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Showing results for tags '1980s'.
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Here's my list of recommended 1980s arcade video games (with Gauntlet marking the halfway point in the decade): TRON Centipede Defender Space Fury Galaga Tempest Missile Command Battle Zone Donkey Kong Pac-Man Mr. Do! Gaplus Mr Do's Castle Burger Time Ms. Pac-Man Robotron Crystal Castles Moon Cresta Dragons Lair Stargate Frogger Phonix Gorf Jungle King Pengo Pole Position Elevator Action Pole Position II Tapper Punch-Out!! Spy Hunter Bag Man Tutankham Time Pilot Krull Venture Satan's Hollow Zaxxon Black Widow Sinistar Tac/Scan Zektor Turbo Armor Attack Food Fight Space Wars Subroc 3D Star Castle Super Pac-Man Firefox Donkey Kong Jr. Millipede Jr. Pac-Man Time Pilot '84 The Glob Mappy Regulus Paperboy Super Cobra Carnival Mouse Trap Star Jacker Mega Zone Space Odyssey Bump 'n' Jump Orbit Blaster Popeye I Robot Roc'n Rope Scion Track & Field Vulgus War of the Worlds Space Dungeon Phoenix Bosconian Pooyan Future Spy Wizard of Wor Rampage Marble Madness Starforce Eliminator Kangaroo Gyruss Scramble 1942 Two Tigers Dig Dug Juno First Star Wars Joust Moon Patrol Qix Turtles Front Line Strong X Berserk Exerion Cosmic Avenger Gravitar Discs of TRON Astro Blaster Frenzy Star Trek Omega Race Asteroids Rally-X Q*Bert Congo Bongo Q*Bert Cubes Asteroids II Star Force Vanguard Vanguard II Major Havoc Xevious Gauntlet Gauntlet II Armored Scrum Object The Empire Strikes Back Ghosts 'n Goblins Green Beret Metal Soldier Isaac II Gradius/Nemesis Section Z Space Harrier Terra Cresta Bubble Bobble Darius Gladiator Ikari Warriors Outrun Rampage Rolling Thunder Rygar Side Arms Spelunker Victory Road 1943 Ajax Alien Syndrome Bionic Commando Black Tiger Blazer Contra Double Dragon Galaga 88 Heavy Barrel Karnov Pacmania R-Type Shinobi Terra Force The Ninja Warriors Time Soldiers Tiger Road Twin Cobra Xenophobe Xybots Altered Beast Assault Cabal Operation Wolf Cobra-Command Double Dragon II Ghouls'n Ghosts Image Fight Last Duel Mirai Ninja Raimais Scramble Spirits Shadow Warriors Silk Worm Sky Soldiers Super Contra The New Zealand Story Truxton Turtle Ship Twin Eagle Vindicators Vulcan Vunture Act Fancer Arbalester Blast Off Burning Force Dangerous Seed Darius Darius II Dyger Escape from the planet of robot monsters Galaxy Gunners Gigandes Golden Axe Gradius II Gradius III Hellfire Ikari III Klax Legend of Hero Tonma R-Type II S.T.U.N. Runner Saint Dragon Search and Rescue Shadow Dancer Strider The Astyanax The Next Space U.N. Squadron Volified Night Striker Omega Fighter Pang Plus Alpha Top Gunner/Jackal Rambo III Arkanoid E-SWAT Battle Shark Tetris Ninja Spirit Fighting Hawk Forgotten Worlds Chelnov - The Atomic Runner Armed Formation Rainbow Islands Gemini Wing Afterburner Afterburner II Xain'd Sleena Tiger Heli TwinBee MX 5000 Blasteroids
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We should have a thread dedicated to advertising of our beloved classic games, computers, consoles, etc. We can share television commercials, print ads, circulars, etc. I'll start us off with this Commodore 64 television commercial. I remember seeing this commercial on television that touted how amazing of a gaming machine the Commodore 64 was. Of course, if those kids came knocking down the door at my house, I'd call the cops.
