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Musings of experience with Vintage.

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facattack

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 7, 2007
Messages
960
Location
Bucks County, PA
My first computer was a Tandy 1000 EX. It came with built-in 5.25 drive and ran on MS DOS 2.0. I had several games for it (many of which were pirated by the Radioshack where we bought it). It was my first experience with the card game Black Jack & SEGA (one of the games on the disks labeled "Games" was Zaxxon). I also got boxed versions of several Disney games:

* The Black Cauldron
* Winnie the Pooh
* Donald Duck

Two other games I enjoyed on it were the original "The Last Ninja" & "Thexder."

From a teacher at JR high school I received a copy of First Choice. (I remember seeing someone play Wolfenstien 3D in the computer lab at the time.) I also had Deluxe Paint for painting. The computer had a wonderful DOT Matrix printer as well.

My second computer was a Gateway "Flextastic" Essentail 866. I first played Ultima Online on this machine.

Before getting an internet ready computer, I went from the Sega Net browser for Sega Saturn to the Sega Dreamcast.

I ebayed a Packard Bell computer that had Windows 3.11 which I made into a DOS-run machine. It even has a 5.25 drive and a 3.5 drive besides the hard drive.
 
Thexder was exquisitely programmed; a great example to show off the Tandy.

Do you still have First Choice? There's a guy with a broken TL/3 on the boards here who needs it to read some of his old files.
 
winnie the pooh : the Hundred Acre Wood (disc)
The Last Ninja (Tape)
Got them both on C64...
Just sold Winnie the Pooh for £8 with out instructions
The Last Ninja ive not sold or listed yet... Never played any of these 2.lol but had them in my collection of C64 stuff.

The original price for Whinnie the pooh was £27:95 when it frst hit the C64 Market, well thats whta was priced on my disc. not sure about The last Ninja.:rolleyes:

Steve:-D
 
I was a late bloomer...

My first computer was a Tandy 1000 SX I got from my sister in 1997 as a going away gift, along with a DMP-12 dot matrix printer, and a 1970's BASIC book that I wish I still had, plus 2 folders worth of floppies full of business documents and stories written by my sister's since the computer was brand new, and a copy of Microsoft Adventure, Professional Write, and the stock boot disks and Deskmate II.

On that computer, I managed to procure games on it by "bootlegging" floppies to school, and copying the games on an old IBM PC 5150 that had 256K RAM and a CGA monitor in my Auto Shop class. I was the only guy in school who knew how to run that thing like a champ as far as I knew. I got the following from there...

Bugs
Burger Blaster
CGA Tetris
Car Builder

After that, I got my hands on a copy of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, and lo and behold, a game I could spend HOURS playing. I spent nights brandishing the aluminum codex of ultimate wisdom while traversing the lush 16-color landscapes of Brittania.

Not long after that, my friend found a copy of "Legacy of the Ancients to fool around with. This was another game I worked at for quite awhile. Lots to do, I used to love aggravating the town guards and having a chase with them, I became a pretty good escape artist in that game.

Got Ultima VI after that, and with that, my first Memory Upgrade....to a whooping 640K (when most people had 64MB in their brand new computers), I thought it was badass that I could now have Ultima VI with better sound than my sister's 386 had, and in 16 colors, which after awhile, I realized were not as clear or nice as the VGA my sister's 386 had in the years before when I had access to it.

The Tandy eventually went belly up about 3-4 years in, with a message on boot at random that read "Error I/O of 8253". Not knowing anything about computers, I pretty much gave up attempting to fix it and junked it.

My second computer I still have the case for, with an AMD K-6 living in it. It started out as a 386 SX given to me by my ex-rhythm guitarist's father. I took that computer, and a 486 DX board that I had laying around, and managed to concoct a computer good enough for internet access. By that point, I started finding fun in the process of building old machines up to be useful again, so people started throwing me all their old stuff.....mostly 286s, 386s, 486s, and low-end Pentiums at the time.

Boy what an exciting time that was, and that was only a few years ago, one could pull a 486 out of the thrift shop for a dollar because they had 12 more out back they wanted to get rid of, and all the really old DOS stuff was still around in good enough numbers to be found. Now I tend to pick it up when it first appears, because if I don't, it might not survive to find a home, especially if it's something rare/strange.
 
