I didnāt realize how much I missed 90ās software packages until now. Nothing beat having one of those giant, hefty in boxes in hand, knowing that there was probably a 200+ page spiral bound notebook and various feelies inside. It made you feel like you were buying something substantial.
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I have been doing some research into how to best preserve the original boxes that these old systems came in. I have found several people doing Youtube videos for original console game boxes and toys, but not much for old computer packaging. I did find a cool resource that museums use for their paper artifacts hereā¦
https://www.conservation-wiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
It has a ton of information on preserving old paper artifacts. How do people feel about that, do you keep the original packaging or boxes? Most of the systems in my collection do have their original packaging, it just doesnāt give the same impression without it in my opinion. But it does bring me to the question of how to preserve them?
Jason
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This thread prompted me to visit the Newtek forums and see how LW is getting on and it looks like many developers are being let go or leaving and the morale is rather low.
LW has been irrelevant to me for a long time but I still have affection for it as without it I wouldnāt be doing what Iām doing now. Sad.
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In India, nobody HAS legal software! Imagine the situation! 
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Oh yeah those long programs in computer magazines, none without errors.
And Real 3D !
Long post, take a drink.
I remember the first time i saw Conan on an Apple II, it just blowed my mind, all those green pixels everywhere, a majestuous giant tree, and that spider if you go directly to the right after 
anti spoil bot
First game over ever āOuuuchā.
For those not running linux and willing to try in browser (not tested): http://www.virtualapple.org/conandisk.html
Meanwhile you could cross the path of an old TO7 (Cyan PLUS Magenta !) and beat the speed skiing world record.
I have been lucky to be initiated at early school to Logo language on MO5.
A little computer with lunatic cartridges, and soft plastic keys that can glue on fingers.
Look that pack !
- controll a turtle having its own local space
- helped with an optical pen for tremendous onscreen interactions
(Check your fingers are keyless before operating the pen)
Later, someone shows me a ninja colorfull video game on C64, DANG another bump. There was so much colors really, an a pretty good arcade gameplay. That computer looked really fun. A friend played music with it, before the trackermania ST/500.
First computer was an Amstrad CPC 6128.
That was the discovering of B.A.S.I.C and the beloved OCP Art Studio (Probably as good as Photoshop nowadays, no discussion.)
At first that computer offered 26 colors, but there was hidden colorsā¦
I wrote a long simple B.A.S.I.C drawing program to reproduce a game cover withā¦ninjas. At the end it just needed 5 or 6 hours to draw.
Easy reviews.
I just remembered having coded my own 3D engine 
thanks to magazines.
Ok maybe it looked like a super simple perspective visualizer prototype, fast as Basic.
Years later a friend sold me its Amiga 500 with that extended chip memory card. Awesome times.
People with Atari and Commodore creating, everywhere.
Deluxe Paint was something but there were 3D softs around.
After dabbling a bit with Imagine, Real3D just fitted me, it looked like you needed to be an Illusionist to make visuals, tricking everywhere. (And buy a sillicon graphics.)
What i miss is the demo scene, i always thought it was the birth of community digital design / art.
Coding, Music, Story, Visual, Motion.
For the demo nostalgics :
And for the ninja nostalgics, beware short but bloody :
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My cousin had one of those (except that in Germany Amstrads were branded as Schneider) with a datasette and an external 3 inch drive. I remember a puzzle game where you had to push barrels down holes in the right order and there were little seesaws that would change the direction of the barrels.
Before ( must have been 1984) we kids were allowed to play worm and snake at my fathers work place sometimes. No idea what kind of computers these were but they were of the really large type.
In 1986 I got a C128 and used it mainly in C64 mode for Bubble Bobble, Last Ninja 2 and Blood and Guts and all the other awesome titles.
Then we got a 286 with EGA graphics. My cousin got a VGA graphics card and we thought that graphics could not possibly become any better in the future because humans could not possibly differentiate between more than 256 colors. Space Quest, Kings Quest and all the Lucas Film Gamesā¦
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Yes, I also remember repeatedly thinking that the limits were about to be reached. Then Super-VGA appeared with 16.7 million colors, haha, and so on.
