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hi from (brrrrr!) minneapolis

H

hargle

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 30, 2007
Messages
1,397
Location
minneapolis, MN
hey all,

new here, thought I'd throw out an introduction as well.

I'm interested in the gaming aspects of early IBM machines. Back in 1985ish, when my parents picked up a PCjr, I'd go into software shops and see hundreds of games available, but for Apple and C64, and very little for the PC. I began to wonder what motives my parents had for buying such a non-gaming computer for me...

Slowly the tide turned, and after awhile, the PC began to really shine in the gaming world, and that's where I got rather stuck with my love for old computers.

I've lately amassed a bit of a mad-scientist lab in my basement, with the full range of PC's from an 8088, my beloved PCjr (first computer ever), 286, 386, 486 and a pentium just for good measure, each pimped out with soundcards, maximum memory, hard drives and everything else that I can fit into them. This way I can play '80s games on the machines they were designed for, and finally fix my rather gameless childhood.


As a hobby, I like to take old PC games and update them to work on newer computers:

http://www.oldskool.org/pc/jumpman
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/BCW

are two of my best works.

I'm also working on amassing an archive of DOS games, similar to what the TOSEC folks have done with ROMs and C64/Amiga titles.
This work is being carried on here:

http://www.underground-gamer.com/wiki/index.php/Complete_PC_MS-DOS_Collect ion_1979-1995

If anyone out there is also interested in DOS games, or perhaps has a shoebox full of old diskettes, I'd really like to hear from you...
 
Hargle,

Hello and welcome. Normally I'm not social or polite enough to welcome every new member, but your introduction stuck out for two reasons:
  • I'm in Rochester, just south of you
  • the PCjr was my first serious machine too

I know Trixter at OldSkool too. And if you are a PCjr nut, then you've surely bumped into my web site dedicated to them.

Welcome, and enjoy ..


Mike
 
I also have a couple of PCjrs. Altho I've been collecting for many years, I only have 4 0f the bulky IBM Plastic cases, 2 of which contain disks: File Manager and Turtle graphics. The 2 cartridge games I have are "Crossfire" and "Scuba Venture". I do have 2 Lotus 123 cartridges, a copy of Lotus Utilities, and the PCjr demo disk.

Pretty much all of the early PC games I have are copies on generic disks. At that time "buttonware" ruled as I am sure you know.

Welcome, Lawrence
 
Last edited:
mbbrutman said:
Hargle,

Hello and welcome. Normally I'm not social or polite enough to welcome every new member, but your introduction stuck out for two reasons:
  • I'm in Rochester, just south of you
  • the PCjr was my first serious machine too
Click to expand...

It's sad when even a moderator comes to admit they aren't exactly the social bee, esp. on these part of the forums.:sleepy:

Anyway, welcome. We hope you'll fit right in with our other PCjr owners, I'd get one, but they are probably the most bulkiest computers around, and I like collecting the smaller ones anyway (Love that VIC-20).

so keep on searching for those games, there was alot made for the pc (not including the jr), I happen to collect pc games myself, and have even gotten games like descent and space quest 1 vga into the mix.
 
Whether a moderator or other member greets every new member or not is a matter of personal preference. With close to 5000 members in the forum and a small staff now of admin type people, that would be thousands and thousands of 'Hello and welcome!' messages .. not very practical or fun to wade through.

As for the PCjrs, they are the smallest of the PC type desktop systems. I don't see how you can call it bulky .. to me a 5170 PC AT is bulky. A PCjr is very small in comparison.
 
mbbrutman said:
Whether a moderator or other member greets every new member or not is a matter of personal preference. With close to 5000 members in the forum and a small staff now of admin type people, that would be thousands and thousands of 'Hello and welcome!' messages .. not very practical or fun to wade through.
Click to expand...

Quite right, it's just that I notice you don't post or make chat on the forums much. I'm the same, somewhat. It's very hard keeping a social status on both the forums and the outside world, so a little compensating doesn't always hurt.

mbbrutman said:
As for the PCjrs, they are the smallest of the PC type desktop systems. I don't see how you can call it bulky .. to me a 5170 PC AT is bulky. A PCjr is very small in comparison.
Click to expand...

If your basement storage room was the size of a tent, you'd consider a PCjr BIG all right.

Maybe (Just maybe) I'd keep it upstairs, but that'd be it.
 
Hey Hargle,

Back in my teens my brother and I took my mother from Winnipeg to Minneapolis' Mayo clinic. That was in the early 50s and I was thrilled by the highway cloverleafs which I had never seen before. We stayed in a hotel on Hennipin. While I was excited by the abundant TV choices, I spent most of the night checking out the action of a club across the street.
To me that was the epitome of the excitement of big cities. Altho in later years I lived in Boston, New York, LA. and Montreal as well as other major cities it still remains a vivid memory. I find no surprise that "Prince" originated there. Of course the former coach of the Vikings, Bud Grant, was a big star for, and coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers earlier, and that cemented my identification with the Twin-Cities. Minneapolis is "cool". Go NHL "Wild" hockey team, Go. Also the source of my favorite radio program, "The Prairie Home Companion" now made into a movie. You doin' good Minneapolis, doin' good.

