I had a few floppy disks with these titles on them, but again, having played them for so long, I chose to start my own little endeavour to create games instead of playing them, so I eventually removed everything but ROTT for as much disk space as I could get (being my first computer and such, I believed it might've helped performance, was still learning at this point). When I wasn't writing crappy interactive textventures, I was writing up stories in general in EDIT. My reasoning was also that when my stepdad would come into the room, he could never say I was "off playing those bloody games" again in an argument, and that I could argue that I was studying the books I'd picked up from the library.
I did play a lot of ROTT in my spare time. It was an early copy (1.0) which had some features removed from the final game such as alternatively coloured pushpillars and the such, but as my system had no speakers, the pc speaker became more and more annoying over time as well. That much I definitely remember, but since we went through so many shareware games in the 1990s, I don't remember what was ultimately on the system when it was given to me (nor when it was thrown away). I would give everything I owned to get it back, but unless someone chose to salvage and restore it, that system is long gone and crushed up.
You'd be surprised what happens after 10 years or so. There are games I played as a kid countless times, in arcardes and on my PC, and yet I coulnd't remember their titles at all when I was at university age and such.
I only rediscovered some of their titles with luck and queries on Google later (in my 30's).
E.g.:
"game where a frog tries to cross the road" was apparently Frogger.
"game where you have a crosshair and hit people" is Prohibition.
"pc game where a cat jumps in an neighborhood" is Alley Cat, etc.
Or try an arcade related forum or subreddit. I'm sure someone out there can help you.
The other game I can't remember was contra/turrican like game with main character like a robot and you could go in all directions on a map. I remember there were egyptian motifs around levels and I vaguely remember that game had a name Phoenix or something similar. Same time period, same nondescript arcade cabinet. Both in Europe / Croatia.
First, a 486 with 64K RAM is ridiculous as they typically had multiple megabytes of memory.
Second, he worked with that PC for 7 years and isn't quite confident of how much memory it had? This doesn't sound quite right either. I can clearly remember the amounts of RAM my first few PCs had, starting from 1999.
I don't know how much processing power nor memory it had. I had never owned a computer, and my dad left it behind for me after the divorce so I had something to use. I had no idea what was inside.
I'd agree that this would be a very relevant factor if I had programmed a "true" operating system (since most true programmers would probably be knowledgeable with the amount of memory usage going on etc), but to take things a bit more indepth, I suppose I haved't actually coded an operating system, but rather a dos Shell of sorts that is a facsimile of an 80s-style operating system. It merely uses the same commands as dos and interprets them into a visually descriptive feature on the screen (such as a split-screen with directory and file listings for example), as well as a few commands of my own that I added in. My terminology is not fantastic, but I suppose indicative of what I considered to be an OS. A Graphical shell might have been a more accurate term.
I remember the specs of all the systems I've had since then, but with the 486, I didn't spec it out myself, and was merely a kid with a computer at that point.
A more mainstream option would be python. The free courses at udacity.com would be an easy way to get started.
I'm close to someone who I've been watching slowly discover their passion for programming over the last six months or so. They never realized they'd care so much, or be any good at it. I've been giving consistent positive reinforcement, and I dread the day that they roll out their first real achievement to the masses. They might just throw their hands up in the air and give up entirely, judging by how people usually act.
One, nobody's forced to share their project/efforts on the Internet, which is essentially the entire planet, all of humanity, 24x7 for all the rest of time (info wants to live forever, etc.) We are all free to keep our things private, off-line, just among friends, etc. You're free to approach people in real life you know for feedback, tips, encouragement. They're more likely to be polite, and also you're not asking something of a total stranger.
Second, there's been a cultural change that a lot of younger people or newbs may not be aware of. For folks of the pre-Internet, "first with computers" generation, that's precisely the standard operating environment when we we learning, just starting out, taking those early baby steps. When we were first scribbling out our first programs, however naive or full of bugs or flaws, we didn't immediately go push it in the faces of millions of strangers across the world (ala Show HN, GitHub, blogs, etc), a good portion of whom would be professionals alot further along, and say "omg look at this isn't it amazing I'm a hacker now please hire me k thx" -- we couldn't because the Interent didn't really exist and most of these modern ways of publishing and sharing didn't exist. So most of that early crude, naive, sometimes embarassing stage was done in private, off-line, or only among friends or teachers known personally. Today we have the equivalent of proud (and healthily, voluntarily deluded) parents posting their kindegartener's first crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out onto blogs, GitHub, HN, Reddit, YouTube, etc and then being shocked or having their feelings hurt when others aren't as eaually blown away as them, and in some cases critical or dismissive. Its just the nature of the beast. Nobody forced them to share those things, and in that public global anonymous mixed (newbs/kids and experts/pro's) of a forum. They chose that. And it makes sense you'll also get back a mix of reactions, some of which you won't like.
