Returning this thread vaguely near the starting point, fetes = summer, and I'm enjoying myself in the sun at the moment. I'm stuck at home on my own with the mutt, so can eat what I want to for the first time in months. Lsat nihgt I barbequed a whole mackerel, having first slit the skin and inserted lemon wedges on each side and into the belly cavity, and sprinkled pepper on it. It was delicious, and as I placed it in a boat of foil I caught all the juices to form a sauce to pour over the new potatoes I had done with it.

After then demolishing a bottle of wine I then strung the hammock up in the garden, dragged out my sleeping bag and the dog's bed, and we slept underneath the stars. Brilliant - and I only fell off the hammock once...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Skiffle: If you just want to listen to that tune, it's in the GTA\Music directory, and it's the one called track7.wav
I'm distracting myself from revision with GTA:Vice City at the moment, the soundtrack's all 80's 'classics', with different radio stations for different tastes in music. Also a station called KCHAT, a spoofed chat show, almost worth the asking price alone. The other thing you can do is bung some mp3's into it and it'll play them like another radio station, currently I'm finding the Matrix Reloaded soundtrack works really well for driving fast to.

I like slaughtering people to the music of Elgar (this works better with Halflife though).

A few years back we organised a game of Red Alert over the net, with two pairs determined to crush each other. Unfortunately our opponents talked abetter game than they played, after demolishing a bridge to protect their base they realised they'd stranded both harvesters on an island, and they had no cash to build anything. My co-general was determined to play safe and not attack, as we couldn't see what was going on and were convinced they'd hidden a huge army somewhere. I eventually talked him into attacking - but he first leant over and pressed play on the Hi-Fi.

There's nothing like ordering a load of tanks forward to the strains of 'Ride of the Valkyries', is there?



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

PSD - are you bored?

Must admit, there would be no better music than 'Ride fo the Valkyries' to go forth and conquer to.

Had an original 16k Spectrum and installed the memory upgrade when it became available. Never gave me any trouble at all, except that I fell in love with Z80 Assembly Language, which for a long time became practically my native language.

One of my contemporaries at Sheffield University never got out of the game and is still writing Z80, but now it's for modules that go to Mars in rockets.

Spectrums got less reliable as time went by. So much so that it became a done thing to take advantage of Sinclair Research's Freepost address by sending them a brick wrapped in brown paper through the post as a form of fiscal revenge.

I could never get my Spectrum to load 'The Hobbit' game from tape. Still have the copy of the book that came with the game though.

As far as I remember the ZX80 had a flat plastic keyboard covered in a shiny plastic film, the ZX81 had a hard plastic keyboard with a matt finish, and the Spectrum was the first one to have actual keys.

Actually, I've got a ZX Spectrum emulator on my PowerMac -- it even does the blue-and-yellow bands thing when it's loading a program.

So, it's a bit strange to use to computer that runs at 1GHz and has over a Gig of RAM to emulate a computer that had 16K of RAM and stored its data on a tape recorder, but nostyalgia is a powerful thing. I mostly use it for running the game Lords of Midnight -- which is still one of the best games I've ever seen. Anyone else remeber it?

There's a version that's been ported to the PC available on the net somewhere, I think . . .



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

I'm now going to bump this up to a little thing I noticed over halfway up the page (apologies to all)

Guy - you didn't happen to go to Warwick School by any chance? My brothers were taught by a Dr Frykman (we have a CD of the game 'Enrage Frykman' at home :D)



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

No I was at Roysse's in Abingdon (near Oxford) -- though I guess he might have moved on to Warwick . . .

Can't remember his first name . . . Gerald springs to mind but I think I might be making that up. What I do remeber is that he made Jimmy Hill look chinless.

Are you new here, Jo? If so, then welcome aboard (just been away for a few days and it's taking me hours to catch up with all these posts -- you have been busy little bees, haven't you? Anyway, it beats working.)



