So yeah, it’s FREE over on steam! Get it while it’s HOT!

Classic Marathon on Steam (steampowered.com)

It”s that time of the year again, where if for some reason you haven’t played Portal 2, you can get everything for less than the price of Portal 2.

Other classics on sale include KOTOR (STAR WARS – Knights of the Old Republic), and KOTOR2.

Seriously its a great deal!

So I’d been sleeping under a rock and missed the whole Epyx last last year had put a bunch of games onto steam! I’d just been talking to someone about Impossible Mission as I had no idea what was going on in the first one, but as a kid I’d actually beat Impossible Mission II! Oddly enough the Summer Games & Jump Man Jr are absent, perhaps some long standing deal elsewhere. But at prices between $12 & $28 ($1.55 & $3.61 USD) I was hyped and bought a bunch.

I was curious which system would they be for? Commodore 64? Atari 400/800? Commodore Amiga or ST?

Turns out there was an IBM PC version. I never knew, but back in ’88 I was still using my Commodore 64, and everyone else I knew had either an Amiga or Atari ST. School had those QNX machines but that was just a big missed opportunity from everyone an everything.

The steam/PC version. .. is certainly not right out of the box. As you can see from the box it supports CGA/EGA/Tandy/VGA-MCGA. And it’s configured for EGA by default. Strange, as the MCGA/VGA is the best of all platforms with it’s 256 colours. However here is where it falls flat very quickly is that back in ’88 they didn’t code for that big thing last year, the 1987 AdLib. Ooff! Even worse no IBM PCjr audio (same as the Tandy) either.

So yes it’s glorious PC SPEAKER. Yuck.

Turns out they are all PC versions. Well except for Impossible Mission which is ‘remastered’… And honestly it’s not that good. It’s super laggy. The javascript version is MUCH more superior.

What went wrong?

The Cinemaware Anthology: 1986-1991 managed somehow to get an Amiga emulator that boots up from ROM disks and is so transparent it’s easy to forget there is any emulation.

So let’s use 7zip and rip it apart!

10/11/2014 10:29 pm 402,960 .bind
10/11/2014 10:29 pm 19,962,368 .data
10/11/2014 10:29 pm 27,136 .rdata
10/11/2014 10:29 pm 87,040 .reloc
24/05/2021 09:36 pm .rsrc
10/11/2014 10:29 pm 174 .rsrc_1
10/11/2014 10:29 pm 402,944 .text
28/05/2019 08:12 pm 20,901,904 Anthology.exe

So inside of the executable there is 20MB of data. let’s rip further:

28/10/2014 09:29 am floppy
24/10/2014 11:21 am img
22/10/2014 12:37 am maps
28/10/2014 09:30 am os
28/10/2014 09:30 am rlst
28/10/2014 09:29 am romdisk

floppies, rom lists, rom disks and an OS?

28/10/2014 09:30 am .
28/10/2014 09:30 am ..
03/07/2013 12:02 am 262,144 Kick12.rom
27/10/2014 09:45 am 1,794 rdd.rom
2 File(s) 263,938 bytes

Really? Did they get some kind of sweetheart deal?

I copied of UAE, and fired it up, and yep it’s v1.2

Pretty cool. And sad too as Pixel Games UK obviously couldn’t secure such a cool deal, and all we have is the sadly inferior PC versions. And that is the crux of it, on the one hand I want to support them, but the PC versions frankly are unplayable. Jump Man barely can pick up 2 keys at the same time so it’s almost impossible to run and jump. Maybe it’s a DOSBox thing, maybe its an ancient DOSBox, I don’t know. On the other hand the only one that really doesn’t suffer keyboard issues, is from it’s design and that’s Rogue.

so I’m really mixed on this. And 33 years ago someone should have told them at Epyx to get one of those ‘peanut’ machines and get the PCjr sound effects going or at the least get one of those new fangled AdLibs that Sierra Online kept harping about.

Speaking of Sierra check out Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings, by Ken Williams. It’s not so much about the games, but more so about the business wheeling and dealings, and yes the AdLib and peanut are important.

So yeah if you linked your bethesda.net account to your steam account it’ll transfer it over. I guess to their credit it links your saves and all that.

I loaded it, against my better judgement. And 55GB later they have finally updated it to have NPC’s! But it’s still online, and despite having a commercial internet connection with synchronous up/down it’s still super laggy, and suffers from the damage from after the fact artifacts on launch.

Seriously my internet connection isn’t that crap. No doubt I’m playing on servers on the other side of the planet, but of course you still cannot select what server to join.

Even with an i7 9th gen and a RTX-2070 the game still chops and texture pops.

Sad.

I guess I missed all the excitement of the new DooM whatever, but Bethesda decided to dig up that N64 ‘DooM 3’ aka DooM 64. It’s a unique game unlike all the other console ports that were straight ports of the original DooM, although some like the 32x (Mars) or Jaguar versions that had a bunch of details removed from the levels to either spare the limited processors, and/or save precious cartridge space.

At $39 HKD, it’s $4 USD, so it’s a bit ‘pricy’ for something that is a 23 year old game, but at least I guess it’s out in the wild in a legal format. No idea if it made it to Bethesda.net as that whole thing collapsed quicker than Fallout 76 became a meme riddled disappointment.

Anyways I know I’m late to the party, but it’s all new to me.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1148590

It’s that time of the year again, the Steam Autumn Sale, and I found this one kind of funny: All Final Fantasy games are currently 0% off!

I mean who can argue with discounts like that!

What a bargain!