I played this. I know I did.



ps-great site, by the way

*SPOILER*
















My workplace's Orwellian proxy is blocking the image's URL (because it has to do with games) but it's quite easy to cheat from the URL and guess that it's Space Harrier.

Or course, if I *could* see the image, I would certainly be able to identify it anyway. But my employer has denied me that privelege on this dreary Monday afternoon.

Sigh.

Agreed. Space harrier. One of those old Sega games. About the same time that Afterburner was also very popular. I never liked it very much. (both space harrier and afterburner)

D'OH! Duh...I should look carefully at these things. Thanks, though

Actually, I was just trying to identify a game I used to play on the C64... It's rather difficult to explain, but I'll try. The idea was that you were this parasitic robot hat looking thing. you fly around looking for another robot to grab onto. Here's where it get's strange. You have to try and flip around circuits to try to get more (fuses) to your color than the computer does. If you succeed, you take over that unit. If not, you get rejected, and hurt. Here's another bit of the puzzle. When you're flying around, you look like (000). That's 3 zero's with a circle around you. when you see a dumb robot, it'll be like (024). And a smart robot (721). You never actually SEE the robots picture unless you are actually taking them over, in which case there is a stat sheet on the right. Anyway, can anyone help me with these sketchy details?

Thx

Damn, never had a C64, but that game sounds pretty dope.

Yeah, that C-64 game rocked. It was called PARADROID.

I haven't played with my C-64 emulator software recently, I don't remember whether it ran well under the emulator or not.

Edit, wow, cool link here:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/paradroid90/paradroid90/download.html

Gonna check out Andrew Braybook's diary of the making of the game.

Duuuude... You da MAN! I've been trying to remember that for a year or so... The only other really cool C64 game I remember was Uridium. The really sucky thing is that I have all 400+ floppies in my garage, the C128, 2 1571 drives, everything. A couple years ago lightning struck somewhere near the garage, never hit anything, but apparently the magnetic field was enough to completely erase all my disks. The only things to survive was Choplifter and Jumpman Junior (they were on cartridge). And of course the fastload cartridge. -=Sigh=-

Anyway, thanks Tony! I'm off to download Frodo and Paradroid!

Duuuude... You da MAN! I've been trying to remember that for a year or so...

Aw shucks.

You guys know how much I am "into" the empeg? Well, in my late high school and early college days, that's how much I was into the C-64.

I learned assembly language on that thing. I still remember the day I grasped the concept indirect indexed addressing. And the first time I reverse-engineered a piece of self-modifying code. Wow, what an experience.

I've always said: Everything I need to know about computers I learned on the C-64. Including things like "The OS manufacturers always deny that there are bugs in the operating system until beaten over the head with it." Anyone remember the "Save-with-replace" bug on the 1541 disk drive? Commodore kept saying there was no bug with it, but users kept getting corrupted files. Finally someone (a user) found the bug, and it was because of some leftover code in the firmware that harked back to the days when older/larger Commodore computers had two disk drives (0: and 1:). I remember seeing the details of that bug first published, boy did Commodore have egg on their face that day...

The only other really cool C64 game I remember was Uridium.

Only? Man, there were a whole bunch of really cool games for that platform in its time.

Come on... Impossible Mission? Where you avoided the robots and learned their patterns, then you had to put together the maddnengly clever puzzles at the end before the clock ran out?

How about Raid on Bungeling Bay? Where the bad guys on the islands had an entire "economy" of sorts, and it was a juggling act trying to keep each of the individual elements (factories, shipping, etc) beaten into submission with bombs, or else they built up enough resources to build a battleship to come kick your ass?

And who could forget the original Sim City? Or Jumpman!?!?! Oh, the days I spent on Jumpman...

Okay, I'll stop now.

OK... It plays fine in frodo, except that the sound is messed up. LOTS of static.

Man, brings you back. It's also much easier with a joystick.

If I recall correctly, you can mess with a lot of Frodo's settings to fix that kind of stuff.