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

Lords of Midnight? Yes, and the follow up, Doomdarks Revenge. The latter, especially, took a great deal of time to 'beat', and used some remarkably efficient coding systems in order to create a vast play area. I date that at 1984/5. (Where is it again?)

Hints required, try my e-mail. I'll see if I can remember enough to be of use.

The Hobbit was more creative and less graphic, in many ways well ahead of its time. Knowing the book helped a lot, though the 'place too full to enter' was a puzzle never solved (or perhaps just a bug?).

I was particularly impressed (then) by the language handling, and the non player character behaviour.



Post Edited (06-18-03 13:12)

Lords of Midnight - brilliant, played that for ages on my Speccy.

The Hobbit - Thorin sits down and sings about gold - git!

I'm not exactly new here - I got pointed in this direction back in February by PSD when JFf was guest of honour at the convention I was organising. Sadly finals have meant an enforced absence from the internet, but I'm back in force now! :D

But thanks for the welcome anyway :)

Did anyone play the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy game? Brilliant, but incredibly frustrating



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

The HHGttG game from Infocom? Yes, I loved it, although it was frustrating as heck.

Look.
There is nothing to see here.
Look.
There really is nothing to see here.
Look.
Okay, there are a few things......

My copy (okay, it actually belonged to my brother) had a bug in it, so that it was unsolvable.

I got rid of my common sense, played with the circuit boards, managed to get both tea and no tea at the same time to convince the door I was intelligent enough to be let through, drank the tea, got a nice warm feeling, entered Marvin's Pantry, and STILL died of depression. Not fair!

I later played a friend's copy far enough to get past that point (and I was right, the tea WAS supposed to buffer me against depression), but couldn't get Marvin the right tool to open the hatch, so I never got off the spaceship, or got to do anything with all that fluff I'd collected.

And who could forget:

>Don't Panic.
A valliant effort. It fails.

>Panic.
Not surprised.

I also loved the sequence of events necessary to get the babel fish.

The frustrating thing for me was that if you didn't get something right at the beginning (eg the junk mail), you then couldn't do anything later on, and had to go back to the beginning and start all over again!

It took us *forever* to do - literally - about 10 years if my memory serves me correctly (we couldn't get the common sense partical due to using the wrong words)



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

Do you happen to remember how you got Marvin to open the hatch? I could only carry in one tool, and he kept saying it was the wrong one even if I restored and brought the one he'd asked for last time.

Ah - there you have the problem - you had to restore to before he asked you for the tool - the tool he asked for was always random, and if you returned to a point *after* he'd asked for the tool, the computer would make up a random one and assume Marvin had asked you for that one.



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

ah, the old games are the best. I remember Lords of Midnight, Doomdark's Revenge, The Hobbit, not to mention Tir Na Nog (I'm not making this up), and HHGTTG, though the latter I've only played using an z-machine emulator and the code erm, found, on the net. :-)

Isn't the internet wonderful?

Anyone play any of the level 9 adventures? Snowball was my fave - it had something daft like 2 million locations in it. Strangely 1,999,950 were the cold-storage chambers, differentiated by colour-coding on the doors.

Yes, I've got that on the emulator too. Brilliant. A stupidly fast machine with half a gig of memory playing an old 48k speccy game.

At least the download time was short *g*

I've got a nice speccy emulator hidden away somewhere :) Had to delete it from the computer coz I spent more time on it than on my dissertation, but I have the files still on disk somewhere. Hmmm... time to hunt them out methinks. I don't need sleep any more....

On a similar tack, we used to have an old PC game called Arak(I think?), where you were a robot that could transform into a giant spider thingy when it had all of its parts. You had to go around capturing creatures who would help you find these parts, and then go into a reactor to disable it. Does anyone else recognise this, and did anyone ever finish it? (we could never do the reactor bit)



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

not heard of that one.

Current favourite game is 'Day of the Tentacle' (well spotted PSD, my userpic is indeed the Evil Purple Tentacle). Hilarious, all about an evil purple tentacle who plans to TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

MWAHAHAHA.

He has the best evil laugh i've heard.