Twixt_fanatic

If Google's Deepmind can (in a sense) reverse engineer the old game Breakout from looking at how the pixels on the screen behave, maybe it's not inconceivable that some future program can look at how an online game behaves and where and when information is transferred, and will derive a free open source client and server from that, which may use a different low level approach, but will provide close to the same user experience. So if you are willing to accept ANY improvement over the existing situation, the vague notion that things get better in the future (from the user's perspective) might cheer you up.

Are there other boomers out there who remember how easily amused we used to be? The Motorola 6809 CPU ran at a blazing 0.9 MHz. There was a double speed mode available, but few users knew about it, and most games could not adapt to it, and were impossible to play that way. With just 32Kb to work with until the 64K and later 128k CoCo 3 models came out, creativity was called for, to save time, space, and to keep the user interested. A lot of games failed miserably, but there were notable exceptions. I got a 512Kb upgrade from a third pary vendor. I learned a lot about assembly language with all the weird addressing modes of the 6809 and switching in and out banks of memory with just 16 address lines. There's a Java emulator downloadable at https://www.haplessgenius.com/mocha/ with some good games preserved. My favorites include: Buzzard Bait was a Joust clone. You had to keep flapping your wings. A great way to get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The King was Donkey Kong. This was also Tom Mix software, who could be depended on for decent quality. Tut's Tomb another "go through one screen after another of mazes, collecting good things and shooting bad things" thing. Fourcube 3D tictactoe with a rotating board and several features including demo mode and the "faircube" option which causes the computer to make a sub-optimal initial move. I wrote it and Tom Mix accepted it. Cashman a decent clone of Jumpman. Draconian 2D shootemup. This would put me in a trance for hours. Sadly missing from the emulator is Fangman, a Pacman clone with the twist that you are Dracula and you must collect bats and avoid the evil humans.

It seems this thread started out as an example list for users who want to post in the Obscure PC Games forum, but then users posted their games to this thread instead of as separate posts to the forum. Nevertheless, it might be useful to pin some examples at the top of the forum. This thread is on page 2. Or did I miss something as usual?