Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #28

In this week’s episode we take a look at CAD – yes, 3D CAD! – on a Commodore home computer. I’ve talked in the past about getting Home Designer running on a C128, but in this episode we look at a German-made application called Giga-CAD on the C64. It took a little while for it to get going, but I was frankly very impressed with what it could do. Here’s the episode where we look at Giga-CAD (not yet the Plus version) followed by a quick bit of gaming. As usual, I really didn’t research the software much (or... Read more →

Floppy Friday #27

In this week’s Floppy Friday we stumble across a diskette from the German Commodore 64 magazine, Game On, from June 1992. It contains three games – The Pearl of Dawn, Twin Down and No Deeper Meaning – and a couple of graphics/music demos – Mstocephaloid/XS and Destination ‘91. I didn’t know they were demos when I loaded them, of course, but we got there eventually. Being on a floppy that basically came free with a magazine, none of these are especially “top shelf” (I use that in the North American sense of the term, although in fairness it’s also... Read more →

Floppy Friday #26

I wasn’t sure whether I would stick with the Atari 2600 for this week’s Floppy Friday, but as I received a new batch of floppies by post at lunchtime, I decided to dig in and see what was there. After initially loading Create with Garfield! (and no, I won’t be loading that one again), I fell upon a single diskette with a pretty interesting little collection of games, and ended up just loading a handful of them. Here’s the episode: We started by playing Back to Nature (also known as “Frog”), and then a strange little game called Spider.... Read more →

Floppy Friday #25

This week’s Floppy Friday is once again floppiless, as we take a new old Atari CX 2600 A – with its gorgeous wood panelling – for a spin: We focus on space-themed video games – which were apparently a favourite for early video game designers, as the emptiness of space lent itself to more limited hardware platforms – looking at Space Invaders, Asteroids, Phoenix and Defender. (In case people are interested, we looked at Space Invaders and Asteroids on the C6 in Floppy Friday #14 and we saw some games on the Atari 2600 Jr in Floppy Friday #20.)... Read more →

Floppy Friday #24

In this week’s episode we load (or try to, anyway) a number of games from one floppy. We start with a game called Up ’n’ Down (mis-labelled as Bump ‘n’ Jump) and then try to play Jump Jet before moving onto BMX Simulator. Finally I try to load The Goonies, but fail miserably. I’ll have to see if I have it elsewhere, or can copy it to a floppy from a .d64 image. Here’s the video: Here are some reviews from Zzap!64 magazine. For Up ’n’ Down: For Jump Jet: For BMX Simulator: That’s it for this week. As... Read more →

Floppy Friday #23

Yes, every Floppy Friday’s a good Friday, but today’s really a Good Friday. I hope those of you who wish to – and are able to – are enjoying a nice, long weekend. In this week’s episode, we look at three games from 1983-4 that were released on a 1985 compilation called 10 Mega Hits (all I saw on the floppy was “Mega Disk 2”, which makes sense, as the ten games would probably have been delivered on two cassettes or floppies). The games are Super Pipeline, Trollie Wallie and Automania (once again this last one was only on... Read more →

Project Dasher for the Commodore 64

I’ve been having soooo much fun with my Floppy Fridays that I couldn’t resist trying my hand at developing some code for the Commodore 64. It meant dusting off my BASIC skills – and even dipping into some Assembler for some of the more advanced effects – but I think the results are worth it. After some months of behind-the-scenes effort, I can proudly unveil my (and Autodesk Research’s) first project for the C64. Although I found out last week that John Walker – Autodesk’s founder and former CEO – also developed a number of programs for the C64... Read more →

Floppy Friday #22

I was researching a blog post for next week when I came across a nice surprise. John Walker – the founder and former CEO of Autodesk, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for this blog more than a decade ago – published some programs he wrote for the Commodore 64 and 128 when he was exploring the capabilities of this platform back in the late 1980s. John had published two of them, Key Clicker and Rainy Day Moon – in Compute! and Commodore Magazine respectively – but the third, BrainSim, was just too far ahead of its time.... Read more →

Floppy Friday #21

In today’s episode of Floppy Friday I’m happy to say that we’re back on floppies after a couple of weeks focused on cartridge games and unboxing. We play three games, this week: Predator (a trainer for it, anyway), Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing and Ghosts ‘n Goblins. These games were really chosen at random – and not played beforehand – so I missed a few important details, such as the fact that the protagonist in Ghosts ‘n Goblins was a knight rather than a mummy. Sigh. Here are their reviews from Zzap!64 magazine… Predator Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing... Read more →

Floppy Friday #20

Ready Player One! This week’s Floppy Friday once again doesn’t show a single floppy disk (sorry!), but focuses on the epic console showcased at the end of Ernest Cline’s retro-lovers’ Bible (not sorry ;-). In this episode we start by unboxing an Atari 2600 console (a “Jr.” version from 1986) bought via an online auction. At the beginning of the episode I had no expectation that we’d be able to tune my basement TV to view the signals output by the console, but by the end we’d played games from all four cartridges that came with the auction lot.... Read more →

