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points by chr15m 4 days ago | 0 comments
Conan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.
[–] dustfinger 4 days ago
I grew up with an Aplle IIc and I loved Conan the Barbarian. A neighbor made me a copy and I used to absolutely love playing that game. I remember there was a message on the screen when you died, and the one burnt in my mind is "The eyes have it". I also loved Prince of Persian for the 486. That one I actually beat. Your history is very similar to mine. Now, I have been coding for decades, but it all started on the Apple IIc.
[–] chr15m 4 days ago
Happy days. I think Prince of Persia is one of the only games I beat.

Did you ever play Another World by Erich Chahi? Still one of the greatest games and still good today.

[–] esafak 4 days ago
I've never heard it mentioned, but I think Another World was visually influenced by another French project, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartakus_and_the_Sun_Beneath_...
[–] chr15m 4 days ago
Wow cool!
[–] dustfinger 4 days ago
Oh hell yeah. My neighbor had that for his commodore 64. I never owned that one, but I was blown away by its graphics and how smooth the animations were. I have not thought about that game in a really long time. Good times! I also loved text based adventures. Like probably lots of kids in the early 80s, one of the first ones I played was Adventure. I also loved The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Infocom was awesome. I have been playing through the zork series with my 14 year old recently.

One other game I absolutely loved for the Apple II was Captain Goodnight. I got really far into that game, but I don't think I ever beat it.

[–] tosapple 4 days ago
buck rodgers on c64
[–] sirsinsalot 4 days ago
That sounds like my childhood and teen years. It feels so far away culturally. I miss the sub culture and counter culture.
[–] jacquesm 4 days ago
It's not coming back either.

At the same time: a Raspberry Pi 2 W has more CPU power than all of the machines that I had between 1980 and 1991. The experience is still there. But it is very difficult to take a child from say 'Minecraft' to a blinking cursor on the screen and get them to be interested.

[–] Imustaskforhelp 4 days ago
For what its worth, I might be one of the younger folks on the site (currently 18)

I am still glad that children are playing Minecraft. One of the first things that I am really proud of what I did was somehow breaking a nat of an intel tiber (free) vps just so that I can create a minecraft server.

My first thing that I built myself in mc that I still remember is having a piston push a redstone block which pushes another piston and a redstone block (quite complicated overengineering) to basically create a clock to spawn many mobs. I am still proud of it and my brother showed me minecraft and I remember the first time he showed me and I was in awe!

one of the first blogs (or second I think) that I made was about how to self host minecraft using a different technique (there is a plugin)

There are lots of coding/server related things to Minecraft. I think many people got into coding just as much because of minecraft and got into servers because of minecraft server hosting. (It's really popular)

I sometimes get recommended Minecraft Nostalgia videos and man the nostalgia hits so hard.

I understand what you are saying but Minecraft at its core is a simple blocky game that I played with friends.

Yes, It might be hard to care about pixels but also not so much. I still play chess and I can play it on a pixelated screen just as much as on chess.com or lichess.org

One of the first games that I played was pokemon yellow (the OG one), I pirated it and that introduced to the piracy and oh boy, I genuinely believe that it was the reason why I got tech savvy and am learning CS within uni as I did that within 2nd grade.

I have played pokemon yellow, pokemon crystal and all the pixelated games. I love them all and cherish them with nostalgia.

I am more worried about the shorts and reels.

Some comments and stuff that I wrote about similar things:

[An advice for a 15 year old on HN to play minecraft instead of hyperoptimizing for business]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341430

[My pokemon yellow piracy complete story]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663383

Self Hosting Vanilla Minecraft server has never been this easy before (GUI Right in minecraft , while being open source !): https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...

[–] chr15m 3 days ago
Heck yes, Minecraft is very good for this! Highly hackable. I'm so grateful it exists so we can get more people excited in computers and computation and hacking and building.

Minecraft worlds also have low Kolmogorov complexity and high logical depth, producing these incredible complex worlds from a seed and a relatively small program. Just that observation is drilled into every player's experience in a visceral way and I think it's a useful thing for more people to know and appreciate. A kind of intuition for complexity and compressibility.

You raise a great point. The kids are alright!

Will check out your threads.

[Like you I also worry about short form video, but I note that in the past humans have got bored of these types of addictions so you might find we see it waning at some point.]

[–] Imustaskforhelp 3 days ago
> Minecraft worlds also have low Kolmogorov complexity and high logical depth, producing these incredible complex worlds from a seed and a relatively small program. Just that observation is drilled into every player's experience in a visceral way and I think it's a useful thing for more people to know and appreciate. A kind of intuition for complexity and compressibility.

Glad you liked my comment. I learnt about Kolmogorov complexity through it! I think that Minecraft basically provides some beauty to the complexity yet structure that it has and that too comes in a program that I can download!

> [Like you I also worry about short form video, but I note that in the past humans have got bored of these types of addictions so you might find we see it waning at some point.]

I hope that I am wrong about it. I can be wrong and I usually am and in this case I want myself to be wrong, but within the context of discussion and as it currently stands, I am more worried about that but I do hope that the future will be a brighter future.

Another game that I like with Minecraft is pokemon.

I genuinely think that you will love this video really a lot: Competitive Pokemon may be Impossible to Explain[0][1]

This is a video of an economist Phd person trying to explain competitive pokemon and the most accurate representation that he could come up with for the title is that it may be impossible to explain, but I think that within this 45 minutes video, he does a pretty damn good job at explaining it.

There is some joy in all the complexity behind the scenes that children can be exposed to in "simple" games. There is fun in exploring all these forms of complexity especially if its a phenomenon that other people connect to. I have so much fun playing competitive pokemon with my friends and if someone plays pokemon or minecraft, then it can help strengthen the bond and be part of community of like-minded people in many ways. In my opinion, this is the largest benefit of such things (especially when the downside seems to be comparatively little but nonetheless, I still believe that there are be downsides but still as said by jacquesm himself, there are far worse things out there than minecraft/pokemon)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrR6MquGU6A&t=16s

[1]: https://attraylor.medium.com/competitive-pok%C3%A9mon-may-be...

[–] jacquesm 3 days ago
Oh, no contest there, there is far worse than minecraft.
[–] saulpw 4 days ago
I just produced a restoration/translation of Below The Root last month! Check it out, hope it brings back some memories: https://root.saul.pw.
[–] thenipper 4 days ago
I had a pirated copy of Below The Root as a kid on my Apple IIc... except the small town copy network had made a bad copy. So it'd only play some of the time if i was lucky. I'm going to dive into this
[–] reenorap 4 days ago
Below the Root was a fantastic game, I somehow stumbled upon that 40+ years ago on my PC and played it not understanding what the rules were. Now I’m going to have to look for it as abandonware.