#oneaday Day 50: Another Project Complete

As of today, I now have videos recorded for all 25 of the games included on The400 Mini, the miniature games console based around the Atari 8-bit. Not all of them have been published yet — the final one, which covers both Centipede and Millipede, will be out later in the week — but it’s nice to feel like another creative project is “done”. If you’re interested, I set up a playlist on YouTube here:

As you’ll note from the thumbnail, this playlist includes both videos that I’ve previously recorded that happen to cover the games on The400 Mini and new vids that I’ve recorded specifically to look at everything included on the system. The Atari 5200 games included in the playlist, covered during my “Atari A to Z Flashback” project, where I made videos for all 150 games on Atari Flashback Classics for Switch, are fundamentally identical to their Atari 8-bit counterparts, and a few others I’d previously covered on the 8-bit-centric “Atari A to Z” series.

I’m pleased with this, at least partly because it means I can now get on with exploring the broader Atari 8-bit library once again. The games included on The400 Mini are a fun cross-section of what was out there on Atari 8-bit, but they are just a fraction of the whole picture — a picture that today includes some incredible efforts from modern developers who are still putting out amazing stuff for the platform.

One of the things that I hope comes to light for people who watch my videos is that a lot of games that ended up being very famous across multiple platforms actually got their start on Atari 8-bit. Off the top of my head that I’ve covered already, there’s Boulder Dash, Alley Cat, Spelunker, Lode Runner, M.U.L.E. and plenty of others besides.

All of these are arguably more famous in other incarnations (except perhaps M.U.L.E.) but I feel it’s important to acknowledge where they came from in the first place; a lot of self-styled gaming historians don’t give the Atari 8-bit the credit it is due, assuming it to be a niche system on the level of stuff like the Oric Atmos, Dragon 32 and suchlike. But no; while the Atari 8-bit never had the same widespread acceptance of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, it was still a lively, active and well-supported system (supported by everyone except Atari for significant portions of its lifespan, anyway) with some excellent capabilities that the platform’s more talented programmers really got to grips with.

I realise this all might sound a bit fanboyish, but that’s just because, well, I’m an Atari fan. Always have been. And I feel it’s a bit silly for big chunks of computing and gaming history to be ignored just because they didn’t happen on the most famous platforms.

And so I will continue to bang that drum on my YouTube channel. I have a platform there, and have amassed a following of quite a reasonable size. If the stuff I do convinces just one or two people to explore things a little beyond the usual scope of “retro” — or just to acknowledge that Atari home computers exist — then I’ll feel like I’ve done a decent job.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

2453: A Meeting of Generations

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After a bit of fiddling around and faffing (and eventually giving up on the OSX side of things) I managed to get a 35-year old Atari 800XL talking to a modern-day Windows computer. Not only talking, but even reading and writing files back and forth.

The secret to this black magic is twofold. Firstly, you need a bit of kit called an SIO2PC module, which converts the signal from the Atari computer’s SIO hardware — used for communicating with peripherals such as disk drives and cassette decks — into something which can be interpreted by modern systems, since SIO was a proprietary format and cable type. The SIO2PC module I had was serial-based, so I then had to run it into a modern computer using an RS232 to USB converter cable, since many computers these days don’t come with serial COM ports as standard. The cable effectively sets up a “virtual” COM port via USB, tricking the serial device into thinking it’s plugged into an actual serial port on the PC.

Once you’ve got that bit sorted, you need some software. There are three pieces of software I’ve experimented with today. Firstly, SIO2OSX just didn’t work at all. I don’t know if I didn’t set it up correctly or if the Mac simply didn’t have the appropriate drivers to set up the virtual serial port — though said virtual port certainly appeared for selection — but eventually I gave up and switched to my laptop PC, which has been gathering dust for a little while now.

