Be Excellent To Each Other

When I was younger, I thought I could outsmart my computer.

I thought the more times I ran the 'fast' program (which was an executable provided for people who didn't have a turbo button to increase the processor speed) the faster it would become. This eventually reached an OCD-esque level of running 'fast' four times, and 'fast ultra' and 'fast mega' twice respectively. I was convinced this made my games run a bit better than just running 'fast' once.

I also thought that by changing the BIOS settings and telling it I had a bigger hard drive, it would actually give me a bigger hard drive.

I was stuck in Space Quest 2, and frustrated that I still wasn't on disk 3. DIR of disk 3 revealed three files, one of which was very obviously the game's data. I tried for hours to somehow run this file so I could start at the beginning of disk 3 (which later turned out to be Vohaul's asteroid). I don't think I ever thought of renaming the file as the first data file, though I doubt that would have worked either.

Incidentally, wasn't that the great thrill of old school adventuring? Walking into a new screen and being told to insert a different disk? Wow, we're making progress at last!

I couldn't understand why my CGA card would only let me play in one of the two shite palettes (orange, red, blue, green or cyan, black, white, magenta) but while playing around in BASIC I could make it display sixteen different colours of text at the same time.

When we got a new PC, I loaded up Dr Sbaitso (heh) and tried to explain what was going to happen to him. I even offered to 'save' him by copying him onto a floppy drive.

I really wanted to print the shuttle launch pad picture from Project Space Station (clicky) to colour in and hang on my wall. My dismay that 'print screen' only gave me the text was compounded by confusion - the printer at school attached to the C64 looked the same, and we'd been printing off all kinds of pictures from The Newsroom (gotta love the company name too, Ariolasoft).

The kid across the road tried to get his copy of Willy Beamish to work but failed - high density 5.25s didn't work in my low density 5.25 drive. He did, however, painstakingly reproduce all the nuts and bolts for the Search For The King copy protection for me.

I used to spend hours with my illicit copy of Indycar Racing typing 'the' and 'and' in, as eventually one of these would work. I memorized most of the Stunts! copy protection words. Another friend had to bring his dad's laptop over and install Laplink (remember that?) because his illict copy of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary had one file that was 7Mb and this was in the days before splitting a zip file across multiple disks.

I remember some girls in the school library trying to play King's Quest 3 and, frustrated by the parser being uncooperative, tried to talk sense into it. When it failed to understand this, they ended up telling it they didn't like it and, yes, eventually resorted to just swearing.

We had an EGA card with dipswitches on it, bought cheaply from the friend with the laptop. After hours of trying different combinations, we got one to work which alas would start the computer up in huge chunky text mode. After you ran a program, though, the C prompt would be back in normal size text. Later, we bought a knock-off Adlib card from a dodgy Chinese PC store. This would emit a blaring BEEEEEEEP when the PC was switched on, until a program used the card to play music. We ended up having to add the crappy music demonstration software included with the card to the autoexec.bat, so as to have it shut the damn thing up as quickly as possible.

Many was the time I tried C64 disks in a PC or Apple, and vice versa. I don't think I saw anything beyond gibberish on the screen until on a very old Mac Classic which at least recognized it as an MS-DOS formatted disk.

We were all delighted when someone brought their Master System pad in after noticing the plug was the same as on the C64's joystick port. Double joy when - yes - it worked!

When I had my Amiga a friend of mine offered to do me a copy of the 3.5" floppy drive cleaning disk that he had just bought.

I had to insert Disc 2 of Mass Effect 2 today. That's progress for you!

Used to haaate it back in the Amiga days, when, having bought a legit game with box and manual, every other Amiga owner I knew would ask about leaching a copy for free. Aggravating. (I think I was the only Amiga owner I ever met who had legitimate games.)

i had a fair few legal games, mainly budgets tho. Super skidmarks had no copy protection whatsoever, fyi

I used to think drilling a hole in the top left of a DD floppy disk would change it into a HD floppy disk.

Idiot friend of mine claimed his Atari STFM 520 was so called because it had FM quality sound.

I then explained in great detail how his ST had the same sound chip as the CPC and Speccy.

He then claimed it had 520 colours.

No helping some people.

Somewhat similarly, when I first saw a Megadrive, and its '16 BIT', I assumed you opened the circle, and put the sixteen bits of a game in it, jigsaw style.

I was all legal. Hated cheapskating pirates. Helped kill off that machine.

Idiots who believed the Jaguar was really properly 64 bit.

A mate who played on his Amiga in about 2 colours for a month or so because he'd somehow knocked the TTL RGB switch on the back of his monitor and hadn't realised. He was terrified to mention this to his parents as he thought he had broken it.

