Comments in the retro gaming post yesterday made me start looking for emulators for the computer I learned to program on, the Commodore PET. I found one - w00t!
The VICE Emulator stands for Versatile Commodore Emulator and in addition to the PET it emulates VIC20, C64, C128 and Plus 4. I'll restrict this post to talking about the PET though. I will stick an Amiga icon the post though in a forlorn attempt to try and get into a tag section on Technorati!
in 1978/9ish (I was 11/12 ish) my school had a room which had a PET 3016 and a PET 3032. There were no computing lessons whatsoever - to use these machines you had to book time on them during your free time. To begin with I spent loads of time during lunch and after school playing games like Blitz, Nightmare Park, Dungeon and Super Glooper.
There was also another lad who wrote a very complicated (PARP!) program to calculate cricket averages for the school cricket team and he was the darling of various teachers including my geography teacher Mr Masterson (replete with houndstooth jacket, leather elbow patches and rusty Triumph Stag - you don't come any more stereotypical than that!) who hated me. He had a major rant one lunchtime as I sat playing some game or other saying game playing was banned unless you wrote it yourself.
The following week he came back in and ranted again at me for playing one of those 'guide your ship through ever narrowing tunnel games'. At this point I broke program execution, listed the code and showed him the bit saying 'written by me'. A couple of hrmphs and he walked out without a further a word. Sweet as fsck. Of course he hated me even more after that.
For some reason I never became the darling of teachers even though the various little games (including a game like the aforementioned Dungeon called Moria including skinny rock bridge with balrog episode) I wrote on the PET were all way more complicated than simply averaging a list of numbers. Ho Hum. I have however made quite a decent living out of coding so I guess I should be grateful to Masterson. I still think he's a cnut though. :)
13 comments:
Where are you now Mr. Masterson??
Nice post... :)
Slightly off topic guys but mmChronic, check your gmail.
Probably dead - he was in his forties then and was a smoker. He used to hang about some windows in teh upper corridor that overlooked the interior of the girls PE hall (ILN will know which ones I mean) and smoke whilst leching at underage girls.
I used to see many people in that corridor, regularly!
It was OK for us to lech as we were also underage but Masterson was just a dorty old porv. :)
I was regularly late for lessons due to being in that corridor.
There was quite a few perv teachers at our school but i'm noit going to libel anyone due to the power of NewLinks. :)
The reason you were never their "darling" was because you had a "bad attitude" (which I believe is "school-masterese" for "thinks for self"). My own school record was spotty depending upon whether they rewarded this or hated it. Well, that and lots of could-do-betters because I couldn't be ar... ahem.
There's a unix "Moria" game that's been around for donkeys, too... I used to play the Amiga port back in the early (for me, anyway) Amiga days.
BTW, for C64 emulation, I find CSS64 to be a better emu than VICE. Well, at least for playing games -- and that's what I care about in C64 emulation ;)
Underage girl letching... one wonders how many teachers became teachers for that very porpoise.
Thus ends another fine post by YLFM.
I'm not scared to name and shame - it's a fact! :)
Masterson once set me an essay titled 'Why I should do my homework on time' as punishment for not doing homework. To be fair I went weeks without doing any. The main point I made was that any delay in my handing homework meant Masterson had to chase me which cut into his his smoking and leching time.
I was expecting a right bollocking but he passed it around the other teachers and I was getting praised of loads of them for a fine piece of prose. To set the record straight I got an A grade at O level for Geography when O Levels were O Levels. Who needs to do homework? ;)
And another anon post from YLFM! Apart from the thinking bit most teachers didn't like my inability to concentrate in class (ie fscking about), regular truanting and very little homework done in any subject. If I was at school these days I'd get diagnosed with ADD, get fed a shitload of speed and get lots of extra benefits of the state. Probably.
I figured there'd be better C64 emulators as I hadn't heard of this one before. When we do a C64 retorgaming post we can link to the better ones.
I did the shuttling between levels as well - Physics, Maths, English (Lit and Lang) and Geography in particular. I moved constantly between them. O Level was easy but I'd get kicked out for behaviour / homework / whatever then I'd go to CSE where they knew it was a waste of time so kick me back to O Level and so on.
It was pot luck which actual qualification I took for each subject - it depended where I was when I was entered for the exams - even though the teachers knew I could pass the O Level exams. I am now the not so proud owner of several CSE grade 1s. Twunts.
To get back on topic - posh bastard with your BBC! Nah we eventually had one for the whole school in the same room as the PETs - it was easier to book time on the PETs though so I didn't use it much. :)
Bungers will be able to chip in as he had a beeb too.
I've played on them infrequently but I've got a BBC story too. :)
The Archimedes had no games? It had Zarch and erm.. um.. other stuff. The Archimedes tempted me for a while but I didn't end up owning one.
Ah.. the Beeb. My first computer was an acorn atom that actually had to be built from a kit. My dad got it from Watford Electronics or something, and we were occasionally allowed to play games on it. There was a ropey 747 flight Sim and a text adventure or two but that was about it.
We eventually got a BBC (I think we had the A, then the B) before upgrading to the BBC Master. This was at the time when any self respecting kid had a Speccy or a C64 so all I had to play was Elite. At which I attained the rank of 'Dangerous'. Very proud of that too. Funny thing about the BBC version of the game was that the docking computer didn't work unless you had the 6502 second processor (which let you do floating point things - I think) so I was really hardcore Elite.. ;)
It was crap for games, but it did have Citadel, Stryker's Run was another favourite, erm.. oh and Exile I think.. that was good. Spellbinder rocked too. But I figure that was about that as far as games went.. Revs was good.
My old man even recovered an Archemides from a skip outside his work one day, and it had Zarch/Virus on it that was very good but a bit mad...
You should have kept that for the BBC episode of the NewLinks Guide To Gaming Through The Ages™. ;)
If you want to relive Nightmare Park and have a Windows Mobile PDA, why not visit ... http://www.therealeasterbunny.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
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