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I have no idea how to make a game out of this, so just went with the title and theme. For now, the theme falls apart towards the end into random data. I might fix that later. family_ties_intro_0.1.bas.bin family_ties_intro_0.1.bas
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Aside from the neat cross-over between classic computers and synths with people like Bil Herd and Bob Yannes, I find it interesting to see how some of our favorite CPUs crop up here and there in the music industry. So I started making a list of synths and samplers that made use of various old-skool CPUs. To start things off, here's a list of what I've been able to find so far. Feel free to correct any errors you might spot: Roland Jupiter 8 Z80 Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 & 10 Z80 Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 Z80 Roland MC4 Z80 Ensoniq EPS-16 68000 E-mu 4060 Z80 Roland MSQ700 Z80 Oberheim OB-8 Z80 MemoryMoog Z80 Emulator I and II Z80 Akai 2700 Z80 E-mu SP-1200 Z80 E-mu Drumulator Z80 Sequential Circuits Drumtraks Z80 Fairlight CMI series II 6800 Fairlight CMI series IIx 6809 Oberheim Xpander 6809 Oberheim Matrix 6809 PPG Wave 2.x 6809 PPG Waverterm A 6809 Ensoniq SDP-1 6809 Ensoniq ESQ1 6809 Ensoniq SQ80 6809 Fairlight CMI series III 68000 and 6809 Quasar M8 6800
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My name is Robert Anschuetz. Together with my brother Eric Anschuetz and friend John Weisgerber, we wrote 3 Atari BASIC games that were published in 1985 in Antic magazine (Kooky's Quest (Feb. 1985), Overflow (July 1985), and Robot Dungeon (Nov. 1985, Antic Disk Bonus). In addition to these three games, we also submitted and sold two games to Compute! Magazine that were never published (Kooky Klimber and Night Rescue). We also wrote several other games that were never offered for publication. We are now releasing all of these games to the Public Domain with the hope that the Atari 8-Bit community will take a look at them, and perhaps they can be added to the Holmes or TOSEC archives for preservation. Again, these are not new games, but they are new to the Atari 8-Bit community. Many of these games really pushed the envelope at the time for what could be done in Atari BASIC, including bi-directional smooth scrolling, assembly language subroutines, parallax scrolling, cut scenes, attract modes, display-list tricks, interleaved-displays, etc. In conjunction with the release of these games, we have written a short article that describes how we got together as a team to write these programs, along with game instructions, and development notes. This article gives a really good insight into what it was like in the 1980's to discover the hidden programming secrets of the Atari computers during many late-night programming sessions. All of these games were written for an Atari 400/800 with 48K RAM (most run with less) and BASIC. An Atari 800XL configuration should run all of these games with no problem. Each game is saved to an individual ATR file, which also includes an AUTORUN.SYS that automatically runs the game at coldstart bootup. One note, after the games start, almost all of them require a lengthy initialization process. Even after the "Press Start to Begin", some require another minute of initialization before the game actually starts. As part of this release, we updated one of our old games called "Alien Assault" because it only ran with a cassette system. It now works fine with a disk. Included in the zip file are both versions. We are also re-releasing a 2017 version of the game "Robot Dungeon" that was originally published as an Antic Disk Bonus in November 1985. The original game had 3 levels of 400 rooms. This newer update cuts the size of the levels way down and makes the game winnable (the cut scene at the end is worth seeing!). The user can create mazes of any size from 5x5 to 20x20. The ATR comes with three 5x5 levels (25 rooms per level) (use the filename D:DUNJIN.DAT to load the maze). We have also added a cheat so you can walk through interior walls and not be killed by monsters. Attachments include the "Anschuetz/Weisgberber/Anschuetz Atari 8-Bit Programming Saga" as well as a zip file containing all the ATRs that can be run with an emulator. Again, remember to have BASIC turned on and Coldboot to auto-run these games. And be patient during initialization! We hope that you enjoy this release of "new old stock" games! And if anyone can submit these to the Atari repositories, please do so! Sincerely, Robert Anschuetz / Eric Anschuetz / John Weisgerber Atari 8-Bit Game Programs - Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz.pdf AWA ATR Floppy Disk Images.zip- 22 replies
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Last week, Eric dug deep in his attic and found boxes of Atari stuff that has been hidden away for 30 years! Included were hundreds of pages of hand-written A/W/A game notes, more correspondence with Atari 8-bit magazines, and some 5 1/4" floppies that were still usable after all these years. One of the disks was really warped and unreadable, but Eric had to perform disk surgery to extract the media from within the protective disk cover and insert it into another disk that wasn't quite so warped. We had to wait for a serial to USB cable to arrive so we could use our old SIO2PC to dump the games. I have updated the document covering the Anschuetz/Weisgerber/Anschuetz 1980's game development. I have added a change history so you can see what new sections have been added. There is quite a bit of new stuff, some related to the newly discovered games we uncovered in the attic boxes. I have also attached a separate game development notes document that has scans of hundreds of pages of game development notes, code, and bit-mapped graphics. These are organized by game so you can compare the development notes to how the games turned out in the other document. I have also attached a zip file with 3 ATR self-booting BASIC disks with 3 games that were found on Side B of some of the 30 year-old-disks. These games are Phoenix, Piracy, and Ramses' Revenge. Ramses' Revenge is really worth taking a look at. It takes a minute to initialize, and is meant for two players, but it can also be played with one player (you'll just always win!). These three games were some of the very first that we wrote within a couple months after getting our Atari 400 and teaching ourselves BASIC in 1982. Phoenix was literally our first game and was written within a couple weeks of getting our computer while trying to learn to program. Hopefully you'll enjoy taking a look at this peek back into the history of Atari BASIC game development from the 1980's! Robert Anschuetz Eric Anschuetz John Weisgerber Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz v3.0 - Atari Age.pdf Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz - Development Notes.pdf AWA Disks.zip
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A game that never made it to the NES was one featuring the California Raisins. The game was specifically titled The California Raisins: The Grape Escape. Before we go on, my fellow 80s children should remember the Raisins. If not, I'll explain. Back around 1986, the California Raisins were created by the California Raisin Advisory Board (yes, such an entity existed!) to raise awareness and sales of raisins. Many commercials ran that featured anthropomorpized raisins singing and dancing to old Motown hits like "I Heard It Through The Grapevine". The irony was that the California Raisins completely failed at boosting sales of raisins but became a merchandising phenomenon. There were comic books, toys, assorted merchandise, hit recordings and even a Saturday morning cartoon that ran for a single season in 1989. There was going to be a video game released in 1990 for the NES. It was developed by Radiance and to be published by Capcom. It was a side-scroller similar to Mega Man; you could choose to take any of the first four levels in any order but had to complete each one to advance to the fifth (and final) level. You played the raisins and had to collect music notes while shooting grape jelly beans at your enemies. This game was advertised and even reviewed in magazines so it was nearly complete. I even owned one magazine and one NES strategy guide mentioning the California Raisins game. It is a shame that the plug was pulled; this looks like a fun game. Anyone else familiar with this title?