I drew him a diagram of what buttons to try and the next day he was very happy!

Confession time. Last week I was looking for the stupid little adaptor that goes from my logitech wheel's cable to the 360's USB port. I pulled the TV trolley out and had a look through the nest of cables in case it had got lost back there. On the 360's scart cable I noticed something I hadn't seen before, a little switch with "RGB" and "S-Video" marked on it. It was set to S-Video. And the S-Video DIN plug wasn't plugged in to anything. I changed the switch over and the picture got miraculously 400% better. OOps.

Anyone who bought a Jag at all, even for Tempest 2000, deserve scorn IMO. Even the people who bought a Jag for "only" sixty quid when Rumbelows was closing down. There was a console format that deserved its fate. (Heck, it's one machine I personally dislike more than the Sega Saturn.)

Nutcase who believed if you played computer cassettes on a normal cassette player, you'd ruin the game.

No SCART socket. That was fatal. (subs please check).

I was told about viruses that'd chew up my tapes, and was utterly paranoid about them.

Er, it did, didn't it?

Hurrah! I was right!

Yeah, the disks were the same - the DD ones just failed some sort of test during manufacture and were downgraded because they were a little less reliable at storing data at high densities, but if you didn't mind taking a chance with your files you could drill holes in them and convert them.
I even remember reading a review in PC Format (when it was good - so more than fifteen years ago) for some gizmo that did the job - a giant square holepunch thingy that some company had the gall to sell for fifty quid or thereabouts.

Don;t both a DD and HD have the read-only hole?



Also, I didn't understand that 95% of the games I had were pirated. I just thoght we had lots of Amiga games, and someof those came in boxes...

Also lots of other things but I can't remember them right now; hell I dbout i'll ever remember them.

They both had a read/write hole, aye. HD had one on the opposite side, too.

My mother thought the original shape Genesis/Megadrive already had a CD player, and that the large circular area with the cartridge slot was also the lid for the CD drive. Thinking about it, that's a pretty cool idea... until you try to shove a cartidge in while there's a CD in there.



I remember trying Trevor McFur In The Crescent Galaxy at Selfridges. Yuck!



This was compounded for me by the fact my dad was initially obsessed with the 'back up your disks!' warning in the manual, and so we had a huge stack of 'play disks' for all our games. When I needed to insert the original disk for the copy protection of, say, Thexder, I remember handling the original disk like it was the Turin Shroud.

What's worse than a 14 disk Monkey Island 2?

The fact that you have a dupe of each + 2 save disks :/

HEAVY BOX

I got Police Quest: Open Season on floppy. I think it was 23 disks!

When I first got my BBC Model B I got the Missile Command rip off with it and would load it from tape.

What I didn't know at the time was if you got a loading error you could just rewind the tape to when it fucked up so every time it failed I would stop the process, rewind the entire tape and start again.

Haha, I must have been playing the wrong games because I don't think I ever had anything that had more than 4 on the Amiga...

MI2 had 11 disks. I only had two floppy drives, so it was an interesting experience.

This thread and the one Chinny started about Amigas and LCD displays makes me wish I still had my Amiga 500. Not the later 1200 (which the family 500 was sold to pay for), which was by then a too little, too late underpowered competitor to the PC and Japanese games consoles, but the glorious 500, back in the optimistic days when the Amiga was the smartest thing you could realistically hope to own, and you didn't care how most of the games available were direct Atari ST ports because it had colour graphics and a mouse and proper stereo sound that didn't come from a buzzer.

It still nags you for the disc, even when you have both ripped to the hard drive, annoyingly. I guess that's to verify you actually have it, and may not be bypassable, but it's annoying.

My brother used to tell me that if you ever spoke out loud the name of the game you were trying to load on a Spectrum, it would fail soon after with the infamous "R Tape loading error." message.

Now I realise it was basically a ploy to keep me silent.

when I first got my pc, I was soooo protective of it, so much so that I used to turn it off after about 2 hours to let it 'cool down'. I had a monitor and keyboard dust cover and a tiny hoover for the keyboard. How things change...

When I worked at GAME and the N64/PSone/Dreamcast were the big consoles, I overheard a female shop assistant telling someone that a cartridge can hold a lot more information than a DVD.

I once believed that CDROM drives couldn't run faster than 4x else the mechanism would break free of its casing.

I used to use a program called Rocket to speed things up.

Dav. I have treated every computer and console I have ever owned like that.

It could if it was bigger

Sorry for the MP but I just thought of one of my more stupid computer moments.

When I was a kid (and I was very young at the time) I thought that if you recorded yourself screaming into a microphone and recording it to the sound of a Spectrum game loading that you might fool your Spectrum into loading a cool new game.

