{"id":120,"date":"2010-01-03T20:16:50","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T03:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=120"},"modified":"2010-01-03T20:20:08","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T03:20:08","slug":"8-bit-computing-power-overload","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=120","title":{"rendered":"8-bit computing power OVERLOAD!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today – between bouts of doing laundry, working on FembotWiki and wishing I had more time off – I loaded up my Commodore 64<\/a> emulator and played a bit (several hours) of Questron<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Back when I was a young lad, my Father bought me and my brothers a Commodore 64.<\/p>\n

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It was the first computer I’ve ever owned, though not the first computer I had ever used.\u00a0 That honour belongs to the venerable Apple ][<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve got an emulator and some games for that as well.\u00a0 But back to the topic of Questron.\u00a0 I would spend literally hours and hours at the old Commodore 64 playing Questron.\u00a0 It’s a role-playing fantasy game… the only one I’ve really played much or enjoyed.\u00a0 The fantasy RPG genre doesn’t interest me much.\u00a0 Probably because there are (usually) no fembots.\u00a0 If someone made an “invade Dr. Franklin’s base” RPG game, I’d buy it immediately.<\/p>\n

But anyway, I played Questron so much when I was a kid that I kept a binder full of detailed notes of the game.\u00a0 I even made maps of both “islands”, all the towns, all 3 cathedrals and the Castle.\u00a0 The dungeons on Island 2 are too vast and complex to map… though I think I did attempt doing so.<\/p>\n

I still have that binder.\u00a0 It helped me grow my character strong and get lots of stuff accomplished within the game.\u00a0 I never did finish the game though.\u00a0 The Commodore 64 started acting funny, and very soon after that it refused to boot at all.<\/p>\n

But thanks to emulation, I can use my really fast PC with the crisp, clear 21″ monitor and awesome Logitech stereo speakers to play this vintage 1986 8-bit video game.\u00a0 I have a comfy game controller with a thumb-action joystick and about 10 superfluous buttons with which to emulate the old-school Atari-style joystick I used to have.<\/p>\n

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\nThe game play is still the same, the graphics are still in 16-colour glory and the sound is still bloops and blips.\u00a0 Actually Commodore 64 sound was way ahead of its time, and was basically a synthesizer on a chip compared to Commodore’s main competition at the time.<\/p>\n

But anyway, even though I can get the game running on my emulator, there are two things that don’t work:<\/p>\n