#oneaday Day 641: Learning something new and pointless

Every so often, I get kind of a hunger to learn something new, but a little gremlin in my mind almost always stops me from pursuing that thought with a simple phrase: "there's no point".

His thinking is that learning how to do something new absolutely must be something useful that you can use in your day-to-day life, and preferably make money from. And the reason I listen to him is because I understand where he's coming from; we live in a mercenary world with a cost of living that continues to escalate, and thus it would seem eminently sensible to learn something that would, at the very least, have some value in the job market.

But at the same time, there are things I want to learn about that, while arguably "pointless", I think would just be fun and interesting. One that I keep coming back to is the concept of programming — but specifically programming on the Atari 8-bit home computers.

I used to dabble quite a bit in programming in BASIC when I was a kid. I had several floppy disks' worth of BASIC listings that represented a combination of things I had typed in from magazines, things I had adapted from things I had typed in, and completely original creations. I never got particularly good at programming in Atari BASIC, but I did enjoy doing it. And for the longest time I've found myself wondering "what if I actually applied myself and tried to rediscover and expand on those skills?"

That's about where the gremlin enters the picture, you see. There is no rational reason why I should spend time learning how to program a long-defunct computer that you can't buy any more and which, in the grand scheme of Home Computers People Have Heard Of, ranks far behind the Commodore 64 and Spectrum, despite having capabilities at the very least on a par with, and often superior to, both of them.

"It's a waste of time," he says. "There's no point. You won't make any money from it. No-one will want to hire you based on that."

Well, frankly, who gives a shit? I'm not getting any younger, and I feel like learning new things is a good way to keep the brain active. So I think what I might actually do is put some serious time into this. Maybe devote an evening or two a week to it and see what happens.

It might not go anywhere. But at least I'll have been trying something new. And that's quite an exciting thing.

Another thing that has been holding me back is not really knowing where to start, but a blog I stumbled across by chance earlier today gave me some good recommendations of books to take a look at. And if people back in the '80s could learn how to program using just these books and no Internet to look things up on, I'm sure I can do something similar.

Maybe. We'll see.

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.

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#oneaday Day 518: '80s Activision had the juice

I frigging love '80s Activision games, particularly on the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit. I grew up with the ones on Atari 8-bit, of course, and since I never had a 2600 back in the day, those are a (relatively) more recent discovery. But I adore every one of them, and I'm beyond thrilled that I've been part of bringing them back to a new audience on Evercade.

The first of our Activision cartridges isn't out yet, but I, of course, have a copy. Perks of the job and all that. It's already becoming one of my most-played Evercade cartridges, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We're actually doing three collections in total (this isn't Super Secret information, it was in our press release) and I've been largely responsible for the curation of said collections. All three of them are very strong indeed (you'll have to wait and see the lineup for the others, which are coming next year!) but this first collection comes out of the gate swinging with some of my absolute favourites.

My personal highlights are MegaMania, Enduro, Crackpots and River Raid, with honourable mentions to Beamrider and Demon Attack, games I've gotten to know a bit more recently.

MegaMania is one of the absolute best fixed shooters of the early '80s. Pitting you against waves of strange household objects, this "space nightmare" keeps things constantly interesting, as each wave has its own distinctive movement pattern — and then once you've cleared a complete loop of all of them, they go and change up their patterns a bit, just to keep you on your toes. It's a beautiful example of how utterly elegant some early games can be: it's simple to understand, has a brilliantly paced difficulty curve, a well-crafted scoring system and is endlessly replayable.

River Raid is, of course, a pioneering vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, whose noteworthy features include the ability to adjust your speed as you fly and the necessity to refuel your aircraft while negotiating obstacles and blasting enemies. The fact that this game was crammed into 4 kilobytes of ROM will never not be amazing to me. Carol Shaw was an actual wizard — not just for the game's technical accomplishments, but for the fact that, like MegaMania, it's an incredibly well-paced, considerately designed game that is likewise replayable until the end of time.

Enduro is the spiritual precursor to the home computer game The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, a game which I played as a child many years before I ever encountered Enduro for the first time. Enduro is, partly by necessity of the more primitive hardware it's running on, a simpler game, but I think its simplicity is also a core part of its appeal. All you have to do is overtake a set number of cars as a full day-night-and-weather cycle of a set duration proceeds: overtake 200 cars on the first day, then 300 each day thereafter. Your final score is how many "miles" you successfully drove before failing to qualify for the next day, and the score is presented using a lovely rolling analogue counter effect. I would have loved that as a kid — hell, I love it now.

