When I Was Just A Little Boy 7
Computer Games
To be exact, there wasn’t much feature of the computer when we were young. I was lucky as my dad got be an IBM PC 8086 XT with 20MB HDD and 1MB RAM (I remember hacking it to figure out how to utilize the “hi-mem” i.e. memory space beyond the famous 640KB that Bill Gates declared was more than enough for anything).
Here’s an example of gaming devices for my age:
Western Bar – basically a multilevel shoot-the-bad-guy game.
Super Mario on Nintendo (of course you know)
But also, on the PC, I did have a good time with Dig Dug, King Kong, Space Lander, and, interestingly, Nobunaga’s Ambition.
Of course the version I played was not as colorful and advanced. It was, in fact, monochrome, but the battlefields was already hexagon, and the number of parameters for a young boy to manage was substantial. It was a great optimizing exercise (much like how one would start doing calculations for Earth 2025) and conquering all of Japan can take months.
Another PC game that I played on the XT was Space Quest 3 (oh I love that astro chicken mini-game inside, if you know what I’m talking about mp3). There was a bunch of games like that (King Quest, and later Final Fantasy) but I couldn’t get my hands on them, so eventually the interests died off. But a story where you learn about thermal underwear, new vocab like “incinerate” (Roger Wilco was a janitor), and literally seeing how one could make such a complex graphic on my CGA (3 colors) monitor was thrilling to say the least! A lot of these thinking, of playing and then thinking how the system would be created, underlies the thinking I had later in university.
I loved Alley Cat, and a variation of Dig Dug called Digger. I liked to press the ‘Turbo’ button on my XT when my bro was playing, it changed the clockspeed from 8MHz to a whopping 12MHz and Digger went crazy.
lol… Now even handphone like n82 has 300mhz++ cpu, 128mb ram and max 32GB memory card. I can’t imagine how those old perform job.
Bill was actually misquoted… he never said 640k was enough for anybody.
oops! guess i’m perpetuating the misquote then 🙂 but it was really hard to get the hi mem thing right in CONFIG.SYS so that my games could run better..
Oh ya Alley Cat – but I can never control the cat!! I end up listening to the music played on a monotone speaker…
Oh man! Western Bar… I beat that cowboy game till the score had to go back to 00000.
And space quest!! Roger Wilco!! Haha.. that’s a classic.
What about Prince of Persia?
I guess that counts. 🙂 Coz later in form 1 or form 2 I got a 486, which was what I played prince of Persia, romance of 3 kingdom, sim city, etc. (ya I know that time you still in primary hehe) these games means something else already coz time and energy was spent on band. It was more a release of frustration and having a sense of control (playing games you always win) rather than the world of it’s own. Dunno if you sense that.