Wed, 19 Mar 2008
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i've been feeling nostalgic lately for the computer games I played as a kid. my parents bought an apple iigs in fall of '87 or '88. i was already obsessed with sierra's 'space quest' from the box i had seen on the shelf at our local radio shack. someone had supplied my (very excellent yet geographically distant) older sister with intelligence and, very quickly, I received a surprise copy of the game.
my family stumbled into the computer upgrade game very early on; earlier, i think, than any of us cared to. space quest would load as far as one screen, one flicker of the interior of a spaceship, before crashing. It turned out that out brand new computer needed both more memory and a firmware upgrade to run the game. but once those obstacles had been cleared...
i poured over that game. even with the limitations of sierra's 'agi' programming system, i was challenged by every new puzzle. i explored and stared through the screen at the simple landscapes for what must have been hours. at first it was just to try and move through the game. as time went on, i began to imagine an entire world inside the computer and i yearned to explore it. my brother and i enlisted our babysitter to help us solve the particularly sticky puzzles, but what i really wanted was not to complete the game. what i wanted was freedom to explore the world of the game beyond the limitations of the puzzles and the storyline.
others from my generation who felt the same way are now making massmogs like world of warcraft, attempting to create limitless game worlds.
at any rate, i felt like playing space quest again the other day. i still have the iigs, but it's in a box 2000 miles away in my father's basement in maine. so i had to come up with a software option compatible with my macbook pro.
agi studio continues to allow folks to build their own late-80s sierra-styled games, but it's not for playing them. scummvm has added some agi compatibility to its already awesome scumm powers (allowing you to play not only sierra agi games, but also many of their spiritual descendants from lucasarts).
but the best source for the apple iigs versions of old games is the apple iigs gaming memory fairway and when i get to looking at all of that wonderful digital memorabilia, i realize that it's not enough to just play agi games. i want it all, and that means an emulator.
when i was in college there was a fantastic and only-slightly-buggy shareware emulator called bernie ][ the rescue. it made everything super-easy and it worked well. i even bought a serial number for it. sadly, it's not really supported any more and major overhauls in both macos x and mac hardware have rendered it inoperable on my current machine. Its successor, sweet16, has not matured as well as i would have liked, either. so i'm using kegs-osx. aside from an inelegant interface for choosing disk images, it's working well.
and i'm having a good time.
[/bithead/games/nostalgia] permanent link - comments (1)
it is.
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Testing to see if Blosxom is really that easy.
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