When life was in 256 Colours...

[cpage]

hehehe I remember playing KQ5 on floppies
and seeing my parents play LSL (I was told I was too young to watch)
and playing Police quest

I started with 2 colours, as my first PC was a 8088 PC with CGA graphics on a Green monitor...

hehehe one of my teachers had one of those he let me fool around with it after school all the time.
tell me could you even play games on it really?

[n3tgraph]

oooh the balance and the influences.....

clever foes

my 2 eurocents:
I loved the old computer era, although I was quite young, but somehow I think that all this fancy technology isn't really nessecary. A great part is due to the games business.

although the technology rises, it also becomes more buggy and crappy like shit. In my DOS period, my computer never hung. Nowadays, every program runs at the same time and jams eachother up.

* N3TGraph looks at the icons next to the time.

The old atari's had a great sense of rhytme and just worked, my old cheesy keyboard hung to that and I made some great cheesy midi music with the first cubase. I feel sorry I threw away the atari.

Now I have the newest cubase and theres always something wrong with it. Then this doesn't work, then that doesn't work, error here error there

Aside from the errors, my new cubase has difficulties with playing real time and registers everything too late. The atari was always 100% realtime and never lagged or hung.

I don't get it
because the atari had like 5 mhz or something?
now with 2200 mhz it still isn't right. I just don't get it....

oh well...  

[n3tgraph]

hehehe I remember playing KQ5 on floppies
and seeing my parents play LSL (I was told I was too young to watch)
and playing Police quest

I started with 2 colours, as my first PC was a 8088 PC with CGA graphics on a Green monitor...

hehehe one of my teachers had one of those he let me fool around with it after school all the time.
tell me could you even play games on it really?

yesh,

We also had an 8086 pc without a harddrive,
it had 2 floppy drives (those very big floppies). One for the OS and the other for applications like word-like programs (damnit what was that name again) and games just like sokoban, digger, test drive 1, airborne ranger, calgames, sopwith, snake, pong etc etc

* N3TGraph pinks away a tear

[Nacho]

Well... I don´t understand the question very well... It is ambiguous, but I can say that I preffered games in 256, pixeled, without all that requirements. The games were simplier, smart, more addictive. Now, all they seem the same, quakes, aliens, predators, Matices... Shit, It is the same I feel when I see modern films... Have you seen "the Hulk"? I havn´t, but the images of the green beast are so unreal for me...

Yes... 256-colour time were better, IMO...

[cpage]

I really loved my 386 days
there were alot of fun games to play at that point in time

the 8088 was fun I think I played robotron for a while without it dying
it had a hard drive tho cause i remember you have to stop it so the arm doesnt scratch it. but I think I would ditch the 2 color for 256 any day.

I had so many fun times playing games on the 386 and 486 that its umbeleivable

and I also remember me and my older bro playing atari 2600 all the time
mostly joust and mario bros.

[PeaceMan]

I'd rather their new Pandemonium or whateverthehellitscalled system didn't automatically delete files that it finds offensive. One step closer to a 'Democratic Communist' era.

Yeah. If you look at the American government you will see it has things in common with Communist Russia.

There is a secret police force (CIA).

There is no free speech, (even though they say there is).

You can't speak out against the president without being accused of treason.  

Ha ha! I live in Europe! We'll stay free for at LEAST 2 months after you americans have been enslaved by your own government.

Heh me too.

[m0ds]

Or you could go even further back than the 386 and reminiss about Lemons

How many posters would you like to put up?

[FruitTree]

m0ds is right,
there's nothing wrong with having more colors,
the only difference is people get lazy.
aslong as you create with style there's nothing wrong with having more colors

[DGMacphee]

The atari was always 100% realtime and never lagged or hung.

It did crash though when a program didn't work.

However, I used the expression 'bombed out' because, instead of an actual error message, it would display a row of little bombs with fuses and the number of them corresponded to the error message.

[Helm]

and not only was I nearly as good as proffesional animators on Dpaint

Let's see that.

[Ben]

You can't speak out against the president without being accused of treason.  

That's not true.. If you're white. That's what bothers me most about post-9/11 America. We seem to be ignoring peoples' rights for the sake of "national security", which basically means keeping all the white people from getting upset.

However, I used the expression 'bombed out' because, instead of an actual error message, it would display a row of little bombs with fuses and the number of them corresponded to the error message.

Cool! I think Microsoft should do that. At least it would make crashes more fun.

[DGMacphee]

Or rich.

[rodekill]

Some of my favorite computer memories:

- Getting my dad to type a few hundred lines of basic code from a book so we could play a crappy game, and getting bored with it after two minutes. Here's the system

- Swapping between the six 5.25 disks between each room in SQ3. We had a lot more patience back then. Here's a pic of that system

- Booting up SQ4 for the first time on our new clone 286 and seeing glorious 256 colour graphics for the first time. I don't think anything has ever blown me away like that since.

- Booting up SQ4 on my friends computer with a Sound Blaster installed. We got one of those puppies within a few weeks after that.

- My friend getting kicked off of a BBS for completely dominating their Pimp Wars game. Bastards.

- Finishing the final project for our 'programming' class in high school while the teacher was talking during the first day. Don't be impressed.

