Greetings

[ahdiovizun]

Hello everyone. From lurking here a while, it would seem that I'll likely fall into the "old man" category. I respect retro because I grew up with it - born in '73, right at the beginning of the first home game boom. My first machine was an Odyssey 2, and I remember spending too many hours down at the local shopping center in the arcade section playing all the newest games. A few years later, I acquired a 2600 - that was wonderful just because of the sheer number of great games, but I always envied my Coleco and Intellivision friends. I remember in '90 when my high school computer teacher brought in a NES with a 64-game multi-cartridge he bought through Computer Shopper... we didn't get much schoolwork done that day. I also spent about 5 hours a week down at the local video arcade inside a movie theater all through grade school.

After the Great VG Crash and graduating high school, I got out of the arena for a while, other than owning a succession of Amiga machines (which, in my opinion, is still the best home computer system that was ever made - shame about Commodore running it into the ground). Now that I'm "older", well-settled, have a lot more disposable income and space, I've started getting back into retro gaming. I "discovered" Mame and PinMame a few years ago and have been collecting ROMs ever since (it's wonderful to be able to play all these games that I remember so vividly from my school days), and I've also picked up a standup arcade cabinet (no idea what it was originally - the previous owner started it as a project and got through sanding and painting it, so it's near-virgin) that's currently sitting in the garage waiting to be made into a viable machine. I also have an idea about throwing a large plasma/LCD screen into a pinball cabinet to turn it into a PinMame machine. One of these days...

I had some time to kill this evening and just started googling around for retro gaming sites, and that's what brought me here.

It's nice to see all the traffic here, and all the interest from you "young kids" who weren't there back when this stuff came out. I still play the occasional strategy or FPS game on my big PC, but other modern (2000+) game systems generally don't interest me. In fact, I remember even when arcade games lost my interest - right around when the Neo Geo system came out.

Before then, game designers really had to be innovative, due to the extreme RAM and storage limitations. As an example of the most extreme end of that spectrum, I'd suggest Starflight (from EA/Binary Systems) which was released back in '86 - I remember buying that for my... I think it was a Tandy 1000 at that point... and playing it for years. Two 360k floppy disks contained the software plus data on hundreds of star systems, each with multiple planets to land on, each planet with incredible land detail (not to mention a great storyline). The disks themselves couldn't store anywhere near that much data, so they actually wrote a fractal generation system for the planets - incredible work. These days, with DVD/BRD distribution, virtually unlimited storage, and hardware graphics engines (pioneered in the Amiga) few developers really NEED to be that innovative.

Anyway, I really do miss those days, and it's great that we can relive them now.

My main purpose in being here is to catch up on all the systems I missed from after the Great Crash - the Nintendos, Segas, and so forth. I never owned or played with those myself, though a few friends had them, so I'll enjoy reading about your experiences. I'll also enjoy swapping tales about the early days - every time I light up Mame or UAE or one of my other emulators brings back incredible memories.

Glad to be here - thanks for having me.

-ahd

[dedalusdedalus]

I've never heard of Starflight prior to your post. I read about it on Wikipedia and it sounds like an amazing game, especially for its time. I'm also a big fan of games where you can choose what to specialize in; I think "Uncharted Waters 2" also did that pretty well in that your character could specialize in privateering, cartography, or trade.

Welcome to Racketboy!

[ahdiovizun]

If you want to learn more about Starflight, I'd suggest googling a bit - I hadn't read the WP entry before, and it's woefully short and doesn't talk very much about what made the game so interesting. The main storyline was long and detailed, the game designers introduced a bunch of humorous elements (even down to the copy protection - if you entered the wrong code too many times when prompted, the game would proceed normally but a few in-game-days later the Galactic Police would track you down and force you to try again or else destroy you), and it truly is an open-ended game.

It's been a few years since I last played it - I might have to give it a whirl soon. It should look hilarious in CGA mode on my 30" monitor.

Anyway, yes, these days it's rare to find a game with that type of ingenuity and design thought outside of MMORPGs. I've been watching a lot of old movies recently and see the same trend today - CGI availability has jaded me; most modern flicks I see are the equivalent of mindless shoot-em-ups. Why do you need a plot if you have great FX, seems to be the going thought. More evidence of the "old man" in me creeping out.

Another set of games that I miss (or, more accurately, I miss people giving them appreciation) are the old Infocom text adventures - Zork, et al. I spent countless hours playing those things - I still remember the first time I solved Zork II. Those too are easy to find these days, but most people these days can't fathom how a non-graphics game can be interesting, and they lack the patience for them. I have a 120" projection screen in my home theater downstairs, and that 30" LCD on my desk - back then, in 1980, all I had was my TRS-80 Model III (cassette only - no disk drives; but I did have a killer 48K of RAM!) and the "big screen in my mind."