Second up was Atari Peripheral Emulator, or APE for short. This Windows-based tool emulates a stack of Atari disk drives, printers and modems, allowing you to mount disk images and (theoretically, anyway) boot from them. I had trouble getting this part of the program to function correctly, but what did work was a separate application distributed as part of the APE package called ProSystem. This is a much simpler tool that allows you to either “rip” Atari disks to .ATR disk image files, or take an .ATR disk image and write it to a physical 5.25″ disk to use in the Atari disk drive. While APE failed to do what it was supposed to, ProSystem had no problems whatsoever, reading from and writing to my ageing Atari 1050 disk drive with no problems whatsoever.

The final tool I tried was AspeQt, which is still in active development. AspeQt is pretty much an open-source tool that does most of the things APE does — APE is shareware — but I found it to work much more reliably than APE for simply mounting disk images and using the PC as a “virtual disk drive” for the Atari. AspeQt also has an excellent feature that I was specifically looking for: the ability to extract individual files from .ATR disk images and save them as standalone files on the PC filesystem. It even automatically converts from ATASCII — Atari’s proprietary take on the now-standard ASCII character set — to standard ASCII, meaning that files such as AtariWriter documents can be easily transferred to PC for dumping into other applications with all the requisite line breaks and suchlike intact rather than being replaced with special characters.

My current Atari setup, then, is a bit of a kludgey mess, using ProSystem to rip and write complete disk images and AspeQt to mount and use individual files on a disk or image — ideally APE would act as an integrated solution for all of this — but it works, by God. And, boy, was it exciting to hear the 1050 snark into life when I clicked a button on my Windows PC. Just to prove it really worked, I downloaded a disk image for the AtariAge forums’ current High Score Club games and wrote it to a blank disk. A few minutes later, I had a bootable floppy disk that you’d never know I’d downloaded from the Internet running on original Atari hardware. Black magic, I tell ye.

Getting all this working opens up all manner of exciting possibilities, and I’m sure I’ll be exploring them more in the coming weeks.

2450: Original Hardware

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Emulators are great and all, but there’s something indescribably wonderful about playing old games — or using old applications — on their original hardware.

I hooked up my Atari 800XL to an old-fashioned CRT TV/monitor today, attached the 1050 disk drive and booted up a few old favourites from my childhood. And it’s been marvellous.

One thing that’s struck me with the retro scene of today is that you often hear the same game names coming up time after time, and they’re more often than not console titles. For my money, while the consoles of the ’80s were technologically superior — most notably with regard to scrolling and sprite work, which were done in hardware as opposed to the home computers, which required extensive poking around in RAM to accomplish the same goal — the games were far, far more creative.

I guess this is kind of a reflection of the situation we have today, where all the blockbusters come out on consoles, but the truly creative, weird indie games tend to hit PC first and perhaps consoles a bit later if we’re lucky and/or the developers feel like jumping through Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo’s respective hoops to publish their titles. The only difference is that home computers of today are regarded as the pinnacle of gaming technology, while the consoles represent the “affordable” option.

One thing I find especially interesting about the Atari 8-Bit scene in particular — and I’m sure it’s the same for the Spectrum and Commodore 64; I just don’t know those systems nearly as well — is that some of the most creative, interesting games were put out for free(ish) as type-in listings for magazines. All Atari systems could run the programming language Atari BASIC: early models had it on a ROM cartridge, while later models had it built in so that you’d just turn the machine on and it was ready to obey your every command.

The fact that absolutely everyone had access to this easy to learn (albeit not very efficient or speedy) programming language meant that magazines were able to publish complete programs sent in by readers or composed by staff members. Type the program listings into your computer using BASIC, save them to disk or cassette and voila: a free game or application for you!

Because these games weren’t beholden to the fickle whims of publishers — not that even commercial games were particularly restricted in this regard at the time — the authors were free to be as batshit crazy as they wanted with them. And oh, they were: some of the greatest games on the Atari are some of the most abstract, in which the answer to the question “why does that happen?” is simply “because it’s more fun and interesting that way”.

