Be Excellent To Each Other

It's time for an Interceptor Software special!



First, it's Scramble 64.



The text on the back of the Interceptor Software games isn't as vivid as the rest of them. They mustn't have wanted to make any promises they couldn't keep. Smart move.

This is the first version of Scramble I've seen that provides a plausible explanation as to why destroying the enemy installations increases your energy. How about that!




Not the best title screen I've ever seen. Is this a real Scramble?

Controls are CTRL, C=, Exponent, *, RETURN and SHIFT. That's not a comfortable combo. It's difficult to press buttons on different rows of the C64 keyboard. It would be easier if it wasn't so deep. I've got to manually trigger the camera on top of this, y'know.




It took me a while to work out where the up arrow key was. When I saw manuals referring to the left arrow and up arrow keys, I began to wonder if there was a set of cursor keys I'd missed. Nope. The up arrow is exponent and it lives next to asterisk on the right of the keyboard. The left arrow lives in the top left of the keyboard and its function is to print a left arrow character on the screen in BASIC. That's all it does. When you're in BASIC you press the cursor right and cursor down buttons to navigate the screen. To move left, you have to press SHIFT + cursor right. To move up, it's SHIFT + cursor down. Would it have killed them to include TWO MORE KEYS? Spectrum +2's got four cursor keys!




You fly to the right. Some stuff flies at you. You shoot forwards or drop bombs. Accidentally knock the camera over for unbonus points.

What can you say about a version of Scramble with character-based graphics and scrolling, awkward controls and too little fuel? Oh right, you can say that it's bad. Even though the game proudly claims to be WRITTEN IN MACHINE CODE, I doubt that that's the case. I don't know anything about C64 games really, but I assumed that machine code games disabled the Runstop button and didn't produce messages like 'break in line blah' when you pressed it.

Scramble 64 is still head and shoulders above Word Wobbler, 3D Hypermaths and Bath Time given that it is A GAME. Not a game that I will ever load again after today, but a game nevertheless.

The Spider and the Fly.



There are lots of games with evil spiders in and not very many with good spiders in. This game pushes the boundaries of morality in gaming by making everything evil, immersing the player in shades of grey.

And "The number of insecticide can's increases."

CAN'S. TSK.




Or it could just be a crappy C64 game about a spider.

JOYSTICK CONTROLS! HOORAY! We've advanced past QW OP style at long last!




It's really an adaptation of Quantum. You draw lines as you move about.




Encircle moths in your line for accolades. Try not to let the 15 second long twinkly music box tune destroy you.

This is way harder than it appears. Everything on screen moves in short random movements. The moths can cross over your line, and you don't have much of a line before it starts disappearing. The hand tends to move towards you through its random movements. If the hand touches your line, you fall to the ground. If the hand touches you directly and you have no line, you lose a life.




Level 1 complete! Okay, I'm fibbing. This is about as much line as you get. I ended up running circles around the three of them and not capturing a single one. BAH.

I spent most of the game running around the outside of the screen trying to avoid the hand. The moths are really, REALLY difficult to catch. I had a go of Level 9 and it was the same except everything had sped up to 300%, including the music. It was not pleasant.

Spider and the Fly works better than Scramble because it uses the C64 properly: it uses the eight hardware sprites. It's slick. It's challenging. It's an arcade game! Hell, it's better than a lot of arcade games. Early arcade games really sucked.

I couldn't see a Speccy version of SatF looking this good... but it wouldn't necessarily become a worse game. Graphics don't make blah blah etc. Spectrum Jumping Jack was probably the very first game I ever played. It's flickery and it's weird, but it's difficult to best, even if it does use crazy controls.

These are great. Keep 'em coming!

Interceptor Micro's what?

Brilliant thread. It hardly showcases the cream of C64 software, but it's going to be closer to what most people experienced

It reminds me of when I was given my Speccy as a hand me down from an older cousin. He gave me the speccy, a crappy tape deck, one broken joystick, 3 years worth of YS* and about 200 games. I had no idea how to load games to begin with and was left to fend for myself. Exciting!

*Thinking about it, getting those YS back issues probably began the chain of events that led me here! Spooky.