Crackpots is a relatively recent discovery, and a game I feel I would have probably been terrified of as a kid. Again, the concept is simple: bugs are climbing your building, and you must drop flower pots on them. With each wave of bugs cleared, a new colour appears, and each colour of bug has a distinctive movement pattern. When you've cleared one loop of all the bug types (black, blue, red, green) the cycle repeats, but faster. The bugs chew through a layer of your building every time you let too many past you, and this affects the pace of the game from thereon. After too many layers of your building have been eaten, the game is over. It's pure high score fodder, and once again, beautifully paced and designed, with a dynamic difficulty level that raises and lowers according to how well you're doing.

Beamrider is, in essence, another fixed shoot 'em up, but it probably has more in common with Atari's Tempest than anything else, in that rather than moving freely, you switch between distinct "lanes" that the enemies proceed down. Thus there's a much stronger element of precision and even strategy to Beamrider than some other games, and the presentation, considering the host platform, is very good indeed. It's another game I got to know quite recently — there is an Atari 8-bit version, I believe, but I never encountered it back in the day.

Demon Attack is a game that I became familiar with after watching Classic Game Room's Atari 2600 reviews many, many times. It's a very simple fixed shooter, in which all you have to do is blast demons in the sky above you. Only three demons appear at once, and only one of them fires at you. It should be primitive and stupid and dumb, but it's incredibly compelling, particularly once the pace of the game increases and the demons start splitting into smaller bits. This one actually wasn't an Activision game back in the day; it was by Imagic, but Activision got the rights to all the Imagic stuff at some indeterminate point in the past. So yes, the Evercade Activision cartridges will have some of the Imagic stuff, too.

I'm quite fond of Activision Anthology on the PlayStation 2, but the last time I played it, I spotted quite how poor the emulation is in that version. It's not altogether surprising — there have been 23 years of advancements in emulation since — but, given how accessible good quality emulation of these games is about to become with the Evercade cartridges (and, hell, how easy it is to get 2600 up and running on systems like MiSTer and cheapo Chinese handhelds) it's a little hard to go back to. The built-in "badge" challenges, weirdo visual effects and '80s soundtrack are fun, though. I feel like we'll never see a compilation quite like that ever again.

But anyway. I am banging on about this because I spent today making a video about the upcoming cartridge. Watch out for it on the Evercade YouTube channel soon!

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#oneaday Day 508: Pondering a new video idea

I play a lot of classic games on my YouTube channel, and that's not going to be changing any time soon. But I'm always pondering interesting new things I might be able to do with the channel, and something popped into my head earlier.

What if I do some videos specifically about programming in Atari BASIC, with an aim to showcasing what an interesting, flexible language it is — particularly compared to some other micros' BASICs — and basing the videos on the numerous tutorials published in magazines like Page 6 and Atari User? (Crediting the original writers, obviously.)

My thinking behind it comes from several perspectives: one, there is a niche interest "market" in videos about programming for classic computers, as evidenced by the thoroughly lovely Yawning Angel Retro channel, who specialises in programming the Amiga with the AMOS language.

Two, I just think it would be an interesting twist on what I do on the channel.

Three, I will probably learn something from it — albeit something that may not necessarily be especially "useful" in the modern world.

Four, it's something to do with the magazines I've been acquiring besides just doing flipthroughs of them (which I also intend to keep doing on an occasional basis).

And five, it's something a bit different to do with the computer stuff. I'm not exactly bored of doing the games — there are still myriad titles I haven't covered on both Atari 8-bit and ST! — but I have reached a point where I want to do something a little different. This is part of the reason I've done so much console stuff on the channel recently — that and the MiSTer Multisystem 2 making it so easy to capture from all manner of different platforms — but I'm always conscious that the backbone of my channel was built on Atari home computer stuff.

I think I will try an experiment in the coming weeks and months. I will start with the absolute basics (no pun intended) for the sake of those who have never programmed in '70s/'80s computer BASIC, and gradually move on to the Atari specialisms: graphics, sound, manipulating the Display List, Player/Missile Graphics and all manner of other things. Some of these things I've never understood, so I feel like taking the time to make a video version of some of these tutorials may well allow me to improve and advance my own knowledge — something I've always kind of wanted to do, but never really made the time for.

In time, maybe I'll even be able to Snorkify some Atari BASIC games. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we…?

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#oneaday Day 474: Archiving with mixed results

My 5.25" floppy drive and power source came today, so I've been tinkering this evening attempting to image some Atari 8-bit disks from the big boxes I have buried in a cupboard upstairs.

