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Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

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Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#171

Post by scholia »

busterarm wrote: post #108
kriro wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Atari ST 1040 was a great gaming platform.

Boy were they unpopular though. They built a machine to compete with the C64 at the time when Amiga was the new thing.

> Boy were they unpopular though

They were popular in Europe, where they were cheap. In fact, in the UK, the 512K Atari ST with mono screen and mouse was slightly cheaper upgrading a 128K Mac to 512K (£750 vs £800).

The Atari ST was slightly faster than the Mac, had a better monochrome screen, and could run all Mac software, albeit not legally. (You either bought a plug-n cartridge that took Mac ROMs or used MacBongo, a ripped-off version loaded from disk.)

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#172

Post by eggy »

Keyframe wrote: post #153
eggy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I think that is a common problem with purely technical people. They don't include all of the other important factors: affordability, support (by the company and number of people around you familiar with the system), and many others. The Amiga sound and graphics chips blew other systems out of the water technically, and did good with the consumer offerings like the A500, but aside from a niche in the vide…

Funny memory. We bought an SGI machine for when clients were around (doing 3D graphics and video compositing). In the backroom we did it all on Amigas and Lightwave. Clients thought it was all done on SGI/Softimage - so it must be good! It would've been (better) if we could afford as much workstations and application seats as we would've wanted. I still have two SGI's that work. It feels like owning a vintage Ferrari…

Where was this? I worked in NYC, and I landed a non-paying, non-intern learning position at a 3D animation company using SGI with Prisms, which is now Houdini. I loved the design, and Irix was great! I recall thinking that the screens were so hi-res ;)

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#173

Post by lwhi »

32bitkid wrote: post #138

My father bought the first family computer, an IBM PCjr, when I was 4 or 5. Donkey.BAS made a huge impact on me, although its easy to overlook as a crap game these days. Sure, there were "better" games that I played on that system: my older brother purchased Sierra's Black Cauldron–which I played the shit out of. My uncle wanted me to grow up to be a pilot, so MS Flight Simulator was in order, too. Jordan Mechner's K…

It makes me feel incredibly nostalgic too. In the 80s I used to borrow books from my local library about programming (written for kids) [1], and spend hours typing out source code for computers that used a slightly different version of BASIC. While I was frustrated they wouldn't work, it sparked my imagination and I think the process taught me more about self-learning than anything I was taught at school.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE...

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#175

Post by Keyframe »

eggy wrote: post #172
Keyframe wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny memory. We bought an SGI machine for when clients were around (doing 3D graphics and video compositing). In the backroom we did it all on Amigas and Lightwave. Clients thought it was all done on SGI/Softimage - so it must be good! It would've been (better) if we could afford as much workstations and application seats as we would've wanted. I still have two SGI's that work. It feels like owning a vintage Ferrari…

Where was this? I worked in NYC, and I landed a non-paying, non-intern learning position at a 3D animation company using SGI with Prisms, which is now Houdini. I loved the design, and Irix was great! I recall thinking that the screens were so hi-res ;)

It was in Croatia, Europe. Same story all over the world though (at least where I was at). And, they were so "high-res". At the time, I believe only screen I saw on a workstation that had such a high resolution was on one HP-UX machine. They were also a great sight. Shame about later models (Octane) being such loud beasts though. Not really for desks.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#177

Post by kabdib »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #126
kabdib wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistic…

PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck While true, the quality of sound achievable this way is a matter of software. There are many programs that achieved excellent sound quality, playing music even with just a speaker and a TTL drive. Remember, the simplest DAC is PWM into a low-pass filter.

Well, maybe. It's still bang-bang control, and to get decent quality you'd have to dedicate the processor to bit-banging the port. With the Mac you just filled in a buffer that got DMA'd along with the video. Not great, but at least you could do waveforms using a slice of the CPU.

The PC was built to beep, and that's about it. Anything you got out of it past that was painful and used a lot of CPU.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#178

Post by pantulis »

zamalek wrote: post #73
pantulis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it should have some kind of display adapter, what was it, Hercules? I didn't know of any 386-class computers that didn't carry EGA or higher.

Hercules definitely rings a bell. The Wikipedia page[1] actually explains how the TSR [probably] worked, which seems to not be much as the Hercules seems to be quite elegantly designed. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_Emu...

Well I clearly remember using an Hercules emulator with my SuperVGA card so that it could run some old DOS games, so the other way around also worked.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#179

Post by johansch »

kragen wrote: post #157
johansch wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC-BASIC is a great re-implementation of GWBASIC. I tried it on some of my old gems from the late 80s and they still worked. :)

Are you going to put them on Github?

Sorry, that would be deeply embarrassing. I was 10-12. :)

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#180

Post by Nullabillity »

coldtea wrote: post #49
WayneBro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.

> Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. A proven winner, with significant contributions to the field would be more accurate. > Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? It's not what he thinks about games in general, it's what he think about a particular historical artifact that happens to be a game. And people care about his opinion on those times (the website linked is quite popular) because he was an i…

> Only for people whose appreciation for games is restricted to the latest, full-blast on the GPU, AAA titles.

The one common complaint for all game developers seems to be about Apple's nightmare-inducing OpenGL implementation.

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