80s tech... retro geeks come here please. You know you want to.ZX81, Spectrums, BBC, Acorns, Commodores, Those stupid video games etc. etc.

[hub2dee]

Fillyjonk won a Nobel Prize for writing a computer game for her Spectrum.

Let us all reminisce.

We had a 16K Spectrum

And then we sent it away to be upgraded to 48K .

My dad used to write games for it.

Any games on tapes would inevitably end up with R Tape Loading Error.

There are emulators available aren't there (have only read part of the thread so someone has probably already linked to one).

OMG! Atic Atac!! How could I forget? It was the only game I completed! I love Atic Atac.

Vic 20? You dance on the dark side Jura. I also used to type in those damn listings and they never, ever worked. Used to take hours!

I love the way this thread is flushing the geeks out. I knew it wasn't only me

The Amiga wasn't the same as the beeb, agree. It played lemmings though, which was more than my beeb could manage.

Jet Set Willy I was also young enough to at the name.

Anybody else use to use the POKEs? Or am I just trying to crown myself as uber-geek?

I remember the day that the penny clicked that actually, one could just copy computer games using a stereo with 2 tapes, just like you'd pirate anything else really.

oooh I had lots of text adventures after that...

Oh happy nostalgia!

I always loved Killer Gorilla for the BBC better than Donkey King!

Many hours playing Chuckie Egg happy sigh My mum was addicted to Planetoid.

But best of all was text adventure Sphinx! How well I can remember being stuck in those damned iron passages!

When my dad was drunk once he put a towel over the tv and made my sis type out a programme without looking. Oh those happy days

Then we got burgled, but my brother gave us his Speccy. My faves were Gift of the Gods, Clytemnestra is getting closer! Or whatever it was! And best of all... a text adventure! Called Valley I think, I remember some collecting of amulets.

A few years ago I downloaded a BBC and a Speccy emulator and played some of the old games. Acorn games are still copyrighted, but I felt smug downloading them as we still have the old ones on tape!! Tape!!

oooh lemmings!

What was kind of odd was the limited gameplay of these machines. i mean, there was so little randomisation or anything. Looking at stuff like Nethack, clearly it could be done, it just wasn't, for some reason.

Oooh and King Arthur's Quest! But you can't download that cos you also need the clues which were on a fold out crossword thing...one of them is Gawain...but can't risk the rest cos of the witch...

"it is past my feeding time and I am very hungry. Would you mind fetching me my dinner? Its to the east"

Yes, this is a slightly worrying geek flush thread, LOL.

I met my hubs on a MUSH (text based roleplaying game) so I will never ever emerge from the geek umbrella again.

I hope you fought hard and didn't just flutter your goblin lashes LOL.

LOL! Actually I hated his character, an amoral spy with a superiority complex! And he hung out with The Other MUSH Faction whom I hate with a passion ;o) Oooh the memories are all flooding back ;o)

hate = hateD! I'm not still holding grudges 9 years later! LOL!

LOL.

DH and I were just talking about this last night.

Oh Mummy, anyone?

omg , that is not what Oh Mummy looked like in my menory

there were more tombs and suchlike

All the games on these emulators look far more crappy than I remember them being LOL.

I used to do a bit of POKEing and PEEKing arfishy.

am at the hobbit loading screen actually

where are smaug's shiny scales? And he was much scarier than that also.

LOL. I knew you'd be the only one to admit to a bit of POKEing hub.

And the problem with using the ROMs is that the processors now are too fast, so everything runs at super-speed even if you artificially slow it.

Are all of you first-gen lot still playing games?

I sort of handed over the mantle to my DSS and have enjoyed playing with them for the last 10 years. I can't really justify the gaming time now, but want to get a wii for DD, who will be 4. I quite like the idea because it's moving around rather than sitting and staring (ie I can let her play educational moving games and feel completely guilt-free)

I play Xbox games, am addicted to Halo and Lego Star Wars, some DS stuff and I have some adventure games for the PC, but I never seem to get time to do them.

Hubs works for a major pc/console games company so we get free games

if i get into games i become totally addicted (like mn i suppose ) though i loved lemmings, tetris and had a few lost weekends with silent hill.

roland on the ropes... iceman thingy (you could zap and freeze things) manic miner - all on our amstrad (with built in casette).. would set it iff to load before tea... and then come back up 30 mins later and find 'error' all over the screen... bah!!!!

I have a fabby collection of old computers and games

Oric Atmos anyone?

I wrote a Tunnels and Trolls like game for my spectrum

it was called 'There's no such thing as a free lunch'

I wrote most of it during History lessons

dh used to write spectrum games and other stuff as a teenager and had quite a nice little mail-order business going. He gets a real kick out of seeing his stuff on emulators.

(we're such a couple of geeks, we even met online back in the days when most people didn't really know what email was )

I remember getting a ZX81 - first time I'd seen anything like that - and plugging it in, etc, and typing "draw a goat" onto the screen.

I was very disappointed when it didn't.

Spent hours playing Chucky Egg. (must have an addictive personality-now it's hours on MN!