yuppicide Posted January 13, 2010 Share Posted January 13, 2010 I remember my first PC.. 286 compatable. I found it in the back of Computer Shopper (back when they were a HUGE catalog like thing and not the stupid little magazine they are today). I remember back in the 80's or 90's Shareware was all the rage. Every place carried those cheap disks and you could get a bunch of games for only a few dollars each. These would be floppy disks with typed labels on them. Everything from games to cooking utilities, etc. One game I used to enjoy was a detective game. I remember it used ASCii characters from the keyboard and possibly ANSi. I can't totally remember. I believe you moved a smiley face around the screen. You had to solve the mystery in only so many moves or time. I believe you could die somehow, but I kind of forget. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted January 13, 2010 Share Posted January 13, 2010 I remember my first PC.. 286 compatable. I found it in the back of Computer Shopper (back when they were a HUGE catalog like thing and not the stupid little magazine they are today). I remember back in the 80's or 90's Shareware was all the rage. Every place carried those cheap disks and you could get a bunch of games for only a few dollars each. These would be floppy disks with typed labels on them. Everything from games to cooking utilities, etc. One game I used to enjoy was a detective game. I remember it used ASCii characters from the keyboard and possibly ANSi. I can't totally remember. I believe you moved a smiley face around the screen. You had to solve the mystery in only so many moves or time. I believe you could die somehow, but I kind of forget. If you used it to push pieces around a maze it might have been Sokoban. I've never seen the original ASCII version though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CGQuarterly Posted January 14, 2010 Share Posted January 14, 2010 I can't help you with your question, but my best friend and I used to LOVE reading those old computer shoppers. Those things were HUGE!!! You could knock someone out with one of those. I remember us reading an issue and being surprised that hard drives were geting so cheap that they were almost down to $1 per megabyte. MEGABYTE!. Considering that $100 will not buy you a 1 terabyte drive, that means that they were 10,000X more expensive when we thought they were getting cheap! Did that magazine even have articles, or was it nothing but ads? Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yuppicide Posted January 14, 2010 Author Share Posted January 14, 2010 Sokoban is not a detective game. LOL! This game was like Clue.. you had to solve a murder. You walked around in a house if I remember.. drawn with ASCii or ANSi characters. There was a few rooms like kitchen, living room, etc. I think there was a secret door. I like Sokoban, though. I used to have Boxxy Boy for my Turbo Grafx. I remember my first PC.. 286 compatable. I found it in the back of Computer Shopper (back when they were a HUGE catalog like thing and not the stupid little magazine they are today). I remember back in the 80's or 90's Shareware was all the rage. Every place carried those cheap disks and you could get a bunch of games for only a few dollars each. These would be floppy disks with typed labels on them. Everything from games to cooking utilities, etc. One game I used to enjoy was a detective game. I remember it used ASCii characters from the keyboard and possibly ANSi. I can't totally remember. I believe you moved a smiley face around the screen. You had to solve the mystery in only so many moves or time. I believe you could die somehow, but I kind of forget. If you used it to push pieces around a maze it might have been Sokoban. I've never seen the original ASCII version though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yuppicide Posted January 14, 2010 Author Share Posted January 14, 2010 Far as I know, no articles. I loved Computer Shopper. I'd always look for good deals in them. They were probably 300 - 500 pages! I got my first 286 from a local company in there. It was a company that manufactured computers, not selling to public, but they agreed to let us buy one. It was in a office type location. I went to get an 8086, but they sold us a 286 since they had just come out. I think I might have had 20MB storage lol. Like 1MB ram or some crap. Cost my Dad $1500! I can't help you with your question, but my best friend and I used to LOVE reading those old computer shoppers. Those things were HUGE!!! You could knock someone out with one of those. I remember us reading an issue and being surprised that hard drives were geting so cheap that they were almost down to $1 per megabyte. MEGABYTE!. Considering that $100 will not buy you a 1 terabyte drive, that means that they were 10,000X more expensive when we thought they were getting cheap! Did that magazine even have articles, or was it nothing but ads? Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seob Posted January 14, 2010 Share Posted January 14, 2010 my first pc was a 286 clocked at 12.5 Mhz with 1mb memory and cga graphics and a 3.5" diskdrive. My first box of 10 hd disks my dad bought cost a whopping 45 euro. Remember buying 720kb disks later on and melting a hole in the case, so the diskdrive thought it was a 1.44mb disk, so you could format it that way. Later i bought a 256kb vga isa card for around 45 euro and had the money to buy the display for it one year later. Later bought a adlib sound card and a broken 40mb hdd that you still could use as a 30mb hdd by making partitions around the bad spot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted January 14, 2010 Share Posted January 14, 2010 I totally missed the part about it being a detective game. LOL Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seob Posted January 14, 2010 Share Posted January 14, 2010 (edited) Is it this game: Sam Spade detective Edited January 14, 2010 by Seob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted January 20, 2010 Share Posted January 20, 2010 Seob probably already guessed it... but if you like that kind of game, you might want to look into the ZZT and Kroz series, as they use very similar mechanics, and were quite popular at the time. You might also be interested in MegaZeux (Unfortunately, their website seems to be kind of screwed up at the moment). It's basically a modern, fan-made engine for creating such games... though it has much more advanced features such as higher colour depth and actual music support. Some of the games that the community has made for it are very impressive. --Zero Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S1500 Posted January 20, 2010 Share Posted January 20, 2010 Back in the days, there were quite a few games being made with IBM's extended ASCII characters. I remember one where you did play as the smiley face in some Rogue-like game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yuppicide Posted June 23, 2010 Author Share Posted June 23, 2010 (edited) By the way, I did recently locate the game. Sleuth for DOS. Man, these days I suck at the game. By the way, this DOS game rocks: http://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-game.php?gid=MTA3Nw== Rockstar.. you are in a band, you make music videos, gig, make albums, tour, do drugs, rest, go on vacation, etc. Pretty fun. My friend had a #1 hit song called "Do Me In The Dumper". Edited June 23, 2010 by yuppicide Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CGQuarterly Posted June 23, 2010 Share Posted June 23, 2010 I'm going to check that out. I love text-based games. LOL @ "Do me in the dumper"... Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
potatohead Posted July 21, 2010 Share Posted July 21, 2010 There were some articles in Computer Shopper. Don Lancaster was often worth the issue. He dove into lots of fun stuff. His articles on Postscript as programming language were intriguing and educational. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
youki Posted July 21, 2010 Share Posted July 21, 2010 By the way, I did recently locate the game. Sleuth for DOS. Man, these days I suck at the game. By the way, this DOS game rocks: http://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-game.php?gid=MTA3Nw== Rockstar.. you are in a band, you make music videos, gig, make albums, tour, do drugs, rest, go on vacation, etc. Pretty fun. My friend had a #1 hit song called "Do Me In The Dumper". hey, i remember that game, i have it on my PC XT in 1984. But at this time i didn't mastered English (not even really today in fact.. but at least i can read!) so it didn't really played. It think i played also at the game called ROGUE that was ASCII as well. I made big progress in English by playing at King Quest 1. I searched all words in a dictionnary. ... arf... good old time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Gemintronic Posted August 3, 2010 Share Posted August 3, 2010 (edited) I never knew the name of the game. Good work hunting that down! I vaguely remember being irritated by a turn limit/time limit but it's been a LONG time. We're talkin' Tandy 1000 long time! Wasn't my favorite but not bad by any means. Somehow or always got put back into the disk drive Edited August 3, 2010 by theloon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HollowPoint123 Posted August 31, 2010 Share Posted August 31, 2010 (edited) Throughout my early career I used to aquire games (copy2pc was a very good command) but one ascii game I loved (and still do) was called 'Sprites', no idea who produced it as it's only a single exe file. Basically a scolling maze game (up and down - you ony saw a 9th of the maze at any one time) with portals placed in various locations and coming out of these were little retangular faces. They would make there way around the maze. You had to guide your self (a big face thing) around and shoot this liitle things (before they shot you) and try and destroy the portals - the higher the level the more portals. Great fun as you could be concerntrating on destroying a portal and a sprite from another would come up behind you. Don't forget the old text adventures from infocom like the Zork series and HitchHilkers. S'pose they could be called ascii games as they only used text characters. And...the ulitmate keyboard killer (and when ibm keybaords used to cost £80 a peice) though not an ascii game was Microsoft Decathlon. Edited August 31, 2010 by HollowPoint123 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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