After a few frightening mechanical noises and some initial frustrations — the most annoying of which by far was discovering I had the floppy drive cable inserted into the Greaseweazle the wrong way around, causing the drive to perpetually spin and never actually read anything — I got the setup up and running, and successfully ripped a couple of disks, initially to the "raw flux" .scp format, and then converted them to the more commonly used (for emulators, MiSTer and suchlike) .atr.

(For future reference, Atari disks are 40 tracks, meaning you need to set Greaseweazle to read cylinders 0-34 and 35-39. I don't know the technicalities behind this, but it worked.)

My initial success was reassuring, but I had a number of failures after that. I think some of these disks may be beyond help — and frustratingly, so far it appears to be the disks with more "personal" contents.

I attempted to rip a disk that had some of my brother's early BASIC programming experiments on it (including a simple multi-choice adventure game called Treasures of Crylos that I remember being rather fond of), but the disk barely registered as having any contents at all when I attempted to rip it.

I had a little more success with "Pete's Disk 1", which was a SpartaDOS X-formatted double-density disk, so a bit of an unusual edge case. The disk seemingly ripped successfully, and loading it into an emulator with SpartaDOS X installed allowed me to view the disk directory, but I was unable to actually load and run anything from the disk. So close! So very close. Also man, SpartaDOS X could fit a hell of a lot of stuff on one floppy disk. No wonder my Dad set me up with it for my personal disks rather than trusty old DOS 2.5. You can squeeze a lot more on when your file sizes are measured in bytes rather than sectors.

Other successes I had included what we colloquially referred to as "The Dutch Demo", a multi-part graphics and sound demo that is, unsurprisingly, Dutch (and I don't think I've ever seen archived anywhere online, so I will be sharing that at some point); Red Rat's Technicolour Dream Demo, which is a slideshow of pictures produced with the software in question, which supported considerably higher colour depth than the Atari was "supposed" to support; and a couple of disks of collected games.

I haven't started ripping and organising in any great depth yet, but I would like to rip as many of these as I can, then archive them somewhere online. While most of the software on these disks is archived via other means elsewhere around the Internet, it's the little things, like the menu systems used to collect these games together, and the specific combination of things on each disk, which is unique to my own computing history — and something that I'm keen to preserve if at all possible.

I don't know how many of these disks are going to be salvageable. I'm already seeing that some brands of disk have much better longevity than others — thus far, Radio Shack and Verbatim's disks have had the highest success rate, with Wabash being the worst — so it will be interesting to find out exactly how much I might be able to recover and (re)discover throughout this process.

I'm done for the evening, though. Back to it on Friday, since tomorrow is a Work Trip. A fun Work Trip, but still one I have to get up early and catch a train for, so I better get some sleep.

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#oneaday Day 469: Where have all the 5.25" drives gone?

Earlier today, I had an idle thought that has occurred to me numerous times over the last little while, but today I thought I'd look into actually doing something about it.

A while back, I bought a Greaseweazle, which is a USB device you can connect to a modern PC at one end and a floppy disk drive at the other, then "rip" floppies using a particularly accurate method of imaging known as flux imaging. These images can then be converted into various formats, such as those commonly used with emulators (or MiSTer), and can then be safely archived.

I've got two boxes of 5.25" Atari 8-bit disks in my cupboard upstairs that I'd quite like to get all the stuff off — assuming the discs themselves have survived. I know some of them have (and, equally, some appear to have not) and so I thought it would be a nice, interesting and fun thing to do to archive my unique collection of disks, which in some respects are a snapshot of family life in the mid 1980s.

Besides the obvious disks full of pirated games, my brother and I both had our own disks that we'd save BASIC programs to — both those that we'd typed in from magazines, and those which we'd written ourselves. Then there's a bunch of disks that my Mum and Dad did stuff with — my Dad did all manner of things, including writing, music and various productivity things (that and Flight Simulator II, which "isn't a game") while my Mum, on several occasions, spent some time writing. My brother made pictures with AtariArtist. And I'm sure there are plenty of other hidden treasures among them, too.

Now, here's the problem. I bought the Greaseweazle with a mind to making some floppy disks that could be used with the Atari ST, which uses 3.5" 360K or 720K disks. (Actually, Atari format can push the 800K+ mark, but they're broadly MS-DOS compatible, so 720K is a sensible limit for everyday use.) The device worked great for that, though I ultimately got an UltraSatan for the ST (which is an SD card-based storage solution that effectively emulates a hard drive) and have now moved on to the MiSTer for most of my retro computing needs and wants.

