These games look prehistoric (well the 1979)

I know, I still find it a little annoying. Then again, I’m Gen-X, so… At least I make an effort to introduce these games to my kids, unlike those YouTubers I alluded to. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: I hope you do too :slight_smile:

Yeah it was an awesome game and these epic experiences you describes make games wonderful to play as opposed to movies were the epic stuff happens while doing nothing. There is a sense of accomplishment in these things. For me the “prehistoric part” is also finding out that in my mind these graphics blew me away at the time but look very different now I look back at the same game.

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Unfortunately not, I think I became a CIV2 junk at the time which was and IS highly addictive. :-). Also I kept playing the Pacific as I still had these “Bounty Bar Stereotypes” of these Islands and the names all looked cool. That is before I actually went to some of those and learned about Dengue fever, overpopulation like in Tarawa/Samoa, stupid Nintendo like crabs that try to scissor you in the toes, a depressed population which moves to NZ/Australia as there are badly paying jobs there. frikking hot weather, ok they still have great places to snorkel and dives without tourism.

So I thought about buying Europe but never got around to it. Great that we played simular stuff. :slight_smile:

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Nowadays, well this vid is 9 years old even normal flight training is heavily gamified. I personally liked FS Flying School as it rates landings, approaches patterns on many point and builds up a file showing your progress and points to improve. It also won’t let you fly patterns unless you get your landings and take-offs acceptable.

It also monitors use of lights and is getting more and more planes. The only disadvantage I see is that it is more aimed at planes for people who do flight school. So if you fly and old warbird like the J-3 Piper Cub spotter it will keep whining about not deploying flaps. Well uuuhhh the frikking thing doesn’t have flaps so you just have to forward side slip down which freaked out the “computer pilot” even more. But anyway it does offer a useful game and defeats the boredom of most pacifistic flight sims have.

FSFlyingSchool PRO - Tutorial of Pilots Screen - YouTube

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This is one of the games I played on a VIC-20. It came on a catridge and the most difficult part was finding the right commands. It is a text adventure and all you had was text. These worked because it plays like a book where you are the actor. Text adventures triggered the fantasy!

Warning: The game has a lot of smoking by the player in it. :slight_smile: Well it was made in the early 80s :slight_smile:

Commodore VIC 20 - The Count (Full Playthrough) - YouTube

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BBC Micro Elite and 3D Tanks in the arcades; the finest examples of wireframe games ever. Also Conqueror on the original Acorn Archimedes, using the same engine as Zarch to build a tank game.

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Why didn’t we have this in 1981. Someone programmed DOOM (the first succesfull 3D shooter on PC). Well Wolfenstein 3D (which is more appropriate for this channel as you get to shoot up Wevelsburg :slight_smile: )

Doom for the Vic-20 - YouTube

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More importantly, what this computer had was a fantastic manual that came with the computer itself. So a lot of people learned to program on this computer in a time when VERY few people could actually program and courses were wildly expensive.

I learned it on a course of the TI 99/4A By the way which was a great computer with sexy voice synthesizer but was driven off the market by Commodore inesalternatives. Good old Jack Tramiel VIC-20/Commodore price setting. Texas Instruments was another one of the electronics giants who were hammered by the “New Kids on the block”.

This video explains, still amazing what can be done on this basic architecture

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You would be amazed how many DOOM ports are out there. Because the source code is publicly available people have been able to program it onto everything.

I even recall seeing a video about DOOM being played on a calculator :open_mouth:

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Thanks for mentioning the calculator, even more impressive.

But in the case of the Vic 20 it looks like an assembler or even peek/poke machine code to get this result. Amazing job.

Back in those days operating system life was short and few people could program. Some hobbyist are still programming on the 40 year old Vic. :nerd_face::smiley:. Vic forever​:+1:

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When I started teaching IT for beginners in 1997 the course on learning how to turn on the computer and understand how it worked was 37 hours. Today I can hardly imagine how the time was spent, but it was like: Day one: this is a mouse

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I know that One IT guy had to report himself to management because he asked the Purchasing department for a “mousepad” which in Dutch can also be translated as a path that a mouse takes when walking.

They wanted him reprimanded for requesting idiot purchases. It took a while until we should them mousepads and how a mouse worked. I brought out my Amiga and showed them how it works! And that was a hospital.

In another case the Prime Minister was on TV. When he was told to mouse to the right top corner het actually picked up the mouse and held up on the right too corner of the video screen :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

The current generation can’t comprehend how new this stuff is at the time.

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I had a customer return an Atari ST way back when complaining that the mouse squeaked. When I smiled, he went ballistic.

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And unfortunately, the more vocal folks among the new generation see us old men as being a bunch of idiots because of that. I remember showing an instructional video for the Internet from the mid-90s or so a few years ago and I heard some students shout at the folks in the video: “You MORON! How do you live?” Kinda sad, really, but hey. That’s plain old arrogance of modernity rearing its ugly head.

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Sure, but young people just look at the screen and don’t know was Is going on in the backend, And they use platforms for free and happily pay with their privacy. Furthermore the “sky” uses a lot of energy, and they lost the critical sense to spot fake news.

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They tend to forget that the Xerox Alto had e-mailing functionality early 1970s and a mouse and networking. Skyping could be done in WW2 via Teletype conferences and microfiches existed.

A lot of people get panicked when they leave the house without a phone and cannot fathom spending time trekking Alaska being completely outside of coverage.

Well, I guess young people who think they are ahead and act as they “invented” the tech are of ever age. When I was young the teacher had different approaches, some started programming themselves, or assumed computers were only there to play stupid games.

We never had this show Whizz Kids in the Netherlands but being able to peek and poke and let things run on screen by simply using basic was magic. I my parents were amazed that I could manipulate the TV screen.

Whiz Kids - Watch Out (Full Episode) - Bing video

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