Thinking back I dare to think what my mother thought I was doing. I mean, sitting at a computer screaming DOOOO DOOOT. DOOO DOOOIOIOERIOIWEOIOREITORE into a microphone and then playing it into a computer

Edit. It didn't work ....

I refused to believe that a guy for CGW reviewing Journeyman Project on the Mac was right saying that he had a 'speedy Hitachi drive' which made no difference to the load times. CD drives can't be FASTER than others!!

I was later convinced that a CD-ROM drive 'slowed your computer down', citing the anecdotal evidence of a friend's computer which ran Scorched Earth like shit with all the weapons turned up to maximum (we're talking explosions consuming the entire screen). I have since decided this was down to the fact that they ran everything under Windows 3.1. They had tried to counter that CD-ROMs were in fact good, because listen to how good the horses clopping during the Software Toolworks logo for The Chessmaster sounds! Because it's a CD-ROM game! Even though it's just a .wav file that lasts five seconds! Yes!

My dad actually believed this nonsense I was talking and so we didn't get a CD-ROM drive until we bought a whole new PC.

I remember someone at Air Cadets (yes) came to sports night one week with his new PC, and he'd just had a new CD-ROM drive fitted. I dropped the disc caddy on the floor, you should have seen his face. Luckily, it survived.



I think everyone tried that. I remember a summer 'computing course' (read: give me mother some peace during the day during summer vacation) and at the end of it, the guy 'rewarded us' by telling us to type 'breakout' at the command line and, lo and behold, a terrible Breakout clone. I was convinced that all ICONs therefore had Breakout on them, and tried with succeeding for years every time I came across one.

My first computer, a commodore plus4, had built in buisness software. Being six, I had no idea what a spreadsheet was (and obv neither did my dad) so me and my brother spent hours investigating this mysterious feature with many cells for typing in.

Later, I had an Atari 800xl with game called Crystal Thief or similar. Once, it must have glitched when loading, making the player invunerable. For months after, we tried to replicate the glitch with little success

Actually, the Spectrum technically had better sound because it had the beeper as well. My mate who sold his +2 to buy an ST went NUTS when I told him that.

Actually if we're pedantic the ST did have better sound because it had more memory and could do DMA stuff with the AY chip. For a Speccy or CPC to play a sample pretty much everything else had to stop. Using the soundchip was basically a CPU drag which is why in some games that suffered from slowdown when alot was going on, the sound slowed as well.

Amstrad did fix this on the GX4000/CPC Plus by allowing full DMA sound. So the CPC could suddenly play samples with ease as the ST could. Check out Prehistrorik 2's title music.

It must have been '94 when we replaced the A500 with a shiny 486 with CD drive, and a whopping 4MB of RAM. As this setup clearly met the requirements for 'Theme Park', I could not understand why it moaned about a lack of memory when I tried to run it. Nobody had warned me about the 640k limit, and it took ages to work out how to write a boot disk to run it.

Hmm... whilst I think of that old box, I remember frequently deleting the Windows directory by mistake, necessitating wasted afternoons/evening reinstalling it, followed by all the applications and drivers.

When asked to assign the wrong type of data to a variable, BBC BASIC responded with the error "Type mismatch". The first time I saw this, I took it as an instruction.

I remember the first time I used a mouse (which were quite rare on home computers in the mid-80s) at my uncle's house. My cousin enthusiastically demonstrated drawing and DTP software. I was suitably impressed but vaguely wondered why the pointer on the screen moved in the opposite direction to the way you moved the mouse. After a while I turned the mouse 180 degrees and found it much more natural. My cousin was horrified and declared my way of using the mouse to be entirely wrong.

A friend had one of those special designer's mice that had a tablet/mousepad that positioned the cursor on the screen based where it was on the mousepad (so you could use to accurately recreate blueprints onscreen in CAD). Literally minutes of fun picking up the mouse, lifting it dramatically and placing it back down at a random place elsewhere on the mousepad and watching the cursor jump over to the new location.

This is awesome!

Also the inverse of this, watching someone who is new to using a mouse reach the edge of a desk and then panic because they've nowhere left to go.

I'd forgotten how much I hate that picking-up-and-setting-down of a mouse until I played MW2 on a PC back in December.

I don't have any such stories. I guess I learned enough from my elder brother so as to avoid such issues.

Theme Park was nightmare, as it wasn't coded to allow for faster processors, like my Pentium 100 (woo!). You had to be very careful not to run the pointer to the edge of the screen when drawing a path, or the screen would shoot over to the edge of the park.

I don't know if this is a competition, but I think Nik is winning so far.