Hehehe...
My assembly code for C64 book is still on my shelf. As to the games, there were plenty of them, you're right. I can't tell you how many hours I wasted on Impossible mission. I never once beat it though. Not once. Ever. I think that's what I hated about it. I mean, I felt I was pretty good at it. I could run around, kill all the stuff, find all the pieces, but I could never quite figure out what I was supposed to do with them. I mean, do they make a picture? Do they make a solid rectangle?! Grrr... Ticks me off to just think about it. Jumpman was way cool. As was Beachhead. Ah, the Way of the Exploding Fist. Mail Order Monsters. Racing Destruction Set. Marble Madness.
There were in fact LOTS of cool games. In fact, I find that the games back then were better. The GAME part. Obviously, the eye candy wasn't there, so they had to make up for it with good solid gameplay. I mean, Loderunner wasn't pretty, but it sure was a hell of a lotta fun!

Hehe, remember on Sim City when you had that red piece of paper with all the codes on it to start the game? It was so deep red that it couldn't be potocopied. It was about that time when I moved on to the ol' Tandy.

but I could never quite figure out what I was supposed to do with them. I mean, do they make a picture? Do they make a solid rectangle?!

They make a solid rectangle. Several of them, if I recall correctly.

I think it only took four pieces to make a single punchcard. But you had to flip the pieces around and change their colors to make them fit. Clever!

The trick was realizing that each piece was the result of two "cuts" by a cookie-cutter style punch. You eventually came to learn what each of the cookie-cutter shapes were. One was concentric arcs, one was a tab-and-groove shape, etc. There were several of them.

The interesting thing was that the various cuts resulted in both parts of the shape, i.e., a positive image and a negative image of the cookie cutter. So a negative tab-and-groove combined with the positive concentric arc shapes would produce a completely different image than the reverse versions.

You guys ever listen to http://www.retrogamingradio.com/ . Shane the guy that does the show is a C64 nut.

Hmmmmm.... So that means 6 pieces per puzzle? I hate the thought that tonight I'll be playing that game again in the vain hopes of finishing it.

Honestly, never heard of it. I will give it a listen though.

Hey, on a completely unrelated topic, can I ask you to put some kind of separator in your signature, or make it a different color or something? Maybe it's just me, but I end up reading it like 10 times a day because my brain doesn't stop reading until it sees something that looks like a signature. Yours just looks like the final sentence of whatever you have to say.

Unfortunately, this BBS software doesn't have an option to insert a separator or horizontal rule in there, so most people here throw something in to separate it.

I know this seems really picky but it gets me every time.

Unfortunately, this BBS software doesn't have an option to insert a separator or horizontal rule in there, so most people here throw something in to separate it.

It's got an option to not see people's signatures though...

Peter

Except for those that include signatures in the text of their messages.

No problem.... Actually It was getting a little old anyway. At least this one is benign.

Splendid. Now I'll have to figure out something to do with the 5 or 10 minutes that'll save me in my lifetime.

I think making those two posts plus reading Lectric's response (and this one) already used that up.

No way dude, I type fast.

I can understand his frustration. I was having the same problem

All I can say is that at least we aren't one of those many specialty boards where people put giant pictures of the common interest in their signatures. That's just insanity



___________________________

LOL!

That's great dude.

Actually, while those are a hassle to scroll through (and I know the boards you're talking about) they're almost always big and flambuoyant enough that I don't get suckered into readiing them.

The main problem with my last .sig is that we're limited to 100 chars, and I had to tweak it a bit just to get it to fit.

Yeah, I think the limit should be raised to 255 or something. I had to tweak mine to get it to fit, because of the HTML stuff.

Hey Tony... Thanks for the tips. I was able to complete 2 of the 5 puzzles. Twice. One last question. What's the room with the checkerboard floor? I understand that to proceed you have to play the notes in order from lowest to highest, but I quit after 7 squares. Am I just not going long enough? Or is it pointless? Or am I just missing something?

Thanks for the tips. I was able to complete 2 of the 5 puzzles. Twice.

Heh, no problem. The trick is completing all of them before the clock runs out. Oh, and you also have to locate the entrance to the mad scientist's secret lair and get in there before time runs out.

Am I just not going long enough?

Correct. If you do it enough, you will reach the end of that screen. I don't know how many times it takes, though. I forget exactly what you get for your troubles. I don't recall if it's required to finish the game or not.

OK, I finally found the manual last night. Here's the deal. Apparently there are *9* puzzles that you have to complete. The room with the empty doorway is the entrance to the lair, and the room with the checkerboard computer gets you free passwords (lift resets or snoozes). Also, everytime you use the phone, it costs you 2 minutes, and every time you die you lose 10. 6 hours total.