BeEx FeEx.

Awesome thread! I now have the urge to go and dig some random hunk of junk out of my basement, connect it up and play crappy old games all day.

I don't think that's entirely fair.

Certainly a lot of early commercial Amiga games' music was a load of samples strung together (albeit quite cleverly a lot of the time), but pretty much from day one you had cracking crews putting some brilliant tunes on their loaders (a lot of which used only a few KB of RAM and fully utilised the Amiga's stunning 'Paula' sound chip), and also of course don't forget the demo scene, where brilliant musicians produced amazing music time and time again.

I see the Amiga's 'sound scene' as being very much an extension of the C64, and is all the better for it.

There's one more Interceptor game to go:



They really should have printed covers that fit inside the cases.

How evil is that car guy...



GRR. FROG.




This is a nice attract sequence. The letters flash in a pattern, there's a high score table with a cute frog sprite bouncing around and then it shows you the ingame graphics for a bit. It's like an arcade... But In My Very Own Home!




I don't know about you, but this sure looks like Frogger to me. The frog responds to the joystick (or the split keyboard controls), the cars and logs chug along the screen. It's Frogger!

No music. Perhaps they got the Spider and the Fly guy back again and then paid him to be silent.




The time limit is awfully strict and it's difficult to time jumping onto the logs because they scroll by characters rather than by pixels, but It's Frogger! Lookit, I won!

What? You mean I just play that level over and over again? Bollocks if I'm doing that again.

I've never been a big Frogger fan. Once you've played it, you've played it. It doesn't tend to get any more exciting. The best Frogger I can remember is Toado on the Amiga.

The most important thing about Frogger 64 is that it doesn't disappoint. Both Frogger 64 and Spider and the Fly are actual games that can be played and I expect they'd be my favourite games ever if they were all I knew. As it is, I was raised on (or by) Speccy Jumping Jack, Ghostbusters and Boulderdash Construction Kit and Amiga Rod-Land, Volfied, Bob's Bad Day and Wiz 'n' Liz, so I think I got the better deal. If I only had Frogger 64 to play, I'd have lived a completely different life as an author or an artist or something. A well-rounded, cultured person.

I played Gauntlet. In the dark. Alone.

I watched it load for quarter of an hour. Then I played a level. Then I entered the warp to cave 8. Then I had to wait for the tape to advance to cave 8 and load it.

All so I could tell the pretend people that live inside the big computer about it.

HEY GUYS, IT'S GAUNTLET.

It's not a bad Gauntlet, except Gauntlet itself is bad. Especially on your own. Multiplayer Gauntlet is a great experience. You get stuck in piles of enemies nobody seems to want to do anything about and you all laugh about how much you wish you had something to do that wasn't playing bloody Gauntlet. Gauntlet 2 is Gauntlet too. (I made a funny!)

If you find yourself about to play Gauntlet, on anything, don't. Go out for a walk. Especially if it's raining. It's wonderful out there.

I also played Monopoly. It's pretty similar to the Amiga and Spectrum Leisure Genius Monopolys, with one exception.



This Monopoly I won. Me versus one computer opponent.

I couldn't figure out how to initiate trades with the computer and the computer only offered ridiculous trades. So I just rolled the dice. Again and again. I got through it by pretending I was playing against a malevolent computer with the future of the human race at stake, like in that one story that Harlan Ellison likes to write over and over again.

I'm a quick monopoly player; I like to get my turn over and done with so other people can play. The computer player is not. Every action the computer does is made explicit so that the player knows that they're doing. This is especially gruelling due to the computer player's technique of blowing all their money at every opportunity. Because of that, every time the computer landed on my Trafalgar Square with no houses, I'd have to sit through COMPUTER DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY, CONTINUE PLAYING?, MORTGAGE?, MORTGAGE WHAT, MORTGAGE OLD KENT ROAD, COMPUTER IS MORTGAGING!!!, COMPUTER DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY... going through all of their weak properties until they had enough money to pay the rent. Then, when the computer goes past GO, I have to sit through them unmortgaging everything. It was worse when I started being able to charge rents over £100 because the computer has to sell their houses one at a time. I had to keep playing just to see if I'd win. And I did. And now I never have to play it again, because I won it. Lucky thing too, otherwise we'd all be dead.

