retrogeek

More from CVG December 1981. Here we have the ‘Christmas Parade’ of all that’s best in handheld gaming. I remember seeing the LED Grand Prix game, and I definitely remember playing with Big Trak at my friend Darren’s house. Big Trak was a programmable truck which could remember a short sequence of moves and replay them, not quite as exciting as it appeared on the TV ads, but certainly head-and-shoulders above any non-programmable trucks…

In the same issue we see an advert for a Game & Watch. Really the first ‘pocketable’ computer game, with an LCD screen and annoying bleeps. Produced by Nintendo, but here appearing under the brand name of CGL, each model featured a single game [this one is a sort of 'Lion Taming' game] and a clock. The promise of ‘Game A’ and ‘Game B’ was a bit of a con, since ‘Game B’ was exactly the same as ‘Game A’, but slightly faster. However, despite these limitations, ownership of a Game&Watch in the early 80s guaranteed you’d be the most popular kid in the playground…

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Computer & Videogames (CVG) appeared on the scene at the tail end of 1981, it was a glossy monthly magazine of listings and game reviews, at odds with the existing ’serious’ monthlies.

It promised to be all about fun and playing videogames! In reality this meant typing in pages of illegible listings and reading about things that were only sold in shops miles and miles away…

Cover art is essential when trying to sell a magazine on a crowded shelf, and generally speaking CVG had excellent cover art. However, even now, I’m not sure the ship-sailing-the-treacherous-waves image screams ‘videogames’ at me.

The picture alludes to a listing for an inpenetrable tactical war game for the Tandy TRS-80. No one I knew had a Tandy, though I remember playing with the one they had stuck to the counter in the Tandy shop in Exeter, at least until the manager used to tell me to get lost.

While the cover art was usually pretty good, inside it was a different story. CVG featured some quite astonishingly poor drawings, some of them easily qualify for the ’so-bad-it’s-good’ category. For example this treat:

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There’s lots to love inside the magazine, giving us a wonderful glimpse into the world of consumer entertainment technology of twenty-six years ago. Below are the ‘Games News’ pages in full, featuring such treats as ‘Rhino’ (”requires Acorn Atom, 10k of memory and a floating point ROM’), the above illustrated ‘Damsel and the Beast’ (which promises “a brave hero sworn to save the wretched by vociferous damsel”, but I fear may fail to deliver on the target platform of 16K ZX81), and the clearly Copyright infringing ‘Startrek’ (featuring Klingons with ’super-fast firing lasers’.)

The magazine cover also promises to help us ‘Solve the Cube’, so tying nicely into the Rubik Cube craze sweeping the UK at the time. Unfortunately to solve the cube you needed a 40 column Commodore Pet - again a machine no one had - and required typing in 537 lines of code. I’m not sure what’s stranger - the idea that someone could condense the solution to a complex three-dimensional puzzle into 8k of BASIC, or that someone might in fact take the time to type it in…

Twiddling with a pet

More to come from this issue shortly…

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Firstly, apologies to you all for an unexpected haiatus in retrogeekery. We’re back now, with an unregularly scheduled selection of prime 80s fun. I’d like to welcome a new contributer to the blog, imipak, who also has a stack of mouldering magazines in his collection and who has kindly offered to scan some for us:

And so, without further ado, here is the first contribution, from Personal Computer World, 1982, a ‘preview’ of ‘the most talked about machine in the history of the micro’, the BBC Microcomputer.

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Since the dawn of personal computing there has been the Biorhythms program. Desparate for something to show to the powerful computational power [and perhaps the graphics too] of your new machine, we would dutifully type in the program which would map our physical, emotional and intellectual ‘cycles’ so we could explain away our miserable mood swings. A pointless and scientifically unfounded exercise, but one that may result in some pretty graphs on the screen.

Here is a dedicated device for calculating these meaningless equations. Type in your birthdate and be instantly rewarded with three LED integers, use these numbers to explain to your mum why you haven’t tidied your bedroom, not done your homework, or why you need a sick-note to get of PE this week - worth every penny of £19.95

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BASIC was pretty much the de facto language of the 80s home computer. Simple to learn, dog slow to run. To do anything really interesting with these little 8-bit beauties involved programming machine code. Instructions are inserted into the memory, byte by byte, then executed directly by the CPU. Whizzy fast. impossible to read.