Floppy Friday #19

We’ve reached the end of a much-needed week off up in the mountains. I’ve actually spent a bunch of time fooling around with getting RetroPie working on a Raspberry Pi 400 I bought for the kids (ahem). We’ve been having lots of fun playing Zelda on the NES and Super-NES, Sonic on the Megadrive, and Runn ‘n’ Gunn on the C64. Before leaving to come up, I did record an additional episode of Floppy Friday, although in fairness no floppy was harmed (or used) in the making of this particular episode: we take a look at three C64 games... Read more →

Floppy Friday #18

This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK. This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to government subsidies – available in the majority of schools in the UK. For my Computer Science A-level I used some networked Beebs to automate a hypothetical fast food restaurant: from touchpad-driven ordering by customers to printing of receipts and stock control. Here’s an image... Read more →

Floppy Friday #17

In this week’s Floppy Friday – a short one, weighing in at under 10 minutes – we look at a couple of games: Bionic Commando and Zaga (sorry – the best article I could find on this game is in Italian). I found a couple of old reviews online for today’s games. The first – for Bionic Commando – is from Zzap! 64 magazine: The second – for Zaga – is from Anirog: As mentioned in today’s episode – and a post from earlier in the week – I have another bundle of retro computing joy about to be... Read more →

Technology wars

I’ve been thinking a lot about “technology wars”, of late. Some of this has been driven by my foolings around with Floppy Fridays – thinking about the competition between 8-bit computing platforms, back in the day – but other musings have been prompted by links I’ve been sent in various newsletters. For instance, here’s an article on Quora by Dave Whittle that takes a look at the fascinating history between OS/2 and Windows, and why the latter won the battle for the graphical desktop OS. In a JavaScript newsletter I received a link to this excellent 3-hour (!) podcast... Read more →

Floppy Friday #16

This week’s Floppy Friday is all about Indiana Jones games. Well, two of them, anyway. First we look at Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom from 1985 and then we play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – The Action Game from 1989. They’re very different games, which I’m sure you’ll see from this episode. I think I’ve managed to fix the focus-related issue from last week (this happened when there was a major change in luminosity with the screen), so hopefully that’s better. Feedback welcome! I’ve also made some progress with repairing the second of my two “breadbin”... Read more →

Floppy Friday #15

In this week’s episode we look at two games: one from 1986 and one from 2021. That’s right: we’re playing Super Cycle from the 80s and Runn ‘n’ Gunn which was just released last week. How crazy is that? I did what I could to adjust the settings on my TV and on my phone to get better colours from the screen recording (thanks to Fernando Malard for the YouTube link!) but I do see there was some auto-focus strangeness. I’ll try to get that fixed for episode #16. Both games shown in today’s episode were lots of fun... Read more →

Floppy Friday #14

In today’s episode of Floppy Friday we use a Commodore 128D – with integrated, double-sided floppy drive! – to play some classic arcade games. Many thanks to Daniel from Bern for parting with the C= 128D via an online auction: this was his family’s home computer growing up. It even came with a Seikosha SP-1200VC, which I’m dying to try out. (I grew up with an Epson FX-80, and I just love the raw – sometimes harsh – music of a dot matrix printer.) So why play classic arcade games on an early “personal” (rather than “home”) computer? It... Read more →

Floppy Friday #13

Welcome to Floppy Ferrari Friday! In this week’s episode we look at two classic video game experiences that allow you to drive a Ferrari. The first is one I’ve been meaning to play for some time and mentioned back in Floppy Friday #6: the classic 1985 arcade game Out Run. It was fun to play the Commodore 64 version – and on a classic “breadbin” C64, no less – but I will say I found the conversion to be a little lacklustre. I certainly enjoyed the arcade version more. The second is a much more “serious” experience, which is... Read more →

Looking back to look forwards

Over the weeks since AU, I’ve been heads-down with writing a chapter for a book that’s due to be published in this summer. The book is about innovation in the construction industry, and my chapter will talk about opportunities related to digital twins and generative design. Which means I haven’t had much time to write “serious” posts for this blog, of late. I did want to put pen to paper in this new year about the sheer joy I’ve been getting from recording Floppy Fridays, though. It’s clear there’s been a strong “retro” trend in recent years. I’d probably... Read more →

Floppy Friday #12

In this week’s episode of Floppy Friday we take a look at two games that came on a Game On floppy from April 1991: Turrican II and Pure Seed. I realised afterwards that Turrican II was made available as a demo version on the floppy – and that I’d loaded the “main” program rather than the demo loader, which explained the lack of loading screen, etc. I used a Commodore 1311 joystick – known as the worst joystick ever created, and apparently a poor copy of the classic Atari CX40 – to play the games, and liked it a... Read more →