I didn't so well at the chess game. Grand Master plays a mean chess. I mean I assume it plays a mean chess, I can't say I know enough about chess. I don't tend to think that far ahead when it's, y'know, just chess. It beat me, that's all there is to it. I don't know what settings I had it on, if it had any settings at all. It was the most basic, straightforward chess I've ever seen.

For some people, C64 chess programs is sirius buisness. If I ever start wondering which of the chess programs for a given micro are the best and planning tournaments for them, please cut the power to my house.

The cassette version loads in the levels 8 at a time , so if you didnt take the warp you would have got to play a bit more before the next load point

So I ordered that 1541 Ultimate 2 jobbie plus an extension that lets you load .tap files as well through the C64's tape port. All included, 165 frickin' euros!* But it will be worth it. The guy has just acknowledged my payment, so now it's just a matter of waiting until he get's round to me in the queue.

Unfortunately, that could take a long time (months, even, in the worst case). When it arrives, I hope I will have the time to collect my impressions and post them here.

* That's about £145.

Yeah, I too hate MrD.


Look at the colour of it! I made the mistake of lending this to a friend, who smoked, in about 1996. When I got it back several years later it looked like that.

Anyway, it still works. The disk drive cable is missing though, and I seem to have lost / thrown away all the tapes, apart from one Commodore Format cover tape still in the datasette. And sadly that seems to be a bit sickly and wouldn't load (I think the drive belt has perished).

It would still be Gauntlet, though. The game that replaced the classic 3 lives with an ever decreasing life counter and never enough health potions to keep it going, thus forcing the player to insert coins at regular intervals. Essentially, this was the video game that took the game out of video games, so to speak, and turned them into interactive rides, where you pay your money and get your 2 minutes worth. Which is something that doesn't make sense on a home version at best.

Huzzah!


Good GOD.


I didn't touch your computer!


And stick around on your pleb early levels? No thanks! I want ACTION!

The is mainly UV impacting on the fire retardant in the plastic.

Easily fixed:

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/

My Amiga was next to the window and the bits where the sun didn't hit it are much better. It took *years* for it to discolour. I'm talking 10 years after the initial exposure to the sunlight!

Is that a result of smoking? I owned my A1200 from new and the case was that yellow within about 8 years, and I've never even so much as held a cigarette

LISTEN TO WHAT I AM SAYING!

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/file/view/after_eight_hours.jpg/57063738/after_eight_hours.jpg

Before and after "retrobright" treatment.

Huh. Everyone on EAB was a brilliant genius, it turns out!

About ten year ago I had a lead (I may still have it) that had a PC parallel port connector on one end and a C64 disc drive port connector on the other. A free piece of software sent d64 files to the C64. The lead cost about £10-£15. I hope that the above does more than this...

Well, for one thing computers don't have parallel ports any more.

If it doesn't have a parallel port, it's not a computer.

As I said it was ten years ago... I'm no technical expert but I thought a USB connector instead of a parallel one wouldn't be beyond reason. The Ultimate thingy seems a pretty comprehensive piece of kit but you're going to have to get some use out of it for that price.

EDIT: Seems I still have it, I think. That is a 1541 connector isn't it?

You can buy a card easily for about £15. Parallel is still used in many industrial applications as is serial. Indeed a piece of industrial equipment that costs half a million quid may have a 20 year working life. I've been in factories where DOS, OS/2 and NT4 are in used as part of the control mechanisms embedded within them.

That C64 adaptor seems quite pricey considering it cost slightly more than it cost to upgrade my Amiga to a solid state hard disk, and to put an accelerator in it with 64 meg of RAM.

Yip thats it - I mentioned the connecting to a parallel port a while back



oh and another alternative

http://www.manosoft.it/?lang=en

(60 euros plus shipping)

So how would I go about getting one into my MacBook Pro, then?

Just kidding, it's a luxury item, that's for sure, and I wouldn't buy one unless I already knew it will see plenty of use.

