Curated historical computer and video game shows, films, and other ephemera, hosted 24/7 by @TheOpponent. Support us on Patreon: https://nitter.cf/t.co/Xz7Si6JAzm
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The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
It's the 45th anniversary of the very first monthly computer game mag. CVG beat US rival Electronic Games to the newsstands by a matter of days - and went on to become a mainstay of UK video game news and reviews for decades. I'll be posting more pages from this during this week.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
Control room inside the abandoned Palast der Republik, Berlin, 1993.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
Computing room at the Pedagogical Institute of Physics and Mathematics in Leninabad, Tajik SSR, 1980s.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
So, when we started on Star Wars Jedi knight II: Jedi Outcast, the first thing I did (being tapped as the Design Lead) was to run over (literally) to the Best Buy across the lot behind us and buy a combo TV/VCR so I could watch the VHS Star Wars movies and pause them at my desk.
I wore that thing out eventually, pausing it over and over so we (Designers/Artists and I) could determine colors, sizing, etc. for wall panels, architecture and such.
Cannot believe this was 25 years ago already!
Picture taken in Feb of 2001, I think.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago, Commodore was playing the shopkeeper in the equivalent of Monty Python's "dead parrot" sketch. C128 dead? Nah. It's only sleeping. mate. Meanwhile Acorn was planning a games comeback for its Master Compact, which unfortunately very, very few people actually bought.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago, a new CPM-compatible DOS OS was headline news, but these days is a long-forgotten historical footnote. Meanwhile, there was a programmer shortage, and Acorn's new RISC system was ready to roll - but it was its chips that were the big thing, not the machine itself.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago Amstrad blocked QL clones. Kinda like stopping a corpse-carrying hearse from entering a graveyard. Meanwhile, fly-by-night publishers taking consumer credit card money and disappearing was becoming a problem as the industry shook out following its early/mid 80s boom.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago, MSX 2 was big news, despite not amounting to much historically in Europe. Commodore was soon to launch the Amiga, Atari's ST-with-TV-out was also imminent, and Psion's Organiser II gave us a glimpse of a future where everyone has a mini computer in their pocket.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
Here's that SF II review, written by me, ol' helmet hair head. This was first SF II review, which we published as soon as we knew the machine had hit arcades (I'd played it earlier in the year at a coin-op show). We knew it'd be huge - but not idea it'd become a cultural phenom.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
When the KIM-1 saves to cassette, it generates 0s and 1s as different frequencies just by oscillating a pin on the MOS 6530 RRIOT - no special audio circuitry. So I used a PET's 6522 VIA CB2 pin to do the same thing, turning the PET into a virtual cassette player for the KIM-1. youtu.be/fVIjKZHK5h0
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago, UK law was tested with this landmark hacking case. It's quite comedic reading as there was no specific hacking legislation plus the actual "hacking" seems ludicrously simple due to piss-poor "security." Meanwhile, reports about the QL's rebirth were premature.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
In the 90s, Hitachi came up with a bizarre way to conserve memory bandwidth.
Their SuperH architecture, intended to compete with ARM, was a 32-bit architecture that used…16 bit instructions.
The benefit was really high code density. If you can fit twice as many instructions into every cache line, the CPU pipeline stalls way, way less.
This was *really* important for embedded devices, which were often extremely bandwidth constrained in the era.
Sega famously used the processors for the Dreamcast, and ARM actually ended up licensing their patents for Thumb mode!
I think perhaps the weirdest thing about SuperH was its concept of “upwards compatibility”. The ISA itself is a microcode-less design, all future instructions were trapped and emulated by older chipsets.
It’d be slow…but you could run future code on very old chips! Very neat design, a massive success through the 90s and 2000s, that slowly faded.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago, Amstrad bought Sinclair for just £5m. Which goes to show that you can produce a best-selling period computer and still totally eff up your biz. Meanwhile Acorn was still farting about with micros and didn't yet understand just how important its RISC chips were.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago, concerns about heavily marketed but delayed games were raised. Ocean was especially guilty of this practice. Yet more Speccy games were found to be 128-incompatible, and the cost of a US Amiga fell, but remained £4,600 in today's money in the UK. Holy freakin' crap!
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
In 1993, Silicon Graphics presented "Project Reality", the hardware later used in the Nintendo 64. One of the demos showed a realistic town populated by cutouts of Nintendo characters. Only two screenshots and a brief snippet of footage of it are known to exist, shown below.
The Old Timey Computer Show retweeted
40 years ago, Commodore announced the Amiga 1000 would hit stores on May 9th but didn't say which stores and how much it would cost. It turned out to be a tiny number of dealers and hugely expensive. It was basically a stopgap until the Amiga 500 finally arrived 12 months later.