Take a game called Duck Dash, published by renowned Database publication Atari User in July of 1987. This is a game in which you play a farmer (inexplicably represented by a green diamond) as he runs around his farmyard trying to gather up his ducks in preparation for Hurricane Harriet. A simple enough concept, you might think. But there are two farmer-eating spiders wandering around the farmyard. And the ground is so muddy that you dig out bottomless pits behind you with every step you take, meaning you can’t retrace your steps.

Or how about Doctor Boris, from the same publication a few months later? So confident was Atari User in the quality of this game — written entirely in BASIC — that they declared it “Game of the Year” on their front cover, promising “the ultimate challenge”. In Doctor Boris you play the eponymous doctor, a recent graduate from medical school who has come to his new hospital in the North of England only to find that it’s still a building site, so it’s up to the good doctor to finish the building work himself. Also there are unexploded bombs scattered around the area. And your supervisor has skin so bad it is fatal to the touch. And there are radioactive skulls buried everywhere.

Ridiculous and insane-sounding, right? Obviously. But the thing is, these games play really well. They’re simple, they have clear goals, they’re well designed and their rules are self-explanatory. Above all, they’ve been designed with fun and challenge in mind, not realism, and for this reason they’ve aged better than a lot of other games I could mention, even with their primitive graphics and sound, not to mention their slow initialisation routines thanks to them being written in BASIC.

We have games that are this silly these days, of course, but when it happens today it always feels very much like they’re being designed as wacky YouTube-bait — that they’re trying a bit too hard to be funny. Neither Duck Dash nor Doctor Boris are trying to be funny or ridiculous; their premises and setup are pretty much irrelevant once you start playing, and the focus is entirely on providing a satisfying, enjoyable and challenging experience for the player. To put it another way, they “play it straight” rather than the whole thing being infused with the feeling that the game is going “HEY! HEY! LOOK AT ME! I’M HILARIOUS!” that you get with modern “creative” titles like, say, Shower With Your Dad Simulator and suchlike.

Anyway. So far it’s been an absolute pleasure to boot up these games — many of which are often neglected and forgotten by the broader retro scene thanks to them not being commercial releases — and I anticipate there are plenty more treasures hiding in the disk boxes full of not-at-all-pirated-games-honest that I happen to have standing by. You can probably count on hearing about a few more in the near future!

2439: Rescue on Fractalus

I’m bored, tired and ill, so aside from wheezing and feeling sorry for myself today, I distracted myself from negative thoughts by making a video about one of my favourite games of all time: Lucasfilm’s Rescue on Fractalus.

A lot of people tend to assume that Lucasfilm’s games output began with their fabulous SCUMM-driven adventure games from Maniac Mansion onwards and ended with some limp-wristed Star Wars spinoffs, but they were actually pretty active in the early days of computing. Not only that, their games became known for being some of the most technologically advanced titles out there, with Rescue on Fractalus being an early example of spectacular first-person perspective flight, shooting and rescue action.

Rather than using polygons, which were only just starting to be explored on home computers by Braben and Bell’s Elite in 1984, Rescue on Fractalus, which came out earlier in the same year, made use of fractals to generate its three-dimensional landscapes. The effect was a much more “organic”-looking landscape than what we’d come to expect from polygon-based titles in their early years, and remains an impressive technological achievement considering the power of the host systems even today. Sure, it may not be perfect by modern standards — the frame rate is janky, there’s a lot of pop-in, the game doesn’t quite seem to know how to respond when you collide with a solid object — but when you consider this was first released to the world in 1984, I think we can forgive all these things, particularly when the game itself is so solid.

In Rescue on Fractalus, you fly a craft called the Valkyrie down to the titular planet, whose atmosphere is so toxic it makes a Gawker publication look like a bereavement support group. A number of pilots have crash-landed, and it’s your job to save them by finding them, landing nearby, waiting for them to come up and bang on your airlock door, letting them in and then speeding off on your way. This is a simple process in the early levels, but as you progress, you start having to contend with mountaintop laser cannons, kamikaze flying saucers, aliens impersonating pilots on the ground and even flying by night, necessitating even more reliance on your ship’s instruments than normal.