And it's a standalone kit as well, no dependence on any particular other hardware or OS. All you need is a micro SD card and a way to get files on it.

And it's just nice, so shut up, and stop bringing me down.

Sorry I missed that. If minkboy or someone wants the lead they are welcome to it - if they can get some use out of it. I'm not likely to us it again.

I already have a cable like that, I think, somewhere.

I used it to transfer my personal stuff from my real C64 disks to D64 files. That was probably around 10 years ago as well. Even back then there were problems with a new standard of parallel ports and I had to go to the BIOS to disable the newer features in order not to screw up the precise timing needed to communicate with the C64 (or something like that). AND the software only worked in DOS as well, because Windows couldn't provide exact timing either. At least that's how I understood it. All in all it was a major hassle then, and I can only imagine it would be a lot worse now.

MrD has now added this to his forthcoming Parallel Cable Museum.

People have tried that treatment on discoloured/yellowed Transformer toys(!), and the results unfortunately aren't permanent. The plastic eventually rediscolours, on some occasions within in a matter of months.

No treatment will be permanent as the plastic will continue to react with UV light. But only at the same speed it yellowed to begin with.

However I haven't heard any reports of people treating computers saying they are discolouring that quickly after treatment. You can only treat ABS plastic. I'm not sure a toy would need the same kind of flame retardant that causes the yellowing to begin with. The whole point of manufacturers using that type of plastic was to stop the plastic bursting into flames if the machine/PSU overheated.

Never really known much about C64 stuff... never heard of a DTV certainly, but this mod looks rather impressive.

It does - although a little pricey - DTV is basically one of those 'games in a joystick things but it has a C64 on there and people have hacked it to allow it to run more than the limited number of games it came with - i think it was around £10 / £15 new

I've a couple of DTVs knocking around. I wish I knew someone who'd do mods relatively cheaply (colour fix and reflashing the thing with a personal selection of games), but the last I knew, someone wanted well over $100, which is a bit out of my price-range. (Note that I'm not suggesting people should do the mods for piss-all—it's fiddly work.)

It's time to kicktake this up a notchgear. I've bought myself a top of the range, very expensive, second hand, base model, cheap as hell DVD recorder. No more propping the camera up against the C64 and manually taking pictures at the same time as playing the game for me!

Except when I tune it into the C64's signal I get vertical rolling, even when I pass the signal through a VCR. Back to the camera it is.

Tonight, I'm going to play 'a totally original game for C64 featuring outstanding graphics and a sound track created by a professional Piano Wizard'. I can safely say that I've never played a game like this before.

It's...


Yes, it's Jeff Minter presents Jeff Minter's Hover Bovver by Jeff Minter. I bought it more or less accidentally. Nobody chucks working tapes on my watch.




Ta da!

I wish I were a Piano Wizard. It sounds exciting.




The eighties were a simpler time, it seems. Gordon's a flash bastard with sixteen lawns but no mower, so he calmly heads off to his neighbour Jim's wide open garage and takes his one without a care in the world.

In the background we've got a pleasantly obnoxious arrangement of 'English Country Garden'. Real background music that's more than a few notes long! That is new!




Let the games begin!

Hover Bovver is a bit like Pac-Man. You have to mow all the fuzzy tiles of long grass while avoiding both the dog and the neighbour. I'm really, really bad at it. I'm finding it hard to tell which part of my sprite is where I turn around. I think it's the mower part.

These camera shots aren't working very well with these vivid colours. I wonder what it looks like monochrome.



If the neighbour gets you, you instantly lose a life and Gordon has to go back and get another mower. Thankfully, the tiles don't completely reset or any nonsense like that.




Somewhere along the way I exhausted my supply of Dog Tolerance, causing the dog to run after me constantly. If the dog collides with me, my Mower Overload goes to full and I'm immobilised for several seconds. More than enough time for the neighbour to kill me.

I'm in a bit of a pickle. Gordon runs really slow to start and picks up speed the longer you run in the same direction. This here is perhaps the only situation where I can use this to my advantage and outrun the dog.