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Kids versus a Game Boy, Vectrex and other 80's tech | Ars Technica Vectrex @ 03:53 https://youtu.be/UGFisjhfnvw?t=3m53s [/ebay]#Vectrex -
I know this has been done to death, but I have to set the record straight. Numerous documentaries and books (even L. Herman's Phoenix) state that the video game crash of the early 80s was caused by too many games on the market. This is false. The second thing to address is the year of the crash. Some are quoting it as 1982. From the perspective of the consumer, this is also false. Perhaps some developers began to suspect the bubble was about to burst at the time. The truth is that the general consumer public didn't feel the effects of the crash until 1984. Reasons for the crash: Primary: Home consoles and arcades were slandered by the media. The focus shifted to computers. Video gaming never stopped. Instead of playing at the arcade or on a console, the majority of gamers played on their home or school computer systems. Secondary: The economic recession and rapidly rising interest rates. People were paying over and above 18% on their mortgages in the early to mid-80s. Consider how this and the energy crisis affected the amount of real disposable income (not to mention investor income). If you were going to spend money at that time, it was no longer enough to purchase an item purely for entertainment. Instead, it needed to serve more than one purpose. I.e. integrate home and office (generate income), educate (build a future), and finally -- entertain. Enter the rise of the home computer. Once the economy recovered and interest rates dropped, people could again begin to look at consoles. Hence the rise of the NES, Genesis, etc.... http://www.fedprimerate.com/wall_street_journal_prime_rate_history.htm
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Hello Atari 8-Bit Community! We were inspired by the many kind responses about our Atari BASIC game development document, our newly posted 1980's Anschuetz/Weisgerber/Anschuetz Atari BASIC games, and our Antic Atari Podcast. For those that missed it, here are the links: Forum post with Atari BASIC game development document and 1980's Atari BASIC games: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/268424-1980s-anschuetzweisgerberanschuetz-basic-games-release/ Antic Atari Podcast: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-297-robert-anschuetz-eric-anschuetz-john-weisgberber-antic-magazine-games In this post, we are uploading version 2.0 of the Atari BASIC game development document. This version enhances the original document in many paragraphs, and also adds some new and very interesting sections to the document. This version includes our original 1980's type-written (we didn't have a printer) instructions and programming notes that were submitted along with our BASIC games to Antic, COMPUTE!, and A.N.A.L.O.G. Perhaps even more interesting, we have also scanned the correspondence letters from these magazines for programs that were accepted and rejected for publication. The table of contents indicates these new sections (Development Notes pages 46-71, and Magazine Correspondence 75-91). These are scans from documents that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1980's! Thanks go out to John Weisgerber for saving all of this information for the past 30 years! We are still trying to dig up the old design notes and the graph paper that we used for character bitmaps! They are probably in the attic, closet, or basement somewhere. We hope you enjoy these new additions. Robert Anschuetz Eric Anschuetz John Weisgerber Anschuetz-Wesigerber-Anschuetz v2.0.pdf
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This is a 2-hour downloadable MP3: http://www.voltage-control.com/Brig/aud/Owen-Rubin.mp3 Originally broadcast on the Arcade Outsiders podcast on allgames.com Just adding the page on which it resides, in case your web browser's player is keeping you from accessing the download option: http://www.blitter.com/~nebulous/arcade02.html
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Greetings all. I'm new to the forum, and bringing you a bit of sad news which some of you may have heard already. Steve Morgenstern (Captain Steve), the editor-in-chief of Atari Age Magazine in the 80's, passed away last month from a heart attack at age 50. Steve was my fiancee's father. He continued working in gaming and tech journalism after Atari Age ceased publication, writing for Rolling Stone, Popular Science, Playboy, Cigar Aficionado, AARP and others. A very cool guy indeed. My kind of guy. Fun, witty, geeky, charming, and endlessly, encyclopedically knowledgable about games, movies, TV and music. It's a tragedy that he passed away so young.
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