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NABU roundtable stream Dec 16, 2023

SpindleyQ — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:15:58 GMT

The NABU was a Z80-based PC designed and sold in Ottawa in the early 80s. Instead of storing software on tape or floppy disk, it connected to the cable TV network in Ottawa, which was continuously broadcasting all available NABU software in a continuous loop, and was continuously being updated with the day's news, recipes, etc, as well as a bunch of games. Many were ports, but there were a number of original titles as well that never appeared for any other platform. NABU hired a bunch of local programmers to write games for it, including a teenage Leo Binkowski, who saved everything he had access to when the company went under. Last year a bunch of these machines surfaced on eBay, curious retro computer enthusiasts snapped them up, and Leo worked with a quickly growing community to bring them back online with the original software. Today you can buy an inexpensive USB serial adapter, build or buy a simple cable with a standard DIN-5 connector, plug it into your PC or a Raspberry Pi running NABU "internet adapter" software, and the machine will come to life as though it's still 1983.

Leo recently announced that he's rounded up a few more NABU alumni to do a livestream on December 16. Feels like it may be worth checking out.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QoZTBNz47co

Thaumistry

Funbil — Sun, 14 May 2023 20:58:13 GMT

@michael Seems interesting! And at $4 there's no risk in trying it out. I'll pick it up sometime

Bring Back the Pod!

rjt — Sun, 07 May 2023 04:34:33 GMT

Have you talked to the man upstairs?

Youtube Video

itch dot io grab bag

mariken_muis — Thu, 04 May 2023 03:17:57 GMT

@michael "the dev doesn't completely understand Adventure Game Studio" I barely understood it myself bahaha!

Hand Eye Society

Michael — Wed, 03 May 2023 16:48:04 GMT

Hopefully this belongs under the Organizations part. I'm a big fan of regional groups that try to put together events and anthologies and one I follow is the Hand Eye Society in Toronto. They do a lot of anthologies that you can check out for free/Pay-what-you-want but they've also done some fun virtual conventions.

You can check them out here:
https://handeyesociety.itch.io/

Who are you? (The self-introduction thread)

SpindleyQ — Wed, 03 May 2023 13:06:13 GMT

Is there a canonical definition of what makes a game fringe for this forum's purposes

My main focus has generally been digging into the stories around games that are outside the normal scope of a "games industry" history. Freeware, homebrew, and fangame stuff most obviously, but with enough vague wiggle room to dig into basically anything that doesn't get written about enough. (For example, I have a strong desire to really dig into the guts of how the shareware industry actually worked, despite, you know, Doom being among the most well-documented games of all time. But most shareware games weren't Doom!)

Above all my interest is in the people whose stories get ignored, and the communities that supported them in their work. I wouldn't be interested in making a podcast episode that was a deep dive into the development history of UT2004, and the hype cycle surrounding it on release, but I'd definitely consider talking about the fan community that surrounds it now, keeping it alive long after the industry has moved on, well within the scope of my project.

That said, that's just how I think of it. It's not like anyone else was using this forum for anything, so if you're excited to talk about a thing with the folks here, I'm sure not gonna stop you.

Domino Club

mariken_muis — Wed, 03 May 2023 03:47:52 GMT

@dirigitive you jump into the hole. The domino hole of oddities and samuel pepys...

bitsy

mariken_muis — Tue, 02 May 2023 02:17:37 GMT

@spindleyq bless candle for making tools for the unskilled at html peasantry such as myself, I'm enjoying bipsi more than bitsy due to a few quality of life features not having to depend on plugins... Flickguy and tape window are also fun

Virtual Nightclub

BogusMeatFactory — Mon, 01 May 2023 15:32:09 GMT

@michael An article about virtual nightclubs

There are actually a ton, but the one I linked there has a great screenshot of one in action with a lot of those same fashion aesthetics that we saw in VNC

Crowdfunded book project: Shareware Heroes

rjt — Mon, 01 May 2023 11:57:36 GMT

Ugh, I still haven't bought this. Every time I go to I think maybe it'll get a second edition with extra stuff, like the Mac one did...

BYOND Deep Dive, or: an essay on "dead" games

mariken_muis — Mon, 01 May 2023 02:55:54 GMT

all I remember about BYOND is space station 13 a complicated simulation game usually about sabotage shenanigans and clowns and the one time I played a doctor put my brain in a robot. The learning curve intimidated me.

