Most of mine don’t work anymore, either, but that’s what Arnold and emulators are for.
Since my last computer upgrade, I’ve had trouble getting emulators to run at proper speeds. Additionally, it’s tough to find roms of all the games I had.
Besides, it just isn’t the same as using the original hardware.
I’ve never tried it but there is a way to hook up a 1541/1571/1581 to a PC serial port. One of the emulator companies offered a special cable for this.
So, someone in here made the argument that THIS is the Golden Age of Computer Gaming. If so, what would we call DOS? The Iron Age? Is the Commodore 64 and it’s contemporary bretheren the Bronze Age, and using tractor-feed printers as the output for multiplayer games on university mainframes way back in the day the Copper Age? 
But if you did, it would interfere with your internal modem, which was on IRQ5. I eventually decided to set the modem to Com2, IRQ3, and disable my Com2 port. This was effectively the same as having an external modem plugged into Com2, but I didn’t have to use an AC adapter, which left an outlet on my 6-outlet strip open for the AC adapter on my speakers.
And what about 6-outlet strips that didn’t have AC-adapter spacing, like is standard today?
And AT-class chassis and individual 44256 and 41256 RAM chips that had to have the pins straightened before you could plug them into the mainboard?
And 65w power supplies with big red switches?
Man, that was a long time ago…
I think I tried IRQ 7 for a while (man, that SET BLASTER brings me back!) but that may have led to the problem I ended up having where my video card conflicted with my sound card AND my mouse driver at the same time.
All my power strips are old and none of them have spacing. I didn’t assemble my own computers back in the days of those RAM chips, but I remember being thoroughly befuddled at the lack of big red switches. How do you turn the computer off properly without a big red switch?
And the sound of the drive heads going nnnrgh when you turn the computer off.
I remember playing a text-based Star Trek game on our high school’s Apple ][ about 1981.
My first computer was a Commodore 64, and my first game was Zork III. I later got Zork I (which wasn’t nearly as interesting), and I still have an original copy of Ultima III on 5 1/4 floppies for the C64 in the original box with the cloth map and the spell books. I played it until my “X” key died, and I could no longer dismount my horses.
My favorite game was called “Archon,” which I can’t find my copy of anymore, but I would love to play it again. It was a sort of chess game where the pieces couldn’t just capture each other: they had to fight. Plus, the squares changed color, which changed the strengths of the pieces that were on them. Plus, the “kings” had magic spells. Plus, it made cool noises that were really funny when you were young and chemically altered (hypothetically speaking, of course).
I tried typing in a few of those games from magazines, but no go.
I never got any of those magazines with game code, though I think Boys’ Life used to have one from time to time. I think I tried typing one in once and then gave up.
I remember my C=64. About a week after it was out of warranty I was hacking it to add a second SID chip for stereo sound. Someone had written a jukebox/music composer app that supported the stereo sound hack so I spent many hours listening to it.
ETA: I think I still have every issue of Compute! in a box somewhere.
Speaking of the magazines with programs in them, does anyone remember the books that had programs too? I have some vague memories of kids detective books that in order to solve the mystery you had to run the program.
The game I liked best was Montezuma’s Revenge. I think I’ve tried running it on a mondern machine at it’s way too fast.
I’m troubleshooting a problem on one of our intrusion detection sensors. Right after boot-up, it prints:
kernel: Disabling IRQ #225
kernel: Disabling IRQ #185
Took CS 105 as a freshman at UofI in 78. Vaguely remember spending hours in the computer labs on a text-based D&D type fantasy adventure game. As well as typing Fortran code on punch cards…
I certainly wouldn’t call this the golden age of computer gaming. Almost every PC game considered great nowadays is a port of a console game. The only “PC only” games I can think of that are really popular right now (and using “right now” very loosely) are the Civ series, NWN2, The Sims (anyone still play that?)
I’d consider this the golden age (maybe silver age*) of console gaming. Bioshock, Halo 3, Guitar Hero/Rockband, the Wii being immensely popular, and so forth.
*One could make the argument that the early 90’s, when we had the NES still going strong, the SNES being just released, and the Sega Genesis the golden age. I’ve also heard the argument that the early 80’s before the NES with the Atari 2600/7200, Intellivision, etc… was the golden age, but IMO it crashed way to soon to be important. The NES/SNES era combined was over ten years…Hell, the way it sequed nicely into the N64, PSOne, X-BOx, PS2, and so forth, one could say the golden age of console gaming never ended.
I typed a few of them, but I also ordered disks, for a couple of bucks, with lots of games on them. Far better use of my time.
No doubt from Ahl’s book of BASIC games. I translated that one into Pascal and ran it on our PDP-11 in our lab when I was in grad school. It was the standard test case for our operating systems research. I made a few improvements as I went along. Did your version have the lifeboat? I think it was Faerie Queen in the official version, but I changed the name to USS Titanic.
I’ve made a couple of unsuccessful attemts of porting a baseball text sim from C64 BASIC to PC.
Gets up on his hind legs and puffs out his chest to make him appear bigger and more intimidating to the other nerds
I’d also consider the Half Life series of games (Half Life, HL2, Team Fortress, Counterstrike, etc.) on the list of PC games currently considered great.
And didn’t Bioshock come out on PC at the same time that it came out on the 360? I remember being vaguely amused when I found out partway through Basic Training that they were releasing BioShock (descended from the nigh-legendary System Shock series) on a console.
That said, at this point, it’s probably relatively pointless to draw a line between PC gaming and Console gaming, especially when you have weird beasts like the XBox and the XBox 360 which are themselves built at least partially with PC parts (my XBox has a modified Samsung 16X DVD-ROM drive and a 160GB IBM Deathstar IDE hard drive). I suppose one could just consider it a general Golden Age of digital gaming, with the consoles finally able to run the same games as PCs with few practical limitations.
Anyhow, just you wait. Once Duke Nukem Forever comes out, PC gaming will be king again!
True, and I see your point on the lines blurring with things like the 360. But I still stand but my comment that we are in no way in the golden age of computer gaming. I think that golden age was late 80’s to mid-90’s (probably the golden age of gaming as a whole, since as said that’s when the NES was still popular, and the SNES and Genesis were booming.) But games like X-Wing, TIE Fighter, the Wing Commander series, flight sims, the classic Sierra adventure games (King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory (originally called Hero’s Quest but Sierra was sued by a board game company already using it,)) Doom, Quake, Marathon for our Mac friends, etc…
Truly a great time to have a nice PC. I, OTOH, had a 386 (not 386 MHz, mind you, but 3x86 (i think that’s what it means…still not MHz, maybe kHz?) with 4 MB of RAM running DOS 5.0 (maybe 4.x?) and Windows 3.0. I could still play TIE Fighter and Doom, but at the lowest as fuck graphics rating, memory manager boot discs, no sound, and still choppy as Hell.
But man, I loved it!
And then some idiot killed the power to the TRS-80 Model 1 and you had to start all over again!
Taping notes to computers “DO NOT TURN OFF” (yes, tape. This was before post-it notes children).
Ages of computer gaming (please edit, but this is how I think of it):
Mainframe age: Zork, Hack and the Starfleet one using ASCII symbols off of a terminal
Floppy Age: DOS, C64, Apple II games
Cartridge Age: Games go to consoles, competes with Floppy
CD age: Games so large the must be on a CD. Golden Age of PC gaming?
Console Age: CD based console gaming - The Playstation
On-line age: No more beating the computer, now you fight with humans