Minnesota to me is the heartland of the US, not Iowa, and the hope of most of the world.

Lawrence
 
Hi!

I have been collecting TOSEC for years (Amiga/AtariST/C64/etc) and was wondering when somebody was going to bother doing the same for the PC.

My gaming experience started on the C64 in the 80's and then moved to the 286/12 with VGA. I kept at it untill around 2001 or so whe new games started to bore me and I went retro. I too have a bunch of older machines setup for retro gaming with the associated sound cards and video cards. My earliest is a Tandy 1000HX, about the same as a PCJr except easier to upgrade to 640K RAM.

When this catalogging project is done is there going to be a torrent to download them? While most VGA PC games are available to download I am kind of interested in the CGA/TGA games I never realy played since I jumped in during the VGA era of the 90's. Would be interesting to be able to grab them all at one place. Are you doing much with the old text documents and walkthrough for the games? Are you trying to preserve the original uncracked disks for the games or just trying to catalog what was sold using old warez files as a guide?
 
Wow that was obscure even for an old user like me. What is TOSEC ? Especially since it refers to the home-computers as well as Dos machines. I don't even know what you refer to as CGA/TGA even tho I consider myself reasonably cognizant of DOS video modes.

OK MGA= mono graphics adaptor, CGA=colored graphics adaptor, EGA= Extended Graphics adaptor , VGA= Virtual(?) graphic adaptor. Perhaps TGA referred Tseng(Labs) Graphic adaptor. Could you ellucidate a bit more for us non-gaming few ?

And then if I translate correcly you ask if the Dos games will be available by advanced "Torrent" streaming. Hell I'm generally happy to get them from Michigan, Simtel or the european archivers even when they require unzipping as an .arc file.

You've generally appeared as a "sane" poster. You didn't run across some "Good BUD" by any chance did you ? OK maybe I'm not as swift as I used to be and missed something.

Lawrence
 
Sorry TGA should have been Tandy video mode, same as PcJr I think (16 real colors, some people refer to it as Tandy CGA I just cut it short to TGA).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSEC

TOSEC people work on many platforms including game consoles and personal computers to document everything released for them. You can find huge compilations going by their renaming format on many peer ro peer networks and newsgroups. They have been around for years. They kind of did a half hearted attempt at the PC and quit from what I recall.
 
Unknown_K said:
I have been collecting TOSEC for years (Amiga/AtariST/C64/etc) and was wondering when somebody was going to bother doing the same for the PC.
Click to expand...

Me too. I've been doing tosec like collecting/archiving for a couple decades now anyway, and DOS is the platform I'm most familiar with. When the subject came up on underground-gamer a few months ago, I decided to get serious about it. I look at it as more of a chance to clean out my games folders than anything. (10+gig of DOS games from the early 80s, all named in 8.3 is more than any one person should have!)

When this catalogging project is done is there going to be a torrent to download them? While most VGA PC games are available to download I am kind of interested in the CGA/TGA games I never realy played since I jumped in during the VGA era of the 90's.
Click to expand...

Yep. It'll be torrented. We're looking at releasing the 1980-1989 collection early next year, essentially to bring some interest into the project, so that is exactly what you should grab first if you want CGA. If you don't want to wait for it, PM me-it's all on my FTP server, but it is subject to change heavily in the next few months.

Are you doing much with the old text documents and walkthrough for the games? Are you trying to preserve the original uncracked disks for the games or just trying to catalog what was sold using old warez files as a guide?
Click to expand...

Support files are a sideline issue for now, but once a naming convention is put in place, that type of meta data should come up quickly. I have a ton of that stuff too, but I don't want to get bogged down with all the goodies just yet.

Eventually I want to see a GUI front-end to the whole collection, with screesnhots, box covers, docs, trivia, walk-throughs, etc, all available in a similar format as MAME32 or MESS presents now. Then you just double click on a game, DOSBox launches, and you're right in the game. With a naming convention in place, having web-trollers out pulling boxes and screenshots off sites like mobygames would be an easy way to populate the meta data, but I'm getting ahead of myself here...

As for uncracked game images, there will always be issues there. Right now I'm trying to focus on just getting all the games in 1 spot, and we decided that it was more important at this time to have them all playable over having them all as pristine, uncracked data, especially since floppy based copy protection and DOSBox are incompatible with each other at this time.

Later (I expect this to be a very long term project) we can do another pass and try and verify CRCs against dumps from original disks, and then we can look into cracked/uncracked files. Again, just trying to keep from getting bogged down in the details to get a presentable collection out first.

-jeff!
 
Unknown_K said:
Any chance you will do the same for old DOS Apps?
Click to expand...

I'm not opposed to it, although I have nowhere near the collection of old apps that I do old games, so I'd be pretty much starting from scratch hunting them down, which is most of the battle. If nothing else, the naming convention used and the methodologies of collecting/listing might be useful for such an endeavor.

The naming convention is key to being able to not only scan through your own archive, but be able to merge collections without too much conflict. We're currently going with Title+version+year+publisher+genre+misc flags, ie:

Black Cauldron, The v2.10 (1987)(Sierra On-Line, Inc) [Adventure].zip

The only headache is when you're trying to actually put some of these long filenamed systems onto an old 8.3 machine. ;)

-jeff!
 
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