[OT] Old-skool gaming

[Nanoprobe]

I don't know about you guys, but sometimes older games hit the spot a lot better than newer ones.

I'm turning into a bit of a collector of old stuff now, with all the consoles I've got:

* Sega Master System
* Sega Mega Drive (Genesis for you US folk)
* Nintendo 64
* Playstation 2 (well, not old-skool unless you're playing something like Chrono Trigger...)

And all of them are in perfect working order.

Yes, as I've told you before I'm a bit of a Sonic nut, which is why I keep the old Sega systems around. It disappoints me that I can't find a 32X to play Chaotix on. :)

I was also disappointed that I couldn't get my hands on NiGHTS - it's made by Sonic Team, and I played it years ago when the Saturn first appeared and loved it. Yet it's been nearly impossible to find the game since then - and I didn't even have a Saturn to play it on.

Until today - I won an auction on eBay a week ago and just received (much to my surprise) TWO copies of the original NiGHTS - complete with its own Sega Saturn. :D

I'm pretty happy now - the whole thing including shipping worked out to be just over $80 Australian. I did some checking in gaming stores beforehand, and $80 was what they were charging for a refurbished Saturn, system only. And I got 4 games with this thing. Neato.

Anyway, anyone gone to any lengths to get old games before, or have a good collection of them? I'm still on the lookout for Christmas NiGHTS... ;)

[edit] Okay so the system isn't in *complete* working order - it turns out in order to save stuff to the system you need, well, a working battery. :eek:

[Death Raider]

I still have an old master system with a few games, Desert Srike anyone? but the pause button is a bit funny at times.

Also have two very old Acorn Electrons with something like 100 tapes only have one working transformer though.
Some of the games for those are amazing, anyone heard of Repton? Real puzzle game very hard.

[Rurouni Storm]

Still got the master system and the SNES. Had to replace the memory battery in a couple cartridges, but they still work fince.

There's still nothing like firing up Chrono Trigger and just playing another new game+.

[Nanoprobe]

Um, wow, I was hoping for a bigger response than this... :)

Guess there ain't a lot of people around who appreciate the early games.

[MichaelShane]

Bah.... Sega? 'Old-skool'? :rolleyes:

Old-Skool was Star Castle and Defender, Asteroids and Lunar Lander. Gravitar and Tac Scan, Space Panic, the real Battlezone, and about a hundred other great games.

Home game systems and PC'c are great; don't get me wrong. But something was lost when games moved from the arcade into the livingroom.

Sega and Nintendo systems aren't 'old-skool'(for me)... they're more like 'old-college days'. :D

Hmmmm.... I like that comparison.

If arcade = childhood;
And Home Game systems = college

Then...

the games we play now must equal 'adulthood'?

How depressing. Old age is right around the corner. :p

[Nanoprobe]

Heh.

Well I guess that all depends on where you live and in what era - I was born in 1984 (man, I'm turning 20 this year), and where I live I was relatively obscured from arcades.

In fact, I'm not even sure that arcades really took off in Australia until about a decade ago. But that's just my opinion - probably wrong.

So, I believe that I got introduced to 'games' on the Master System, followed by Nibbles and Wolfenstein on the PC (the latter two in the same day :)). The Master System *is*, therefore, old-skool to me.

Oh, and now that I've reached university I'm actually making (http://naniteweb.space-combat.net/retroactive/pages/bongPopup.htm) games that would be considered pre-historic to my age group. ;)

[Red_Hex]

i have my megadrive. my master system bit the dust. my nes got eaten by a rogue hamster along with my spectrum. my atari ste works but the floppy drive is broke and it dont work with any replacements. i gave a saturn to a friend, its battery was fritzed too. my playstation i blew up (i have three). i gave a dreamcast to a friend. my n64 is mothballed.

i only OWNED the atari, out of that lot. the rest were cast-offs from the unit i live on.

these days i use emulators. i can even use my atari discs in my machine, although many of them have disintegrated or gone mouldy. if you want to emulate chaotix, nano, i can provide you with the necessary files... as well as any other sonic games you want. i used to be a nut too, i got sonic heroes last week out of a sense of respect

[Nanoprobe]

Red_Hex - thanks, but I've got 'em. :) I'd have prefered to see what they actually played like on an actual 32X though, as the emulation ain't that crash hot.

I actually got Sonic Heroes on the PS2, and took it straight back - it played like crap! It's a framerate issue, one I'm gonna have to rectify (unfortunately) by buying a GameCube.

[MajorTom]

Originally posted by Nanoprobe
Heh.
Oh, and now that I've reached university I'm actually making (http://naniteweb.space-combat.net/retroactive/pages/bongPopup.htm) games that would be considered pre-historic to my age group. ;)

Cool! I actually built the pong game back in the early 80's using a schematic diagram and discrete components ( so called 16 pin integrated circuits and wound my own coils for the HF modulator). We spent hours playing with it on the TV. You could move the paddles up and down using a potentiometer.

In the late 80's I played a point and click game with a charachter named "Larry the Lounge Lizard" (can't remember the name of the game) on one of the first IBM Office PCs (pre x286). I think it had like a 25 Mhz CPU. The game had remarkable graphics for the time :rolleyes:

[Rurouni Storm]

Originally posted by MajorTom

In the late 80's I played a point and click game with a charachter named "Larry the Lounge Lizard" (can't remember the name of the game) on one of the first IBM Office PCs (pre x286). I think it had like a 25 Mhz CPU. The game had remarkable graphics for the time :rolleyes:

Leisure Suit Larry. That games spawned a ton of sequels from Sierra and they're working on another one.

[MichaelShane]

My first PC game was on the TRS-80 (or 'Trash-80's as we called 'em). Can't remember the name of it though.

The screen would show two crude sticks which were supposed to be artillery cannons, one on each side of the screen. A wall was between the two, stretching halfway up the screen. Then there was a wind direction readout in the corner.

The player would enter in angle coordinates and then press the enter key. According to the wind velocity and angle, the shell would either hit the computer's gun (which would win the game) or miss. When the computer fired, it used random numbers for angle coordinates.

PC's were a little boring at that stage... :p

But the next PC game I encountered was called 'Apple Panic"... an Apple II clone of the arcade game Space Panic. I spent hours upon hours on that thing. :D

[WX_Peregrin]

My dad copied someone's hard drive onto his with our first PC (i was rlly young, but i remember it having DOS and Windows 3.1) . Some of the games I had:
Mechwarrior (1)
Wing Commander
Wolfenstein 3d Demo
A-10 Bomber
Sub Commander (or some other name similar to that)...

and a bunch of other games under the directory. My mom, even though she isnt rlly a geek, used to play Mechwarrior once and a while. Even though I never got to play Mechwarrior (mainly because it crashed once I was old enough to understand it), I was really fond of Links Golf.

[Red_Hex]

are you sure you had the right emulator nano? i can play it full-screen, smoothed, with better quality sound than you got on the console itself. but getting that setup took a week of messing about with thumbnail-sized screens, pixellation and static.

[bentmick]

Nano Wrote :-

In fact, I'm not even sure that arcades really took off in Australia until about a decade ago. But that's just my opinion - probably wrong.

From "an older Aussie", My mates and I played at the Arcade after school all the time. That was in the late 70's, early eighties in a country town in Western NSW. You were born in '84. Class of '84 man.

[Nanoprobe]

bentmick - yeah. Just shielded from it a lot, I suppose I was.

Red_Hex - yeah it works fine - it's completely playable. But there's still a few graphical glitches that just detract from it occasionally. There's nothing like playing the original on an actual TV screen though. (And no, hooking your computer up to the TV to do this does not count. ;))