What the modern Internet enables today has lots of great qualities (eg. I can download all this cool software for free, Wikipedia, Kickstarter, etc etc) but it also enables lots of sucky stuff (eg. eternal September, eternal kindegarten mode, arrogant assholes, FAQs, RTFMs, trolls, flamewars, phishing, astroturfing, doxing, etc.) Its hard to enable one without the other.
No one was asking for anyone to hire anyone. I have no idea why you're saying this or belittling people's work.
If you can't be supportive, don't say anything unless you have strong reason to say it. Doesn't matter how far along the work is or how bad it is. If everyone followed this, the world would be a better place than it is, particularly the internet.
The lack of support is exactly what causes people to switch careers, because they get the impression everybody in the field is a flamer.
I learned to code in machine language, I was punching in hex codes into an Amiga, all from one reference manual. It was a painfully slow way to learn. With no IDE or other reference manuals, QBasic would be the only way to achieve any of this.
I've been there, just as everyone else who learned this stuff pre-internet. Not only did I know how much memory I could address, but the location and behaviour of various i/o ports and hardware interrupts, not because I have a good memory but because of necessity.
As an illustration to those that don't seem to understand, there was that year when I was a kid when my friends and I decided BASIC on the C64 was not good enough, and we tried to figure out how to get started with assembler....
Something that started with us trying to poke the character codes for BASIC statements into memory, unaware that we were not only still writing BASIC, but had "invented" a storage method substantially less efficient than what BASIC on the C64 already used (it was stored tokenized).. It took a long time before I managed to get hold of an assembler, and months more before I managed to get hold of a tutorial that got me anywhere.
This was with a group of 5-6 of us that all wanted to learn, but none of whom knew where to get the information, nor had parents that knew. My dad was programming, but only BASIC, and didn't know where to get what I wanted - few books were available, even fewer translated.
People really shouldn't underestimate how vital easy access to documentation is.
We're talking about a time when e.g. when I (years later) finally got hold of precise cycle counts for raster interrupts for the C64 (understanding precise cycle counts in the presence of sprites etc. was vital for many more advanced demo effects), it was a 3rd or 4th generation photocopy of a handwritten diagram that someone had partially learned from others, partially reverse engineered through countless hours of adjusting interrupts a cycle at a time to study the results.
None of the books I'd managed to get hold of contained even a fraction of the amount of detail.
Frankly I remember playing with qbasic/basic and being put off by how unwieldy it all was. Kudos to any kid that makes anything in basic.
I didn't become interested in programming until I managed to get a copy of Modula-II off of a BBS.
Relevant: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033318/black-annex-is-the-be...
Homepage of this (incomplete) game: http://www.blackannex.net/
Conventional memory was limited to 640kb. Access to higher amounts of memory either required switching to protected mode or using XMS.
Additionally, there was the segmentation limit of 64k for pointers, which may have limited things in qbasic.
It's a bit like Australian Woolworth's.
It's strange how consistently true this has been. I wonder how many games Notch plays, especially during his prime when he was making Minecraft.
While I played a bunch of games on it, they weren't games to play to death. Once I finished the levels of Loderunner, for example, it looped back to level 1, and I stopped playing it. The game instead was to figure out neat thing to do, then do it.
The comments on the reddit link are often uninformed, both the negative ones (few hobbyists of the era used source control) and the positive (the projects did not make real use of the hardware, and show no special 'knack' - I certainly am from that era but have no knack for the demoscene).
Edit: Also just wanted to point out that writing a few games has in a way ruined playing games for me. I still load up a new or classic game every now and then but it's more to admire what the developers have done and not so much as to play the game. I don't really 'play' games any more.
Two other similar things ring similar to me. I was big into haunted houses when I was younger, volunteered at them and hung out around the online "haunting" community every season, and to this day visiting haunted houses is more about admiring what is being done than being scared. I recognize the animitronics from the catalog, know to expect that panel to drop, and know how that illusion is done, but I still enjoy visiting a good haunted house.
