Got my Amiga 500+ set up!

[Churchill]

Ah yes - Retaliator. The game with copy protection so good that even an original copy failed to load most of the time.

Did you work on any of the DiD games then?

Nope, purely setting up cross-development systems based on the environment we had at Ocean.

[NickFitz]

sparked up my Atari 520Ste about a year ago

fancies a go on Geoff Crammands Grand Prix which was cutting edge at the time and also some Microprose Golf

neither has aged well!!!

nastalgia ain't what it used to be.

A mate of mine did a lot of work with Geoff Crammond - he showed me Grand Prix about a year before it finally came out.

I crashed into the barriers (naturally) and a crane lifted my car off the track... but they hadn't defined the polygons for the crane yet, so it looked like the car was levitating itself

He also worked on Stunt Car Racer - again, I got to see that quite a while before it was finished

[chicane]

I crashed into the barriers (naturally) and a crane lifted my car off the track... but they hadn't defined the polygons for the crane yet, so it looked like the car was levitating itself

There were no cranes in the final version either! Despite this and numerous other faults, it was awesome for the time - way ahead of anything else available.

[NickFitz]

There were no cranes in the final version either! Despite this and numerous other faults, it was awesome for the time - way ahead of anything else available.

Wow, they must have taken that feature out - I thought it was pretty cool myself.

Perhaps you had to crash in the right place - somewhere you couldn't be recovered by other means?

Then again, it wasn't unusual in those days to cut features, either to squeeze into 512K at runtime, or to avoid the additional duplication costs of overflowing onto an extra disk.

[original PM]

yes interesting - IIRC there were cranes by the side of the track but yes when the cars crashed and needed lifting they did levitate obviously they decided the extra code required was not worth the enhanced experience

in fact I recall I had to set the track detail to minimum as I actually timed the lap times given against a real stopwatch - for full trackside details each lap took about 15 seconds more real seconds to complete (depending on the course being raced of course)

with minimal details the lap times were pretty much the same as real time.



I even upgraded my to 1 Meg so I could play Elite 2

double

[original PM]

also with respect to Stunt Car Racer i did buy the below for my C64

The Commodore 64 version was later modified for use without a keyboard. This version was in the Power Play cartridge together with Rick Dangerous and Microprose Soccer, released for the C64 Games System.

brilliant!!

no loading great games and graphics - turned the C64 into an early console

not quite as good as Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O Fun

[Grinder]

I spent many happy hours on Elite 2 - the 500+ came with I think 2meg RAM.

also with respect to Stunt Car Racer i did buy the below for my C64

brilliant!!

no loading great games and graphics - turned the C64 into an early console
[/URL]

When did that come out, compared to the Sinclair Spectrum Interface 2 (cartridge-based games) that I had? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Interface_2 happy days!

[original PM]

OOh at best it was 88/89 looks like the speccy beat them to it by a good few years!

didn't the vic 20 take catridges as well?

[gingerjedi]

I even upgraded my to 1 Meg so I could play Elite 2

double

But it never got better than the original vector GFX version on the BBC B with 32k of ram.

IIRC a new players rating was 'Mostly Harmless' in homage to Douglas Adams.

[Churchill]

OOh at best it was 88/89 looks like the speccy beat them to it by a good few years!

didn't the vic 20 take catridges as well?

It surely did! I remember having "The Count" on a cartridge and peeking the memory that the cartridge occupied to cheat!!!