I do think these days the difference in audiovisual advancements is becoming negligible. I switched from an iMac with a Retina resolution of 5120 x 2880 to a Windows PC with a native res of 3840 x 2160, and it didnāt feel like a really noticeable visual downgrade.
The same goes for 4K video versus 8K video of the new NVIDIA GeForce 3080 Ti, or the difference between 320 kbps MP3 and a lossless audio format. The difference is barely noticeable anymore.
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Yes, the resolutions, the color amount seem negligible. But the visual advancements are really apparent in other areas. VR has worse but better graphics at the moment. They are worse in every conventional aspect such as resolution, polycount and stuff like that but that doesnāt matter. It still looks better because you donāt look at it through a window.
Subjective of course, but this reminds me of Wing Commander and Tie Fighter. Wing Commander used sprites which looked gorgous at the time while X-Wing used real 3D but the space ships were gray boxes. A lot of people thought that X-Wing had worse but better graphics due to the fluent animation granted by real 3D.
Personally I liked WCs sprites better but I can see how the smoothness of X-Wing can appeal.
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Very recognizable. I clearly remember the same dualism between the last generation of Segaās pseudo 3D arcade games based on bitmap scaling (Out Run 2, Rad Mobile) versus the first generations of Segaās real 3D vector graphic games (the Virtua series: Virtua Racer, Virtua Fighter, etcā¦) in the early 1990s.
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HEY GUYS! - FRESH NEWS!! The campaign for Issue 2 of the ZX Spectrum Next machine is running on Kickstarter ONLY FOR THE NEXT 48 HOURS (well, less by now!). Check out the entire thing at www.specnext.com . This is the Kickstarter:
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Iām very tempted by this 
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c16, 800xl, st 260 and ste 1040. Neochrome was my entry drug into the CG world.
I remember computer magazines with nothing but hex-code in them or the obligatory copy parties after the CeBit. Fun times.
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Cool. Neochrome was the STās DPaint equivalent.
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Does anyone remember āThe Artistā on the Spectrum? Written by a guy called Bo Jangeborg? AMAZING for itās timeā¦
Iāve found something. And Iāe realized I know no one anymore who could appreciate this. But I remembered this thread so here you go 
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The Bitmap Brothers released a range of classics back in the days. I clearly remember how much in love I was with the first Xenon, with arcade-quality graphics by my favorite pixel artist Mark Coleman.
Having said this, I was always a bit disappointed by the code quality of the Bitmap Brothers games. Scrolling was usually jerky, even without parallax, and their games were always developed for the Atari ST and directly ported to the Amiga, without any enhancements.
Hahahaha, thanks much for that link. In fact I did. Great cover.
Ouch. That hurts. 
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I guess I was too young to appreciate the code side of the games at the time. But I was a big fan of Psygnosis games, I was and am especially impressed by their art. I remember though that a lot of them, especially old ones were really difficult and weird to play.
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Yeah, Psygnosis was a force. They published a few classics, such as the Shadow of the Beast series and Leander. Games that were really developed for the Amiga, using its custom chipset for cool effects, such as Dual Playfield mode for smooth parallax scrolling, and the Copper chip for smooth sky color gradients.
Most of the Psygnosis games were not really interesting in terms of game design, fun and playability though. Their biggest strength by far was the graphics, both in-game and box artwork.
The coder of our games and I visited the Psygnosis office in Liverpool once, in the early 1990s. They were interested in our puzzle game Clockwiser, and we had a chat about that.
But Psygnosis demanded an MS-DOS version as well, next to our Amiga version, and the coder only knew how to code in Amiga Assembly.
In the end, all publishers turned out to demand an MS-DOS version, so we found a coder willing to take care of that. If we knew him earlier, Psygnosis would have published Clockwiser. 
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If there is any nostalgic Amiga user among you, I would like to give you 15 minutes of something really brand new. But at the same time so satisfying for nostalgia ā¦ you will not be disappointed I promise you. 
Thanks to the open source, this decade will be interesting in the rebirth from the ashes of the Retro nostalgy.
(enjoy that particular old times stereo ā¦)
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