Gordon's walk isn't so much a 'walk' as it is a 'thrash'. He looks as if he's suspended by his shoulders and his legs are free to dangle around beneath his body.

I'm on to my last life already. Jeez...




I've got the hang of this now. The dog and the neighbour are jammed behind the impenetrable hedge, leaving me free to mow the remaining tiles of long grass and complete the level.

This looping arrangement of 'English Country Garden' was very nice at first, but it's starting to get a bit old now. I'm glad to not be left here in silence but I'm not convinced that the tune wasn't designed to slowly liquefy the victim's brains. Such is the wrath of the Piano Wizard.




If I hold the fire button down, the dog goes after the neighbour, keeping them both off my back temporarily, but I'm out of Dog Tolerance so quickly that the dog's back in less than a second.

And I'm dead.

Nice one, Gordon. You've alienated yourself from everyone you know and none of them will ever give you the time of day again, never mind let you borrow their mower. Your lack of morals has poisoned your community and everybody starts locking their doors, not talking to each other in the street and generally being miserable.

And then they get tired of that and just kick you out. They worry for a couple of minutes that THEY ARE THE REAL MONSTER, but then they figure out that they're really not and have a great old time without you.

One more go?




OH MY GOD THESE CUTSCENES ARE UNSKIPPABLE.




Damn it. It keeps happening. Without any Dog Loyalty, I can't keep the dog away. And I'm dead. Either I don't know what I'm doing or this game is really, really difficult. Perhaps there's some kind of slick manoeuvre that I don't know about where I can keep my speed while going round corners. If not, then I have no idea.

One more go?




Fire space up down left right run/stop restore F1 F3 F7 F5 enter




Level 3! I turned the music off... is that cheating?

I'm still not getting very far here. The game's rules are consistent, so I'm going to blame the creaky joystick that I got with the C64. This game demands absolute precision and I can't do that with this joystick.

IS IT FUN? It's like Pac-Man except I'm not used to it. And you can't really hide behind things or have epic chases or exploit patterns. So... not exactly. It's a perfectly functional game and it would probably make a good highscore battleground, but I'm not really into it.

On the atari version at least when your on the cutscene if you hold down the fire button your guy runs rather than walks so the cut scenes are much shorter.

Also when I first got this (it was pirated) someone had hacked into the game and replaced the normal text with other things , like when you accidentally hit the dog with the mower instead of the 'oh dear' type thing it said "Sh*t i've muzzled the F*cking dog" , which for the 12 year old me made it one of the best games ever :-)



You want to be taking long runs at things so you get your speed up , and you should be using the dog attack as just a 'tap' which makes the dog advance twards the neighbour while making him veer off (holding it down is a bad idea) , also if you can - avoid the flowers because then the parkie will come out to chase you.

C64 to composite SCART leads can be had on Ebay. If it's a later C64c you can even run S-Video. But given the age of your games I suspect you have a proper breadbin with composite only.

I really can't be arsed faffing around with UHF. It looks nasty and modern LCD TV's really hate tuning to things such as my Atari 7800.

http://www.iphonefreak.com/2010/10/fume ... racer.html

Spotted this earlier today - I'll have to give it a go as the video looked pretty good.

Be warned: Fumes Stunt Racer was fucking awful when I tried it. Maybe it's improved some of late, but the feel of the game was horrible.

The levels aren't really big enough to get a run up properly. I don't even try going over the flowers because the gardener is pretty much instant death for me. The only way I got any use out of the dog was to get the neighbour hooked around a corner, but that's really difficult.


Yep, composite only. I have some cables that can get the composite out, but I haven't tried it because the DVD recorder doesn't seem to like 'artificial' signals (when I put it through the VCR, it liked playing the tapes, but it didn't like the fullscreen set up interface for tuning the channels).

As I've run out of C64 tapes, I've been focusing my efforts on writing a game of my very own. How hard can it be?

As it turns out, not very hard at all.

Presenting...



Legendary 1985 puzzle game Twinz!

Y'know... Twinz...?



How can you not have heard of it?!?!?! It was written in an afternoon in DarkBASIC by a crazy guy who's since disowned it and it only works on Windows and only then sometimes a challengetastic DOS puzzler!