My first computer was a Dick Smith System 80, purchased sometime around early 1982, the history of which is covered by a site under the URL attached to my signature below.

In 1983 at work I started to use a PRIME minicomputer for statistical analysis and Report Formatting. Around 1984-1985 this was supplemented with a IBM 5150 for programming and word processing. About 1988 I got a machine "on my desk" ..an Asian clone 286 I think. Since then I've had a series of desktops and laptops until the present day. Since 1995 up until the present day, a laptop has been my main work machine.

At home, the System 80 was supplemented with an NEC 8021a about 1985 (I think). I used this at work too. Then about 1987, the System 80 gave way to an XT clone. This was then replaced with a home pentium around the mid ninties.

Tez
 
facattack said:
....I also got boxed versions of several Disney games:

* The Black Cauldron
* Winnie the Pooh
* Donald Duck....
Click to expand...

OK. I need some info on The Black Cauldron. I have two originals of that game on 360K 5.25" Floppies. I bought them both used for next to nothing. In both games disk #2 has no data, or at least no readable data. My question is: Is disk #2 supposed to have data or was it to be used as a saved games disk?
 
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Nope, it's a game disk. I'm not sure, but I think when you get to the castle you had to put the second disk in the drive. The original game also came with a 3.5 disk. (Atleast that's the Tandy version.)

Thankfully I found the game on Al Lowe's (the programmer) website.
www.allowe.com

It doesn't seperate the game into disks but you can play it on a computer with a hard drive.


And as for information, Abandonia, in addition to offering the game as a download, also has scans of the game's packaging and other stuff.
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/430/Black+Cauldron,+The.html
 
facattack said:
Nope, it's a game disk. I'm not sure, but I think when you get to the castle you had to put the second disk in the drive. The original game also came with a 3.5 disk. (Atleast that's the Tandy version.)

Thankfully I found the game on Al Lowe's (the programmer) website.
www.allowe.com

It doesn't seperate the game into disks but you can play it on a computer with a hard drive.


And as for information, Abandonia, in addition to offering the game as a download, also has scans of the game's packaging and other stuff.
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/430/Black+Cauldron,+The.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for info on the game disks.:-D I already know about Abandonia and Al Lowe's Humor Site (There's some hilarious vids on there) and have both bookmarked. I have his available copy on a 3.5" disk someplace, and I think it's on at least one of the vintage hard drives.

Now for the embarassing part. I assumed (never good) by the box art that the versions I have were for EGA or better and could be copied to the hard drive. I just took a second look and noticed the date (1985), requirements (128K), and specs (IBM PC, PCjr, and compatibles). I got to thinking "Are these PC Booter versions? Sho' nuff' they are. They load fine: Disk #1 loads at boot, then prompts for disk #2 to load game. The game runs in 4-colour graphics :rolleyes: I'm thinking the pics on the box were likely from the PCjr. I'm feeling pretty stupid right now. DOH!!
 
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On this website:
http://retrograde.trustno1.org/

are 3 different versions of the booter images for that game (1.1 j, k and M)

If you don't mind, could you check what versions you have? (i'm collecting them all)

I think you can hit Ctrl-V or perhaps type in "ver" or "version" to get the version number-I forget how it worked on TBC.

thanks!
 
Here's my Tandy version of Black Cauldron. The major difference here is that it's version 2 and as Hen Wen peers into the bowl there's a little animated thing showing close-ups of the Horned King that zoom in. In the other versions (presumably DOS) I've downloaded, you don't see this. Sorry it's not a disk image. (I pressed ESCAPE to bring up the menus then selected "About Black Cauldron" from the list.)

http://www.2shared.com/file/3815821/b7cf7df9/blkcauldron.html

BTW, inside the folder should be a program called "NAGI" it's supposed to be used to load AGI games but I'm not sure how to run it anymore so I used DOS BOX instead.
 
Thanks for sharing that!

It's version 2.00 and (obviously) isn't one of the booter images off that website. I've also got a version 2.10 in case you're interested.

I don't know what the differences are between the 2-your post is actually one of the first I've seen that actually points out some differences between versions, which I think it really pretty cool. I mean, it's obviously more than just a bug fix or two between the versions since they added that animation along the way. I just sometimes wonder why something as simple as that didn't make it into the first cut, was it time or disk space perhaps? We may never know.
 
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