Furcadia (and perhaps other old MMOs?)

mariken_muis — Mon, 01 May 2023 02:42:47 GMT

I tried to go on furryMUCK once but I was too nervous around people I didn't know and now I'm in a private discord server of a subgroup that started in furryMUCK... thankfully not as nervous but we're not obligated to do the whole rolpeplay thing that was expected in the MUCK so... I feel more comfortable not wearing the mask! Furry culture...is strange... beautiful.

Nocturnal Nightmares

SpindleyQ — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 17:25:50 GMT

I loved this video about Nocturnal Nightmares, a shareware game that this person made with a friend in QuickBasic when they were 13 years old, and how he found joy in revisiting it as an adult in a bunch of different ways.
Youtube Video

Gaming the Iron Curtain

SpindleyQ — Mon, 16 May 2022 18:26:28 GMT

I'm surprised I haven't mentioned this book here yet! Gaming the Iron Curtain is a book which details how game development took place in Soviet Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. It's a vital history of an area of computer games which is almost entirely disconnected from the gaming industry. @coleoptera recently recorded an interview with the author, Jaroslav Švelch, about the book for the Critical Distance: Keywords in Play podcast, which I am enjoying listening to very much.

If you like, you can play an English translation of The Adventures of Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1989 where you, as Indiana Jones, kill a cop with an axe on like the fourth turn.

Battle of the Eras

SpindleyQ — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 17:37:01 GMT

Friend of the Fringe Game History Podcast Phil Salvador just posted a lovely article about Battle of the Eras, a Mortal Kombat-esque fighting game made by some teenagers in Belleville, Ontario. Worth a read, as well as this interview with its lead developer from Brandon Cobb.

Episode 4: Jonah Davidson discussion thread

jonnu — Mon, 04 May 2020 14:03:01 GMT

Interesting to hear from (and reminisce with) somebody that passed through the rpg2knet.com community. As it's creator I was always one or two steps removed from the people using it for its intended purpose, so it was a fun trip to hear from "the other side" almost two decades later!

Break Into Chat interviews with BBS door game creators

rjt — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 11:35:51 GMT

Oh wow, nice find!

I missed the whole BBS thing, but have had a bit of a poke at them within the last year or so.

Episode 2: Phil Salvador discussion thread

SpindleyQ — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 19:18:21 GMT

@Shadsy has written an in-depth essay called The Mario Fangame Myth about MFGG for the Lost Histories Jam that is very worth reading.

Episode 6: Shawn Hargreaves discussion thread

SpindleyQ — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:27:03 GMT

I'd say every tool has its "grain", and Allegro's bread and butter was really "draw bitmaps on top of other bitmaps", with certain effects like scaling and rotation being very easy to add. But other things, which may have been straightforward if you had written the blitting code and were able to make tweaks to it, were much more difficult.

I remember putting together a demo game to show off my "skills" in the early TPU days, where I tried to build the most audiovisually impressive thing I could. The thing that gave me the most trouble: I wanted to reproduce the end-of-level screen-melting effect from Doom, and getting that to run fast was hard.

That game also had:

a pretty 3D fractal landscape generated by a VistaPro demo I got from a book called Virtual Reality Madness & More huge 3d-rendered characters modeled in a tool called Imagine (I couldn't figure out how to texture pupils on his googly sphere eyes, so I just drew them on afterwards in NeoPaint and hoped I got them in vaguely the same place every frame (I didn't)) a title screen that I'm pretty sure had both gratuitous scaling and rotation oh, and I animated some extruded text as a "company logo" in I think maybe TrueSpace 3D? custom fonts EVERYWHERE; I feel like I must've had a tool for Windows that would export a TTF font as a bitmap that Allegro knew how to treat as a bitmap font. But if you wanted text in your game, you were probably gonna export a bitmap font. All I used it for was, like, "press start", and displaying your score, but I'm sure I had at least two fonts.

I definitely remember having to do a lot of fiddling to mash everything from these random sources into a sensible 256-colour palette. I had specialized commandline tools for palette generation & re-importing.

In general, I had a bunch of disparate free-or-pirated tools for creating visuals, and I used them about as naively as you could possibly imagine, and I suspect that had a lot to do with how my games ended up looking. It probably was not far off from the process that people making OHRRPGCE games were going through. Even my 3D stuff was made in tools that were designed to be accessible. I had a copy of 3DS Max, but I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything - I just knew it was "professional".

Jeremy Penner and Mattie Brice discuss Glorious Trainwrecks

rabbitboots — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 02:01:16 GMT

Thanks so much for Glorious Trainwrecks, Klik of the Month, the Pirate Karts and MarMOTS -- They've been a total blast to partake in.