I loved Rescue on Fractalus back when I first played it because it provided one of the most convincing, dramatic representations of flying an advanced spacecraft that I’d ever seen. The realistic cockpit view with instrumentation, the wonderful two-channel “whistling” sound of the ship’s engines — entirely unique to Rescue on Fractalus, making it instantly recognisable to hear as much as see — and the fact that the game involved more than just “point and shoot” captured my attention as a child, and it’s a game I still delight in playing even today.

But those aliens hammering on the windshield still scare the shit out of me.

2427: 10 Atari 8-Bit Classics*

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Still curious about the Atari 8-Bit? Here are 10 classic games.

River Raid

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The 2600 version of River Raid has been whored around the place numerous times over the last few years, but the infinitely superior Atari 800 version never gets any love.

While the formula remains the same — fly up the river, don’t crash into the sides, don’t run out of fuel, blast any helicopters, ships and bridges in your way — the execution is better thanks to the addition of numerous features that use the additional power the 8-Bit computers had over the 2600.

Atari 8-Bit River Raid also had tanks, hot air baloons, jet planes that flew across the screen ignoring the river boundaries and more complex level designs. It’s still a top-notch shoot ’em up today.

Miner 2049’er

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Any self-respecting Atari enthusiast will almost certainly put this game near the top of their “favourite games” list, though interestingly I didn’t warm to it much first time around. Replaying it again now, however, I see its appeal — it’s a well-crafted platform game with interesting environmental puzzles that never gets too complicated for its own good.

Playing the role of renowned (and rather chubby) mountie Bounty Bob, it’s your job to make your way through a uranium-infested mine in search of the nefarious Yukon Yohan. In order to do this, you need to “paint” every platform in each screen by walking over it, while simultaneously avoiding the mutant uranium beasties that prowl the platforms. But in true Pac-Man tradition, grabbing a bonus item allows you the temporary ability to turn the tables on the meanies, eliminating them from the screen and helping to clear a path for you.

Star Raiders

Again, the 2600 version of this has been re-released time after time, but the Atari 8-Bit version is much better. It’s the original 3D space sim, essentially being a more action-oriented take on the traditional grid-and-vector-based “Star Trek” game that can be played on anything from a mainframe to a graphic calculator.

Aliens are invading the galaxy. You need to stop them. You do this by reviewing the galactic map, determining which of your starbases are in most immediate need of attention, then warping to the aliens’ location, blasting them to smithereens and then repeating the process until the galaxy is safe once again.

Notable for being more complex than simply “point and fire”, you had to manage your energy levels by determining when was (and wasn’t) an appropriate time to switch on systems such as your shields and targeting computer.

Star Raiders II

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Not perhaps as fondly regarded as the legendary original, I still loved Star Raiders II (originally intended to be a licensed game of the movie The Last Starfighter), because to me it kept what made the original great while improving almost every aspect of it.

Instead of a grid-based galactic map, you now had a convincing looking solar system map and could even orbit planets. The enemies you confronted were more than just fighters that went down with a single shot, too; in one of the earliest examples of boss fights, Star Raiders II often put you up against enemy destroyers and battlecruisers, requiring you to change tactics somewhat.

Star Raiders II also saw you going on the offensive rather than playing strictly defensively, too; when you thought you saw an opportunity, you could warp into the aliens’ star system and bomb their planets in an attempt to stop their invasions once and for all.

Oh, and you could fly your ship into the sun and the on-screen cockpit would melt.

Ballblazer

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An early Lucasfilm game, Ballblazer was a split-screen arcade sports game for one or two players. The basic premise was similar to soccer in that you had to gain possession of a ball and shoot it between the opponent’s goal posts, but there was only one person on each team and the goalposts moved.

Ballblazer made use of a convincing first-person 3D perspective using a patchwork grid effect on the ground and automatic 90-degree turns whenever you needed to face the ball. Despite its simplicity, the game was fiercely competitive, and had some fantastic music, too.

Rescue on Fractalus

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I mentioned this the other day, but I can’t talk about 8-Bit classics without discussing Rescue on Fractalus, another early Lucasfilm game.

