I started with a TI-99/4 Christmas of 1979. It was mainly used as a game playing machine: A-Maze-Ing, The Attack, Hunt the Wumpus, Car Wars, Munch Man, TI-Trek, and the text Adventures game. It had a cassette player as the only way to save data. The power supply went up in smoke around 1997. I kick myself now for getting rid of it, instead of keeping it to try to fix it. I wrote my own versions of A-Maze-Ing, The Attack, and Hunt the Wumpus on my IBM PC XT class machine in the mid-nineties.
I got an Apple //e in 1983. That machine is still going, though I did have to do a little work on it a couple of years ago. I played a lot of games on it, but I also used it to start programming: AppleSoft BASIC, Apple Pascal and eventually 6502 assembly language. I see Apple enthusiasts still make new hardware for it. Iām considering purchasing some of that hardware to update the machine.
I occasionally run emulators of the two machines on my Windows machine.
Hunt the Wumpus was in a book of BASIC Games I used to copy onto an Apple IIe. The book had many, many pages of pure code. I donāt think I ever tried Wumpus because it was like 12 textbook pages of BASIC commands.
I also like to run an emulator to dive into some sweet nostalgia. A few years ago I had a Wacom Cintiq (sold it again as it was an ergonomic nightmare to me), and it was magic to run the Amigaās Deluxe Paint (āDPaintā) on it:
TI-59 Texas instrument 1979 and afterā¦ I used it for statistics. There was a printer associated to the calculator and we could program printing of drawings made of stars, minus signs, etcā¦ We could save the instructions onto magnetic cardsā¦ Games came in 1980 when users did start to program instructions that were not officials and allowed for creating state of data entry to be processed and the result being printed. I did not go fare there. In 1981 I went to Cupertino meet Steve Wozniac to pick up an Apple IIā¦ Just the box, no screen, no mice, no memory other than the one on the motherboard. I did learn Applesoft and got hookedā¦ Finally I could program recursive matricesā¦ The got an Compaq with green screen and running CPMā¦ I end up with the Apple II with 6 drives stacked on the box, an extension card Prolog and one Pascalā¦ Did a lot of simulation for economic analysisā¦
Well, I donāt think āretro desktop gamingā is the right term, because itās something completely new, itās really a back to future from the past. Apollo OS is a New opensource operating system faithful to the old Amiga OS 3.1 and is also natively running on hardware based on the very famous Motorola 68000 processor on almost all computers and consoles of those years, so weāre still talking about some sort of retrocomputing, but it is also something new, Apollo Core 68080 is built as an evolution of them keeping all the legacy instructions and adding multimedia instructions and optimizations of modern times as what should have been the evolution of that type of CPU if it were not interrupted. In this particular modern times, its evolution and improvement is easier, even day after day by the community because it is particularly suitable to run on FPGAs that are programmable at the hardware level ā¦ it is also having relatively exceptional performance compared to legacy hardware, consequently increasing interest and fun.
Apollo OS, is a fork of AROS an open source operating system that has been in development for 20 years that aimed to create a clone of the Amiga OS on x86 hardware. Then there was also the re-porting on M68k and the coupling between the Apollo Core CPU and AROS M68k led to the formation of a close-knit ex amiga community that gave birth to the Apollo OS fork, an OS optimized to run on these Apollo core cpu with ammx multimedia instructions (a sort of similar mmx that were for x86 cpu) being all opensource hardware and software has created a lot of interest among the nostalgic and the improvements are daily and exponential.
That of the āRetro Gaming Desktopā is a consequence, since this OS has total backward compatibility with the applications and games of those times, and the Amiga was chock full of games being āa gaming computerā, this modern one automatically becomes an OS full of these games and applications.
Dont worry, I just replied to you by taking the opportunity to write better and explicitly what I wanted to communicate with the previous post that I had linked, you helped me understand that I did it wrong.
Ironically, what is now recognized as the first digital computer was made by Konrad Zuse, who first began developing his inventions (in his parentās house) in 1935, and he applied for German patents as early as 1937.
Incidentally, based on this, I consider it quite impossible that Bletchley Park and others didnāt have true computing devices long before their official histories say they did. They simply had to be aware of what their colleagues, enemy and otherwise, were then doing. The lack of adequate random-access storage technology held back development for a long time, but ānecessity is the mother of invention.ā
For all those who have been passionate about the Motorola 68000 CPU that was present in most of these 80s-90s retro computers, I think you shouldnāt miss this interesting interview on the birth and development of the Apollo Core 68080
itās Amazing.
