Anybody besides me?
I used to be very involved with PCs and PC games. I’d been involved in programming since I was 14, and had written code for 5 or 6 companies when I bought my first real PC video game at age 40.
It was Darkseed, a spooky game about alien invasion, based on the famous “Alien” movie creature art by Gieger. It came on a 3.5” diskette. The game was not only difficult but there was a small bug in the program that allowed you to get stuck.
It wouldn’t be the only game I bought using or based on Gieger’s art, or the only one that needed fussing with in the days of DOS. It was a big kick in the motivation department, to have to dope out this “new” system architecture, for a guy grown a little bored with writing manufacturing code for industry.
A lot of games would turn out to have bugs and patches and defective CD media that had to be dealt with. Having to do so, and doing the research and coding to make things run, was a big deal in my development as a PC guy. I learned to build and fix the physical machines and the virtual machines, both. It eventually brought me to the client/server/object/container modeling of more modern programming philosophies.
I was coding for mostly much older industrial tech, that all went way back to paper tape and IBM punch cards. It was all eventually adapted down from the giant IBM & Burroughs main frames to work on smaller systems like IBM System 32, and then “tiny” Apple & IBM style DOS PCs.
From 1994 to 2014 I spent much of my free time playing games & building hot PCs. I collected over 200 legit boxed PC games & dozens of minor games. I don’t know how many machines I have built and fixed. Dozens of them over the last 30 years.
I never did any super heavy game coding, but I built many levels and scripts. I built many PCs at work and home, and learned to load system code and drivers in the order that allowed all possible scraps of the memory to be used.
But Life Happened More for me, as I got old, & I haven’t played with any involved games, for almost 10 years.
The boxed games are all in the attic now. I have reached the stage where life was too short for more games. I haven’t played with any computer games at all really, since I hit about 60 years old. It’s sort of strange to look back now & remember how I was.
But I recovered from a decades-long obsession somehow. I don’t recall any specific efforts though. Life just got in the way and never got out, I guess.
I used to be very involved with PCs and PC games. I’d been involved in programming since I was 14, and had written code for 5 or 6 companies when I bought my first real PC video game at age 40.
It was Darkseed, a spooky game about alien invasion, based on the famous “Alien” movie creature art by Gieger. It came on a 3.5” diskette. The game was not only difficult but there was a small bug in the program that allowed you to get stuck.
It wouldn’t be the only game I bought using or based on Gieger’s art, or the only one that needed fussing with in the days of DOS. It was a big kick in the motivation department, to have to dope out this “new” system architecture, for a guy grown a little bored with writing manufacturing code for industry.
A lot of games would turn out to have bugs and patches and defective CD media that had to be dealt with. Having to do so, and doing the research and coding to make things run, was a big deal in my development as a PC guy. I learned to build and fix the physical machines and the virtual machines, both. It eventually brought me to the client/server/object/container modeling of more modern programming philosophies.
I was coding for mostly much older industrial tech, that all went way back to paper tape and IBM punch cards. It was all eventually adapted down from the giant IBM & Burroughs main frames to work on smaller systems like IBM System 32, and then “tiny” Apple & IBM style DOS PCs.
From 1994 to 2014 I spent much of my free time playing games & building hot PCs. I collected over 200 legit boxed PC games & dozens of minor games. I don’t know how many machines I have built and fixed. Dozens of them over the last 30 years.
I never did any super heavy game coding, but I built many levels and scripts. I built many PCs at work and home, and learned to load system code and drivers in the order that allowed all possible scraps of the memory to be used.
But Life Happened More for me, as I got old, & I haven’t played with any involved games, for almost 10 years.
The boxed games are all in the attic now. I have reached the stage where life was too short for more games. I haven’t played with any computer games at all really, since I hit about 60 years old. It’s sort of strange to look back now & remember how I was.
But I recovered from a decades-long obsession somehow. I don’t recall any specific efforts though. Life just got in the way and never got out, I guess.