Unfolding from a first-person in-cockpit view, you were sent down to the planet Fractalus (so named because its 3D landscape was generated using fractals) to rescue crashed pilots and fend off the evil Jaggi forces. The game was remarkably complex for its time, featuring numerous keyboard commands that made it feel like a proper simulation of flying an advanced spacecraft, and the 3D graphics were extremely impressive.

Rescue on Fractalus was most noteworthy for its little touches: the sound of a pilot banging on your airlock door would get more and more faint if you failed to open it for him in a timely manner; if you switched your engines back on before the pilot was on board, you’d fry the poor bastard to a crisp; and occasionally on later levels, the downed pilots would turn out to be aliens that would leap up and hammer on your windshield. Absolutely terrifying… until you switched the engines back on for their benefit and watched them fry.

M.U.L.E.

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One of the finest multiplayer games of all time, and one of the finest strategy games of all time. Accessible and understandable yet filled with complexity, M.U.L.E. was — is — an absolute masterpiece.

Marooned on the planet Proc Irata (seriously) for six or twelve months depending on the difficulty you were playing on, it was up to you to make the most of the situation by making use of the land that was granted to you and which you bought at auction. You could assign land to harvest food, energy, smithore or, on the higher levels, a “cash crop” called crystite. The type of terrain determined what type of facility a plot was most suitable for, with the river running down the middle of the map being the most abundant for food, while mountains were best for smithore.

M.U.L.E. challenged you to combine cooperative play with competitiveness — while you were competing against three other players, all of whom could be human-controlled if you had an Atari that supported four joysticks, if you didn’t all work together to ensure the colony as a whole had enough food, energy and smithore to survive the next month, you’d all be in trouble.

The game made use of an interesting graphical depiction of negotiating prices by allowing buyers and sellers to “walk” up and down the screen to determine the prices they were willing to buy or sell at. By meeting another player — or the colony store — you could buy and sell goods as you saw fit — stockpile for later or sell for a high price right now?

Final Legacy

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A lesser-known game, this one, Final Legacy was a strategic shoot ’em up with elements of Missile Command to it, and, like many other games of the period, was the embodiment of Cold War paranoia.

In Final Legacy, you were in charge of the good ship Legacy and were tasked with destroying the nasty horrible enemy missile bases that were pointing their nasty horrible missiles at your cities. You had to torpedo enemy ships, blast the enemy bases with your laser cannon and shoot down the missiles that inevitably got fired the moment you started attacking a base.

Later difficulty levels added some interesting mechanics such as having to destroy “Intelligence” ships in order to find out the locations of the enemy missile bases, but mostly the game was about frantically zipping back and forth between four different screens and hoping you didn’t accidentally let anyone get nuked.

Batty Builders

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Another lesser-known game, this time from the once-prolific English Software. Batty Builders saw you in the role of a builder attempting to build a wall. In order to do so, you’d have to catch bricks falling from the conveyor belt at the top of the screen, then toss them into place in the wall, all without killing yourself in the process.

That’s pretty much all there was to it, but it was enormously addictive, and is noteworthy for being one of the earliest examples of a frantic puzzle game I can remember.

Bruce Lee

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An interesting and peculiar game, Bruce Lee combined elements from a number of different game types, most notably beat ’em up and platform adventure.

As Lee, you’d have to make your way through each screen collecting lanterns. Attempting to stop you from doing so were an anonymous ninja and The Green Yamo, both of whom would pursue you around each screen with a surprising amount of simulated intelligence (or, in the case of Yamo, who could be controlled by a second player, actual intelligence), making your life miserable. Fortunately, you could deal with them by giving them a smack in the chops or a flying kick to the face, though they’d always be back.

Bruce Lee remains one of the finest licensed games out there, thanks in part to the fact that it’s not trying too hard to follow any particular movie. It’s still a fun platformer today.

* your definition of “classic” may vary, but I enjoyed all these.