Here we find a fine example of a machine-code listing from PCW. Take a good look at those long lists of numbers, and realise that getting a single one wrong means hours of debugging. Interestingly the author has included a rudimentary checksum for each line, which I presume would have made the process somewhat less painful - typing in listings was frequently a two person job, one to read out the list of numbers, the other to type them in. For pale and wan little boys, with no interest in fresh air and exercise, this was a perfect passtime.

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In 1982 pac man was a phenomenon. It was the most popular arcade game by far, and hence generated a huge demand for versions to play at home. In the 80s enthusiasts in their bedrooms were the generators of much of the content, and to them, copyright, corporate branding and legal protection were unknowns - hence we saw numerous pac-man clones, some more accurate than others. However, even in 1982 it was apparent that video-gaming was to be a highly lucrative market, and as a result, a more ‘grown-up’ heavyweight approach to the scene emerged.

This news report is of a clash between mighty american titans Atari and Commodore, and caught in the cross-fire the plucky Brits Bug Byte, all over a little yellow circle who liked to eat dots.

This op-ed piece from Computer and Video Games puts it into some perspective.

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It seems many of the visitors to retrogeek are spectrum enthusiasts, for your delictation here is the original 2-page spread advert from 1982. Notable not only for the hyperbole of the descriptions, but also the glamorous assistant shown squelching his way into the world-of-tomorrow on his tiny rubber keyboard.

Also of note is the ‘coming soon’ ZX Microdrive, a strange early storage device with a loop of cassette tape stuffed into a plastic cartridge. Holding up to 100k with a seek time of 3.5 seconds it promised simplicity and speed, but delivered tangled tape, data-loss and despair.

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In a world where ‘Photoshop’ has become a verb, it’s often hard to remember the lengths one had to go to to generate an image on an early home computer. When you’re working with a machine with only a few K of video RAM the options are quite limited, and of course there was no drawing or painting software available, which meant your masterpiece had to be poked and plotted onto the screen pixel by pixel.

This little gem comes from a November 1982 issue of Popular Computing Weekly and is unique in that it’s neither an ad for hardware nor software, but a pad of paper and a set of pens (”set of seven pens for each computer colour”). Effectively this is a book of gridded tracing paper, which claims to help convert your “illustrations, maps, charts, photos etc” into a set of pixel locations on your 256×192 screen. I never bought one myself, preferring to draw my 8×8 sprites in the back of my maths homework book…

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There are two things to say about this post:

1. The Dragon 32 was another also-ran of the post-spectrum UK home computing boom. It had the advantage of a decent keyboard, and represented a decent buy in terms of specifications, but didn’t really engender the support of the developer community and Welsh company producing them collapsed in 1984.
2. ‘Read this ad to your wife’!? The premise appears to be that your wife [all computer users are married hetrosexual males] would rather you bought her a new washing machine than waste your money on a computer. Thankfully she’ll be won over by your erudite arguments on the virtues of 32k of RAM, a whole 9 different colours of graphics and stunning five octaves of monophonic sound.

   

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BASIC was the lingua-franca of personal computers in the 80s, whether we can hold Bill Gates entirely responsible for that is debatable, but that’s the way it was. Here we see a plucky young machine bucking the trend and coming pre-installed with FORTH on it’s tiny electronic brain.

This advert from 1982 is for the ‘Jupiter Ace‘ ['Uranus Cool' being rejected early in the product-naming cycle, I suspect]. Apparently it’s ‘Probably the fastest microcomputer in the universe’ with a blazing 3.25MHz processor. Consider that a PC these days is probably running at 3.25GHz on multiple cores - a speed increase of a thousand-fold at least. It also boasts a stunnning 8K of ROM [where that FORTH compiler is stored] and 3k of RAM - closer inspection of the specifications reveals that only 1k is availble for code, the other 2k for the graphics. To put that into some perspective, the thumbnail JPEG image below is 48k in size…

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