You have to catch your evil twin!

Controls are IJKL to move your guy, R to restart the level if you get stuck and Q to return to the title screen.

Features over eight levels of challenging puzzles to solve!

Complete all the levels for a reward!

Also features a remix of the original Twinz soundtrack!

You should just be able to put the PRG into Vice's 'autostart disk/tap' option and it'll do its thing. Might only work on PAL C64s.

Play Twinz for the CBM 64 today!

I'll come back to this, but

Friends! Internet strangers! Good news!

The X-COM funding panel has reviewed my progress and found it to be satisfactory.

USA, RUSSIA, UK, FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, SPAIN, CHINA, JAPAN, INDIA, BRAZIL, AUSTRALIA, NIGERIA, SOUTH AFRICA, EGYPT and CANADA are particularly happy with my progress in dealing with the local alien incursion and have agreed to increase their funding:


OPEN THE BOX! TAKE THE MONEY! (Shouting this at funding meetings gets you kicked out.)



That's a lot! And I have to play them all. Eventually. Maybe. I don't know if I'm going to write anything about these games given that they're real games and you've probably already seen them before.

Until then, don't forget to read Super Adventures in Gaming every day! Cat face on a post is your guarantee of value!

What's that sneaking around in the bottom left corner?


It's this week's C64 challenge game Ghosts 'n Goblins!

Or, according to the spine, Ghost 'n Goblins. They hadn't finalised the contract with all of the ghosts at the time of printing, so they decided to play it safe and only indicate a single ghost. (Ah, but, etc!)


Voila! It's working!

No emulators, no special cartridges, no cheating: just me and the game. Will I succeed? Of course not. It's Ghosts 'n Goblins.


This is the furthest I've ever got in GnG. Those damn plants are too good for their own good. I only got this far by being a super gung-ho hero and never waiting around or going backwards. These first two screens are probably the hardest part of GnG for a long while.

You've got the flying gargoyle, the raft bit, the ghosty droppy guys, the end of level boss which is probably impossible without armour-loss invincibility frames and then...


Level two! Or three! I have no idea! I'm further thanRay and that's all that matters.

I immediately start heading right and fall off a jump that looks makeable but in fact isn't. You have to go up and left, then up and right and then fall onto it from above. This jump from above isn't easy because you tend to land on the 'next' platform instead of falling between the crack between the two in the right way.


Land the jump and you end up here. I don't recall what kind of enemies are here... I think there's things that drop stuff on you.


A house full of ogre monsters that turn to face you when you're on the same level? No sweat! Hammer the fire button to batter them with lances that stun for a couple of frames. Get hit by a bat? YOU SUCK!

Now there's several moving platforms... geez. When I land on one, they move higher, so the timing is difficult. I'm starting to run out of time at this point. Luckily, there's armour up ahead and I can defeat the end of level boss using the invincibility frames! Yeah!


Still in a state of utter shock, I arrive on this stage with moving cloud platforms. While I'm standing on one, a second platform arrives from the right and pushes me off into the abyss and I'm dead.


For my fourth or fifth go, I think 15500 is a very respectable score.

My original plan was to cheat and hang around the starting area killing skeletons to get my score up. I couldn't tell when and where they were coming up, so I kept getting hit like a fool.

Many thanks to Craig for his awesome cable. Finding a compatible computer and figuring out how to get it to do aught was an adventure in itself. A fun adventure!

Anybody played Twinz yet? Play Twinz. PLAY TWINZ.

I like this website.

I wrote about this for Retro Gamer a few years ago—it's still, surprisingly, a decent basketball game.


Don't bother with this on tape—waste of time. The disk version's an interesting insight into programmed AI and 'pet digital things' though.

I agree.

i'll play twins tonight (if i still have power 64 on my macbook, and it's a universal binary..)

Looks like a nice haul you've got there MrD - plenty of decent games there, assuming the C64 versions are on a par with the Speccy ones. Who Dares Wins II in particular was a very good variation of Commando.

Is it Konami Ping Pong? I remember that being a cracker.