2425: Life in the 8-Bit Era

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I’ve been on a proper nostalgia trip with my old magazines and retro machine emulation recently, so I thought I’d share some memories and factoids about growing up in a household filled with home computers rather than games consoles.

This post was inspired by a conversation with my friend Chris earlier today, who noted that it’s an area of gaming history that he’s not as familiar with as the consoles of the time.

I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who grew up with the Atari 8-Bit range of home computers. Your experiences may vary if you were a Commodore 64 or Spectrum child!

The early machines were massive

The Atari 400 and 800, the first models of home computer released by Atari, were absolute behemoths — the size and weight of a typewriter. The reason for this was that due to FCC regulations regarding signal leakage protection, their innards had to be encased in solid aluminium.

This is the Atari 400.

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And this is the Atari 800.

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There were a few differences between the two. The 400 was originally set to ship with 4K RAM and the 800 with 8K, but by the time they hit the market, the price of RAM had already come down enough to outfit them both with 8K. The 800, which had expandable memory, eventually underwent numerous upgrades to end up with a then-massive 48K of RAM.

The 400 had a horrible membrane keyboard (which many users, including our family, replaced with mechanical keys) while the 800 had mechanical keys as standard. Both featured a then-revolutionary bit of kit called Serial Input/Output or SIO, which could be regarded as a modern precursor to USB in that it allowed the connection of multiple, automatically configuring devices to the computer. It was mostly use to connect tape decks and disk drives.

The later machines were smaller and looked a bit nicer

Here’s the 64K 800XL, probably the most direct competitor to the Commodore 64:

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And the 128KB 130XE, whose extra power went largely unused due to it coming out pretty late in the 8-Bit life cycle; its resemblance to the 16-bit Atari ST is no coincidence.

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(Here’s the ST, for comparison’s sake:)

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Early games came on cartridge

Part of the thinking behind the early systems was that they should be as user-friendly as possible. With that in mind, the very simplest method of getting a program up and running on the 400 and 800 — and indeed all subsequent Atari 8-Bits — was to plug in a ROM cartridge, turn on the power and enjoy the instantaneous load times of the format.

Many of the 8-Bit’s earliest and most well-regarded games — most notably the excellent Star Raiders, one of the first 3D space sims, and still a great game today — came on cartridge, but eventually games got big enough that they needed to be distributed on cassette tape or 5.25″ floppy disk instead.

The 400 and 800 had four joystick ports

…but very few games used them. However, one of the very best games on the system, Electronic Arts’ highly competitive strategy game M.U.L.E., allowed for four players simultaneously. Later versions of the Atari 8-bit only had two joystick ports, so true four-player titles remained rare.

Programming for the Atari and other 8-Bit machines was a big British industry

A lot of the software companies that are doing proud business today — Eutechnyx (formerly Zeppelin Games), Rare (formerly Ultimate Play the Game), Codemasters (still Codemasters) and Electronic Arts began their lives in the 8-bit era, and many of them (all of the above except EA, among others) started in Britain.

The 8-Bit era saw the birth of what we would now call the indie games industry. Single programmers or small teams of friends would assemble games in school holidays or during free time and release them on cassette at budget prices. Many would go on to become hugely popular. And many of them chose to create extremely creative titles rather than lazy copycat clones of arcade shoot ’em ups — though make no mistake, there were plenty of lazy clones around, too.

The reason why so many people got into programming on their Atari is that when you booted it up you were straight into Atari BASIC and could start writing code straight away. Granted, BASIC wasn’t the speediest language in the world, but learning it formed a great foundation for discovering more complex languages.

Loading from tape took ages

This can’t be overstated. It’s a well-known fact that loading a game from cassette took a long time, but really. It took a long time. In the case of the Atari, you’d have to ensure the system going “BURRRRRRRRR, BURRRRRRRRRR!!” over and over while the data loaded from the cassette.

Loading from disk made a great noise

One thing I really miss from the original 8-Bit days when using an emulator is the sound that loading things from disk made. There was this weird farting sound when the machine started up, then loading combined the whirring snark of the drive’s mechanisms with a weird “BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL” noise, punctuated by zurbits from the drive. I was always a bit disappointed when developers poked the appropriate memory location to make loading quieter. (And yes, “poke” actually is the technical term.)