I'd been putting off getting a 5.25" drive to archive these big boxes of Atari stuff, though. I knew the process of getting a 5.25" drive hooked up was a little more involved, for one thing, since a 3.5" floppy drive can power itself from the Greaseweazle, while a 5.25" drive generally needs an external power source. But something in me today said "right, go on, get this sorted". So I headed for eBay in search of what I thought would be an easy thing to find: an old, discarded but working 5.25" floppy disk drive that someone had grabbed out of an obsolete PC and decided to sell online.

Reader, it turns out that 5.25" drives are not, in fact, easy to find. In fact, there seem to be very few floating around out there, and the ones that are are surprisingly expensive. While you can score yourself a 3.5" drive very easily — and it probably be in decent working order, too — 5.25" drives are, apparently, like gold dust.

I did find one promising looking unit earlier, which was actually a self-contained enclosure with a power supply and two 5.25" floppy drives, but after bidding on it a few times, the price went a little higher than I was comfortable paying, so I dropped out. (Also, I was having dinner at the time the auction ended, so I kind of sort of forgot to check in.) The final price was over £80, though, which would have probably given me a certain degree of buyer's remorse. Or maybe not. I guess now we'll never know.

I'll keep keeping an eye out for reasonably priced drives, though. I really would like to get those disks archived and share them with my family — it's something I probably should have done a long time ago (before 5.25" drives went completely extinct, apparently) but I guess it's going to be a bit of effort to get up and running!

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#oneaday Day 394: Motivation located

I finally got together the motivation and energy to make some videos, which you'll be seeing over the course of the next little while over on YouTube. I made four in total, which I'm pleased with, as that means I don't need to be in a rush to make any more for a little while. Not that I ever "need" to be in a rush, but I've felt in a bit of a rut with the channel recently, and have really struggled with motivation.

Not so today, though! I think it helped that it's rained a fair bit over the last few days, and that's cooled things down a bit, meaning it's not quite so unbearable to just exist. It's amazing quite how much energy a bit of heat can sap from you; I'm sure I could have probably mustered up some energy to do something vaguely productive if I really cared that much, but I think the "break" also did me a bit of good and revitalised my enthusiasm for some of the things I want to cover.

Today's videos see me returning to the Atari 8-bit for the first time in a while. Every time I come back to the humble 8-bit after spending a bit of time away, I'm reminded how much I love that system. Seeing its fonts is like coming home; it's a comforting, warm blanket that makes me feel thoroughly pleasant. I'm sure part of this is nostalgia talking, but I do genuinely mean it when I say I find it a comfort. I got to know the Atari 8-bit and its capabilities so well when I was a child fiddling around with Atari BASIC that just the sight of half-height, double-width Graphics 1 characters is enough to make me smile today. Throw in the games I grew up playing, and, well, that's a happy place I feel like I should probably spend some more time in, judging by how much I enjoyed today's recording session.

The games I covered today are Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mountain King and Stealth. There was no particular reason for picking these, aside from knowing that Donkey Kong Bananza is on the way for Nintendo Switch, so I thought it would be fun to look at the "Nintendo on Atari" games; Mountain King I chose because I happened to rewatch Classic Game Room's review of the 2600 version the other day, and Stealth… I can't quite remember what brought that to mind recently, but it's a game I've always loved. Or, perhaps more accurately, I always loved its prototype version, Landscape, which we had on one of our Big Box of Pirated Disks that everyone had back in the 8-bit era.

I haven't published any of the videos yet, but make sure you're subscribed over on YouTube if you want to see them when they go up. I'll likely put one up tomorrow, and the rest over the course of the next little while. I have my monthly trip to the office on Tuesday night to Wednesday this coming week, so that will be… fun, probably? I don't relish the long drive every time I have to do this visit, but it is always nice to see everyone. Unfortunately I don't get to stay in a hotel this time because the usual place I book was full up this time around, and the local Travelodge wanted £120. I'm not paying over a hundred quid to stay in a fucking Travelodge, particularly with how they've repeatedly fucked up bookings I've tried to make with them in recent months. So anyway. I will be staying with my parents and delivering my Dad his belated Father's Day gift, which I inadvertently delivered to myself instead. Whoops.

Anyway, videos are uploaded, eyelids are drooping and it's a school night so I guess I better get to bed. Enjoy the vids once they're up!

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#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.

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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.