The other really sad thing, is that living in downtown Atlanta where there is a moving/tv show being filmed within a block of my place every other week it seems, I've seen the sausage being made. Knowing how long it takes to setup and shoot a scene that may only be 30 seconds in the movie, it's "ruined" watching TV shows/movies, as I can't help but think about the filming process. I was blissfully unaware how much work went into filming a simple shot of two people walking down a city street.
Knowing how it's done and how difficult it is, don't you start looking at things such as lightning, cut techniques etc. in a more informed manner?
It's not usually the same movies (or music, or games) that gets popular with the professionals in the industry is popular with regular folks, for this very reason.
A handful of maps to go through and I've completed plutonia on UV. Next, I'm probably playing Back to Saturn X ep1. It's amazing there's so much new, inspiring stuff for this old game..
I'd know where my school was, I'd just 'go there', I didn't know the street name.
I'd turn on the TV, I didn't know what brand it was.
I'd just turn on the computer and play Escape Velocity, didn't know it was called that.
There are lots of exceptions, like I wouldn't miss the name 'teenage mutant ninja turtles' or ever forget it. But especially for things like computer games when I was 8, I'd just 'doubleclick the game icon with the picture of a car' not having a clue what that racing game was called.
I've had so many questions about my story with people saying "I call bullshit because he wasn't able to remember (minor detail X)" etc. It's only through absolutely racking my brains to bits and insane amounts of googling, facebook messages to old friends and such that I've managed to answer a few of these. It's good to know that my memory is not just deteriorating rapidly as I'd initially thought.
Some things stand out more than others. I was suspected of having ADD for a while, then the diagnosis was shifted to Aspergers Syndrome (something they apparently didn't know much about back then, or was not as commonly diagnosed/referred to as it is nowadays), but a potential giveaway for this was that I had an eidetic memory for some things, and a lot of other stuff that should've been important but I didn't care about was instantly discarded. I can remember down to a millimetre what few toys and possessions I owned, and what they looked like, yet I can't remember what my own BEDROOM looked like because it wasn't the bedroom itself, it was what interested me within it. The same went for most of my house, I barely remember what it looks like or what the furniture placement was. I put this down to perhaps some kind of mental block for traumatic memories. The old house appears in my dreams as a very very very large building and often in pitch black darkness so that I cannot really see what it looks like save for an insanely dim and flickering flashlight. I guess the mind has a funny way of dealing with inabilities to recall events.
Yet I can recreate in my head in incredible detail the structure of the school I attended as I spent quite a considerable amount of my time every day there, and I found the absolutely enormous building to be very interesting and different compared to the bland 1970s brick and tan buidings of my primary school years (I actually went on to recreate it in 3d from memory recently and was able to source some photos of it from the school themself).
http://i.imgur.com/eXb430f.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BDpt6wt.jpg
And yet, I can't remember how much RAM my system had, because it wasn't of any interest to me. It was just "the computer" to me at the time, not "the 486 DX2". Any time I would've seen how much memory the system had (I don't recall if I even used the MEM command, assuming it existed in that version of DOS) but if I had, it would've been "Oh I have X amount, okay" and then I probably never checked it again.
I also don't remember what exact games I had installed on the system, as I barely ever played most of them. I remember which ones I'd played at that point, but I do remember I definitely had Rise of the Triad shareware on there as it served as a key inspiration for writing a "3d" raycaster/FPS style engine. Interesting how selective memory can be, and how it will remember utterly useless details and points of information (or worse, remind you of the moments you did something embarassing or stupid) yet when it comes to crucial or vital events, it can draw a blank on something that was so striking to witness that you would think it would burn the image into your head for an eternity.
> old Apple Powermacs from the 1980s (the tiny ones)
Except that Power Macs were available from 1994 until 2006.
The only reason I knew anything about the hardware of the classic Macs at the time was that I was an Amiga user, and Macs were occasionally dragged in on the periphery of the war of the 68k based machines that was primarily an Amiga vs Atari thing.
Beyond knowing it too had a 68k, that it had laughable small screen and was monochrome and cost a ridiculous amount, that was it.
That was despite hanging out at the local computer store every few days, and reading every computer magazine I got my hands on (I can thank Commodore Computing International for a lot the earliest English I learned)
Most PC users of the era certainly had no reason to know much more about Apple than the name Mac, and know it was some other computer.