Okay, enough ranting for now. Enjoy.

[J T]

Welcome to the board. I had an Odyssey 2 when I was younger as well and I was one of those Colecovision people you envied. I remember Zork and even tried to craft my own text based adventure at some point in high school when I was into programming. There's a freeware Legend of Zork game you might be interested in:
http://legendsofzork.com/

[bacteria]

'73 - I was '66. First console I played was Pong in '75 when you were in a pushchair! My father likes gadgets so got Pong, then on release, Atari 2600 and Intellivision. I still have memories playing some of the games at the time!

Most people on RacketBOY seem to be older than on some other forums; seem to be mostly in their 20's and 30's here, which is nice; meaning a more mature outlook and better quality of member as a result here.

[Dakinggamer87]

Welcome!!

[gtmtnbiker]

Now that I'm "older", well-settled, have a lot more disposable income and space, I've started getting back into retro gaming.

That's the best thing about being older. No crap about money problems...buy whatever you want. The worst thing is that I don't have the same time as I did as a kid.

I'm an Atari 2600/800/Intellivision kid who hated C64. In college, I had a Genesis and hated the SNES. Now that I'm mature, I no longer hate any consoles/computers. They all have their pluses/minuses.

Earlier this year, I asked my parents if they still have my Atari 800 system (I remember seeing it in their garage a couple of years ago) but alas, they had given it away to someone. Rats!

I remember having a paper route and would collect money from a couple of houses before going to the local pizza parlor to play Asteroids, PacMan, or Donkey Kong. Every 2 weeks, I had to pay the newspaper company and would have $5-7 left over unlike my brother who would have $25. My Mom would asked "What happened to your money?". "I dunno?".

[gtmtnbiker]

Most people on RacketBOY seem to be older than on some other forums; seem to be mostly in their 20's and 30's here, which is nice; meaning a more mature outlook and better quality of member as a result here.

Ditto. Another site with an older crowd that you might want to check out is atariage.com

[Hatta]

Starflight is indeed awesome. I played the Genesis version back in the day. It even came with a manual about half an inch thick, half of that being back story. Really immersive universe they created there. Later I played the C64 version through emulation, honestly there was nothing to recommend it over the Genesis version. This is in contrast to Genesis version of Star Control, which is pretty awful compared to the computer versions. So pick it up for the Genesis if you can, and try to find one with a manual.

[ahdiovizun]

@JT: Thanks for the pointer to Legends of Zork. I killed over an hour on there last night. Just what I need - another timewaster!

@bacteria: The more I read around, the more I see that you're right - lots of "older folks" like us. That's a wonderful feeling - it's great finally to run across others of my "genre." Back in the 90s when the Internet started getting out there and hailed the death of BBSes (I started at 300bps on Compuserve in '81, as I recall, ending up in the local New England BBS scene through college), I figured eventually the 'net would be overrun by people who take technology for granted (rather than being interested in its history and engineering, even the art of it), and I was right. It's wonderful to find islands of appreciation like here and AtariAge.

@gtmtnbiker: Thanks for the pointer to AtariAge - I just popped over there for a half-hour and read up on the thread where "Curt" is pulling the Atari chip schematics from old 9-track tape - that is simply spectacular. I'll definitely be spending time there. As far as hating new consoles/computers goes, it's not really that I hate them - it's more, to my mind, about signal-to-noise ratio. As I said previously, the easy ubiquity of high-end graphics and virtually unlimited storage has, in general, I feel, made game designers lazy. A lot of modern games all just look the same to me; it's tough finding that needle in a haystack. Plus, certainly, there's a large element of nostalgia. Those were some of the best times of my life. While, yes, I don't need to save up money (or beg family) to buy these toys anymore, the flipside is that I have to work. Back then, aside from school, I could play to my heart's content. As you say - time is really the issue now. When I have free time, I've been spending it exploring all those dark electronic corners of my youth that I never had the means to enjoy rather than spending it on modern implementations. Of course, 20 years from now, I'll probably still be on here, but reminiscing about Xbox360 games.

@Hatta: I haven't tried anything on Genesis, though I did see that StarFlight was available for it. I'll put it in my list to find. I was very happy with the T1000 version of it, but from the screenshots of the Genesis version, I think I'd enjoy putting that up on the Big Screen a lot more than PC graphics.

Thanks again for the welcome, all.