printing costs, but developing that documentation would cost a lot. I think that would make sense for big venders like Dell, Apple etc, but I wonder if anyone would actually read it. It's too much information...

I've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book.

The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.

The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.

It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.

Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)

A relative had a Mac running Racter back in the day. I was a child but I played with it quite a bit. I found it magical. I thought I was looking at ChatGPT, but obviously it was a trick. A few years later I realized that Racter wasn't that good, but I've always wanted a "Racter that actually works"... It was a long wait, but we got it for better or worse!

> You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then

In the United States... In a lot of countries, computers cost a lot more than that in the local currency which, together with lower salaries, made computers inaccessible to most people.

I remember seeing people playing GORILLA.BAS in computer stores...

For those who don't know why GORILLA.BAS is so cool... Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. Sometimes a parent would buy a computer for word processing or spreadsheets or take kids to the office which also had business computers. Children were curious about the computers but there wasn't really anything fun to do with them besides banging on the keyboard...

...Until you found the BASIC dialect that came with MS-DOS, that is! GORILLA.BAS was bundled with DOS and was a fun little game you could play in those computers. It's not like you could access web games on the Internet - there was no Internet!