And of course someone’s made a YouTube video featuring that noise. It’s number 4 in this video:

Magazines were a key part of the ownership experience

Getting copies of Analog, Antic, Atari User and Page 6 each month meant that we were never short of toilet reading material. And as I noted yesterday, the articles you got in these old mags ran the gamut from in-depth technical explorations of the systems themselves (and how to harness that technology) to the sort of game reviews we’re familiar with today.

The Atari sound chip was awesome

Commodore’s SID chip gets all the love these days, but Atari’s POKEY was no slouch either. Here’s a selection of fine tunes from renowned composer Adam Gilmore.

Piracy was rife

It’s a wonder we didn’t kill the fledgling games industry completely in the ’80s, since very few people seemed to purchase original games; I know it was certainly a rare treat in our household.

Instead, bootleg cassette tapes and floppy disks did the rounds in the schoolyard, at workplaces and even at gatherings specifically for people to swap dodgy copies of the latest goodness. I was too young to attend at the time, but I remember my father and brother attending a local “computer club”, which was the source of most of the boxes full of floppy disks I still own today.

Interesting, for the pirates themselves, piracy was less about getting something for free and instead all about proving their worth. “Cracked” games often came with elaborate introduction sequences (typically including some great chiptune music) and made use of advanced compression technologies to fit multiple games on a single floppy disk. Today, retro enthusiasts are as keen to preserve cracked versions of games as they are originals.

The systems weren’t as powerful as consoles, but they tried hard

Being general-purpose computers rather than dedicated games machines, the Atari 8-Bit range struggled to keep pace with the specialist machines from Sega and Nintendo, but that didn’t mean developers would rest on their laurels. Particularly late in the 8-Bit’s lifespan, developers were squeezing every possible ounce of graphical power they could out of the little machine’s chips, and the results could be both impressive and heavily stylized. Check out Lucasfilm’s games in particular, which featured full 3D fractal landscapes and detailed sprites.

Here’s strange action adventure The Eidolon, in which you travelled through time, fought mushrooms and battled rather arrogant-looking dragons:

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Here’s wonderful flight sim/first-person Defender-alike Rescue on Fractalus, surprisingly one of the most terrifying games in existence for reasons I’ll leave you to discover if you ever play it:

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And here’s the rather strange (but impressive) Koronis Rift:

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I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the 8-Bit era was probably one of my favourite times to be into computers. It was exciting, it was accessible and it felt like these machines could do anything; there was none of the cynicism or taking things for granted that we have today.

Oh to go back, eh.

2422: A Different Time

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I’ve been doing some retro gaming stuff recently which involved trawling the AtariAge and AtariMania forums for information, and as it happened, one game I was looking for information about — the rather peculiar Pondering About Max’s [sic] — linked to a scan of an old edition of New Atari User magazine, the very publication that I, my brother and my father all used to contribute to.

I spent quite a while distracted by the format of the magazine, because it’s a relic of a very different time indeed. New Atari User — or its former incarnation Page 6 — wasn’t a games magazine per se, though coverage of the latest video game releases on Atari 8-Bit and ST formed a core part of each issue. What I found much more interesting was the inclusion of other features. I was well familiar with the Making Music with Your Atari column that my Dad used to write, as I think our whole family remembers numerous MIDI incarnations of various ’60s and ’70s classics blaring out from the studio at all hours of the day — but I was surprised to see quite how… specialist some of the other articles were.

