Re: Cinemaware! Gauntlet, Druid, Ultima

by Vulpis

Ah, the Lipstik. Never had one, myself.
And you got the diskette subs (I'm guessing Computer's Gazette--I can't remember if Ahoy or the other mags I can't remember the name of had a diskette subscription along with the dead-tree mags)? waves cane Sonny, in my day we didn't have these fancy pre-entered freewares! We sat up all night typing in page after page after page of columns of hex code just to have a word processor (though Speedscript was definitely a nice little WP for the time) or clone of Omega Race, and we liked it!

I do kinda miss my Commie, though...there were just so many things an end-user could do with it, both hardware and software thanks to the sheer amount of documentation for it (try doing that sort of thing with Windows without having to pull teeth--and fingernails--just to get the docs you need! Hah!). I rememeber fondly doing silly things like using a book on Apple Assembler in order to learn to use machine-language (the 6510 in the C64 is pretty much the same as the 6502 as far as basic programming goes, with the latter just having a few more opcodes. The important part was having a good memory map for the machine so you knew where to put stuff for grpahics, sound, and such. Never really got a chance to use it, though), editing the classic BASIC game 'Super Star Trek' from David Ahl's book so that it fit in 40 columns instead of 72 and used some color (when I have a red alert, it's actually red!

), and the fun project of adapting the VAX version of TinyFugure (tfVMS) so that ran on 40 cols. Kinda wish I'd bothered to learn how to make telecomm programs, as I never did figure out what kept causing NovaTerm to lock up with that. And unfortunately, since I wasn't using a good monitor, 80-column mode was unreadable on the thing. :-/

And then of course there was the bit of silliness that has ended up with me owning 3 different versions of the game Dragon Wars, first for the Commie, then for the Amiga, and then the PC version.

Posted on Jul 30, 2012, 7:13 AM

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