Commodore Vic-20
Commodore 64
Commodore Amiga 500
Commodore Amiga 1200
(work wise here I was exposed to Apple, and didnāt like it)
IBM PC 486 DX2 66
Some fort of Pentium CPU PC
An endless list of PCs
Commodore 64
Atari XT
Sinclair ZX Spectrum for home stuff
Intel PC with co-processor to do CAD/3D. No idea anymore what CPU or brand
SGI Indy
SGI O2
SGI 540 workstation (ran on Windows)
Intergraph Z workstation with Elsa Graphics
various HP workstations
Also a long list of self build PC configurations, dual CPU or not. Probably forgetting somethingā¦
Never touched Apple for 3D, there was such a huge gap that it didnāt make sense. (Still doesnāt tbhā¦)
Ahā¦ Fiddled a blue Monday with Lightwave on a DEC Alpha. Man that thing was so fast for itās time
Then several years later I got an Amiga 500 and started to enjoy digital art. I loved to paint and animate using Deluxe Paint, I also used Fanta vision and Disney animation studio.
Games was of course a big thing as wellā¦ I remember games like Speed Ball, Hybris, Double Dragon, Turrican, Shadow of the Beast, Leander, Wings, Escape from Colditz, Ghost n Goblins, Populous, Lost Patrol, Lotus Esprit, Super Cars, Rainbow Islands to name a fewā¦
Then I wanted to do my own games so I started with AMOS and did some small games, but realized that I prefer to do graphics instead of programming. So it ended up that I mostly did a lot of title screens for my games and no more than that.
In the early 90ās I upgraded to the Amiga 1200 and started my 3D journey with Imagine3D 2.0.
Then I started to use Imagine 3 and 4 on a PC. When I got my first job I saved my money and bought my last Amiga. It was a tower case with a 68060 + PPC at 233Mhz and a Picasso IV Graphics card with a 17 inch screen running workbench at 1024*768 resolution. I could run the Amiga Quake at more FPS and higher resolution then a modern PC at the time. (PentiumII 266Mhz)
At this time the Amiga was literally dead but I didnāt wanāt to realize that. Imagine and Lightwave and other big 3D apps for the Amiga was no longer supported and I bought Tornado3D that was the only 3D app left still developed for Amiga.
I think I only kept the computer for half a year and then sold it and bought a PC. Then I started using Lightwave3D and used it for 20+ years. And now several PCās later and since about 2 years I use Blender as my main 3D app.
Wow, that screen gave me an instant flashback. I loved the Disney Animation Studio. It featured onion skinning before DPaint had it. Animated a lot of sprites for our games with it.
I remember my dad getting a Binatone console back in the very late sixties, very early seventies. It had the good old simple classics like football, squash and tennis, all played with paddle controllers. Simple, but fun enough back in the day.
My first ever console was the Atari 2600 which I bought from Argos about a year after its release for Ā£150. I think that, as an 19 year old, I would have been earning something like Ā£40 a week, if that, so it was a massive outlay. At least I think that is how it went hahaā¦ so long ago. Me and a pal would spend hours playing space invaders
Then a mate of mine got a ZX and that piqued my interest for some reason. Eventually I got a C64. That would probably have been around 1984 as I seem to remember getting that around when it came out in the UK. I dabbled with some programming but without much success. As I was into creating music I delved more into the SID chip capabilities.
Then when the Amiga 500 came out I got one and I also bought one of them AMAS boxes so that I could connect it up to a MIDI keyboard/synth. I also remember trying to fly an F16 fighter for a short time. The most used program for me became MED and then OctaMED which are ātrackersā for music production.
My first ever PC was bought in the early 1990ās and was a 286 with a tiny amount of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. Also around that time I was one of the first in the department where I worked to start using AutoCAD.
The mid 90ās saw us (I had two young boys by this time) getting a Playstation. Since then we have generally kept up with the PS franchise although I doubt weāll be bothering with a PS5. All three of use much prefer PCās for our gaming nowadays. If I do power up a Playstation it is usually for something like Gran Turismo or Project Cars but my steering wheel and pedals have been gathering a lot of dust latelyā¦
My current PC is an i9 based thing but, as I use it mainly for music production, the graphics card is a lowly GTX1070 because it happens to be very quiet. If Iād have known I was going to be doing more graphics intensive stuff I may have gone for something better.
Ha, ha, haā¦oh, yess. I spent days copying those lines of code. As I remember some of them were in machine code, which basically meant typing pages after pages filled with only numbers.
And the super simple little game you ended up with seemed like an enormous achievement. You really worked hard for it and deserved it.
I also did quite some graphics on the C64ā¦with a graphics tablet called SuperSketch. The pen was fixed to a lever and the whole thing was very inaccurate. But wow, it was amazing to be able to draw freehand!!
Favorite computer games
Arcade games
Atari 2600 games
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History of digital wars