Take the issue I was looking at earlier, for example. There’s a three-page feature in this issue about maths. Just maths, and how to make use of it in Atari BASIC. The article begins with an exploration of the use of the RND function in BASIC, which generates a random number between 0 and 1, expands on this by describing how using multiplication allows you to generate random numbers between 0 and much higher upper limits, and concludes by using the INT function to generate only whole numbers. This is stuff that most bedroom programmers were already familiar with, but the article then goes on to look at powers and roots, signs and absolute values, logarithms and exponentials and finally probabilities — each of which was punctuated with a short BASIC listing for you to type in on your own computer to see how the functions worked in practice. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Elsewhere in the same issue there’s four pages devoted to making the Atari 8-bit display an 80-column text screen — this was deemed exciting enough to get a mention on the front cover of the magazine, which is unthinkable these days — an in-depth exploration of the AtariLab computer-aided scientific experimentation kits, and plenty of other things besides. It really is a fascinating relic of a period in computer media that I thought I remembered pretty well, but evidently have forgotten more than a few things about over the years. Looking back on it now… I miss those times a lot.

If you want to enjoy a bit of nostalgia — or are just curious what computer and games mags used to look like back in the early days — then AtariMania has a substantial collection of scans that you can enjoy right here.

#oneaday Day 892: In Memory of Floppy Drives

I was struggling to think of something to write about until an offhand comment on Twitter got me thinking about, of all things, floppy disk drives.

I miss floppy disk drives.

No, wait. Bear with me. Not in practical terms — I’m sure no-one misses the days when games had a whole disk just for their intro sequence, or the era when Microsoft Office came in a box roughly the size of a Borg Cube — but in terms of… of… you know what? It’s hard to describe exactly, so let me just wax nostalgic about a few things.

I used to find something oddly comforting in the sound of floppy drives whirring away doing their thing. Every floppy drive sounded different, too — the ridiculously huge 810 drive for the Atari 8-bit computers snarked and farted; the later 1050 was a little quieter (though had squeaky mechanical parts sometimes); the external floppy drives for the Atari ST made a pleasant frog-like croaking noise; the internal Atari ST drive was subtler, giving the occasional chug; and the drives in our first PCs were pretty quiet, putt-putt-putting away, usually installing something.

Their uses varied over the years, too. Up until DOS and Windows-based PCs started to take off as a serious gaming platform and required you to install everything, pretty much all software ran directly from floppies, making it necessary to have lots of those big plastic disk boxes (inevitably full of pirated software) — organised alphabetically if you wanted to remain sane. In practical terms, this meant things often took quite a long time to load, which brings us to something that is all but forgotten these days except in the most inefficiently-programmed and/or massive video games: the loading screen.

Loading screens used to be the place where the graphic artist for the game could really let rip and show off what they could do with the limited colour palette and resolution of the hardware they were working on. My most fondly-remembered loading screens were the work of Herman Serrano, a dude who could really make the Atari ST sing. (Visually. Whatever the visual equivalent of singing is. Oh, be quiet.) He did good loading screens for companies such as Argonaut and Psygnosis, and always signed his name prominently on them, which is something you don’t see these days, either. Often they were just pixel-by-pixel recreations of the box art, but sometimes there were variations, and it was fun to look carefully at them, pick out the details and spot the occasional Easter eggs. You didn’t have much choice, really, since there was nothing else you could do while it was loading.

While games still ran from floppies, loading breaks — now considered to be a thing of great evil that should be avoided at all cost — were considered something of a perk, as they generally indicated that you had done something good. This was true whether you were playing an Infocom text adventure on the Atari 8-bit or a LucasArts adventure on the Amiga. If the disk started chugging immediately after you did something, you were usually on to a winner. (Unless you were playing a Sierra game, of course, in which case it was entirely possible it was simply loading one of its many elaborate death scenes for your long-suffering character.) Some emulators of old systems even allow for the simulation of these loading breaks for the fully-authentic experience — though without the sound of a disk drive chugging away it loses something.

So yes. I miss floppy drives. I don’t begrudge the 21st century’s massive storage capacities and lightning-fast access, of course, but I do miss that comforting feel of sliding a disk into a slot with a satisfying “clunk”, turning the computer on (yes! Remember having to turn the computer off every time you wanted to run something else?) and then sitting listening to the distinctive mechanical whirrs, groans and farts of the disk drive as it loaded whatever it was you wanted to play or use.

Rest in peace, floppy drives. You’re missed!