Physical original copy, physical Gold Edition copy, two physical copies on game-magazine CDs when they started to offer free, full games in addition to demos, then once when I purchased it for 5€ in an "Microprose Classics" box-sale because it was there and the box was shiny and new and I'm a sucker for all things Battletech. (Although for some reason, Mech Commander 1 is in 1st place: I own and still have it (legally!) 6 times. Most of the games I legally own more than four times are from the Amiga era. Those were then also the first games I ever "purchased again", as we got them for our DOS PCs as well, when we switched to a 286. It was Wing Commander and Monkey Island 2 for the Amiga that made me and my sis pester our dad for a 25MB HDD, as swapping 12 Disks all the time for each of those games was a pain. All of those I played on the Amiga first. Second Edit: Check out this page,, note line 990 and the poke statement adding all those data statements into the memory.Īll of those games, especially classic LucasArts stuff, started on the Amiga. And those games or programs were mostly rubbish too, although I vaguely recall having some success with a two player, turn based tank battle game from the pages of Sinclair Programs, that we had to type in twice because the cassette recorder didn't save it the first time.ĮDIT: Found a fairly typical example here.
(I found that the best technique was to have a brother who would read the code out loud as you double checked your typing). And typing those in without typos was hell on earth.
Either that or the code was a couple of lines of basic that ran an assembler program, which would be listed as a series of numbers or hex numbers appended to the basic program as a REM (remark) statement. The problem was that most of the code was in BASIC, which made for slow, limited and memory expensive games. The Spectrum, for example had a long life into the late 80s, but the coding sections of magazines dried up a little earlier than that, although I do recall seeing some code for the Sinclair QL published one time.
The coding thing lasted from about 1980 to maybe 85ish.
In the UK it was for the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro or Commodore 64. Well worth a look.Ĭlick to expand.That was more of an 8 bit era thing. They made the machines do seemingly impossible things. Programmers who got right down to the metal, coding in assembler to pull as much graphical and musical power out of the machine as they could. It was interesting to remember the days when standard interfaces for programs hadn't been settled on yet, so you had to learn a new UI every third program.Īlso, there was the demo scene. You could lose hours trying out all the various freebies every month, just pottering about.
Magazines would come with floppy disks attached that contained demos of games, freeware, application software and so on. There was also the world of magazine cover disks.
Great music, clever level design and very annoying, in a good way.įrontier: Elite II, so many hours lost to that. You could also play it with friends if you crowded around the keyboard. The gag being that you had switch the mouse from one screen to another in real time to keep up with the action and move characters about. Hired Guns by DMA Design (aka Rockstar North), a Sci-Fi shooter where you play four characters in a tactical strike team, each with their own first person perspective. Much has been said about it elsewhere, but one of the best turn based tactical games ever. There were far too many games to try to list all the greats, but the standouts were I also skipped the early phase of enhanced conversions of 8 bit games. I came to it late at the start of the nineties and it was my only games machine until a PS1 in 98, so it was very long in the tooth by then. The OS was amazing, five years ahead of its time (thirty five years ago).