- Having an intricate system of turning on/off lines in the autoexec file depending on what game I was trying to play.

- The internet while it was still 'under construction'.

[Meowster]

Mmm, games were a lot more creative. Lucasarts were producing loads of interesting and funny games such as MI and S&M, and the Dig also... and Grim Fandango... anyway... now they just produce a CRAP load full of Starwars ... for lack of a better word... BOLLOCKS.

On the other hand, I guess they ARE releasing S&M2 and FT2... on the other hand, AGAIN, no new material there  

And something I hate about recent games.... back in 256 colour days, they *sometimes* painted every single background with loving care... *maybe*. Now they just made a few 3D objects, throw on some eyes and legs, and call it a "Character". Or make a box with a few other, SMALLER, DIFFERENT boxes inside it, and call it a room.

Curse you lucasarts, Curse you and your crappy employees. See, you should have given Tim Schafer a raise when you had the chance.

[Scavenger]

Eh, I'm too young to remember CGA. Or even EGA. Though I had an EGA computer with DOS 2.0 on it, and 2 5.25" floppy drives. *salutes*
I remember playing my first adventure game: Simon the Sorcerer. Yes, I was spoiled in the retro game sense there, with glorious VGA graphics and 320x200 res. I was convinced all games were installed on all computers, so when I got home from my grandparents house (where I had first played it) I typed all these messages at my dos prompt:
CD SIMON
SIMON
SIMON THE SORCERER
CD/SIMON
A:SIMON
B:SIMON
CD.. SIMON

Bah. Little did I know that StS did not exist on 5.25" floppies, and even if it did, I hadn't put any disks in. The only games I had were Frogger, Digger, Tetris, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and many, many more EGA games. I even played Frogger soley with the A button. Later on, we got a 66Mhz Win3.1 computer with 256 colours. I played Chips Challenge on that one, as well as my second Aventure game, StS2. There were three more I watched someone play, and I instantly fell in love with them. DOTT, S&M, and Full Throttle. On my Win3.11 computer (133Mhz) I tried my hand at Delphi, Paintbrush, and other games. I remember looking at games in a shop and rejecting them because they were for Win 95. Ah, the perils of computers... and I only learnt most of the things I know about computers in the last two years.

[c.leksutin]

well, I remember the old days, hell, my familly's first computer was a rockewell 1086 with a SINGLE line led display that worked only on assembly lang.  then we went throught the normal gamut of 1088, 286, 386, 486 (dx whaterver) p75, p3 233, blah blah blah...  


and to tell you the truth, things are better today.  See, games Like BaSS and DarkSeed (you HAVE played DarkSeed RIGHT??) load up fine, then when I get bored of that, I load up one of my emulators and play some console games and after that I play Hitman and SoF in all of it's 3d glory.  

Sorry guys, I like where gaming is going, it leaves more of a niche market for us, and keeps me from having to only talk to Ut3k[clan]memberz.


C.

[Meowster]

I'm saying life in GENERAL was better in 256 colours, not just games. I remember it as sitting on a HUGELY oversize Bean Bag (Or maybe I was really small?) next to a real fireplace that lit the room up, trying to solve MI2 with my dad and brother (My dad later decided to become retarded so we left). Our tiny, crappy Sound Blaster speakers.... ah yes. We lived in a gorgeous cottage because half my brothers and sisters weren't born yet. There was this hill in the back garden... me and my brother constructed the COOLEST EVER GO-KART. We searched through a rubbish dump and found an old pram, so we uses the wheels on that, an old orange crate and some rope tied to either front wheel as steering. We used to tear down that hill, around the corner and into this kind of FOREST of "Chinese Knot Weed". In case you don't know what that is, it's gardeners hell. It spreads like cowcrap, and grows about 5 foot high. It's hollow and filled with liquid that can cause rashes, and it's very easy to break and grows in thick forests. It was twice as high as me at the time so it was great fun. We had a treehouse, and an orchard, and this weird kind of CELLAR in the garden that had a locked door that we never got a chance to explore because my parents sold some of the land to the building council so they could BUILD THE F*CKING MAIN ROAD THROUGH PART OF OUR GARDEN. Life was good the way I remember it.

Wow, does anybody else remember... Dr Sbatso (sp?)? He was like a doctor for the computer, you could make him faint by swearing?! Where can I get him!? I wanna talk to him again! AND THE TALKING PARROT?!???

Or The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes... I remember those graphics looking SO REALISTIC....

[Jimi]

Wow, does anybody else remember... Dr Sbatso (sp?)? He was like a doctor for the computer, you could make him faint by swearing?! Where can I get him!? I wanna talk to him again! AND THE TALKING PARROT?!???

Thats the fastest I've seen ANYONE go mad.

[Meowster]

I swear to god he was real, he was a computer psycatr...psychiastrist....(sp?) and he listened to your problems and suggested remedies in a COMPUTER VOICE. And there was a talking parrot! You said stuff into a microphone and his MOUTH MOVED. Soundblaster! I wanna download him again! I wanna download the obselete psychiastrist!!!!

[Jimi]

maybe you could try and make one?  

He sounds funny. Was his voice strange? Like he had no emotions?