Retro site

[Ish]

A bit of self promotion. Well. Sort of. More like fishing for feedback. I hope the mod's don't mind me posting this link... the only other bod's I know who are interested in old videogames are people on this site! It sends everyone else I know to sleep...

I've slowly been working on retro oriented stuff on a website. The basic site is mostly finished (I've got some title issues to sort out) but I've actually got quite a bit of content on it: which is what I'm fishing for feedback on.

Basically I've written quite a bit about the BBC B and its games, a special bit about Exile (and filmed some video of that), and some daft stuff. And I've got features on the Master 128, Dragon 32, Chuckie Egg, and Elite all in progress.

Oh yeah the site is at:

http://www.retrojunkie.org.uk

Let me know what you think. But be gentle - I have a sensitive ego

[MD]

Nice, nothing too out of place and most of it was accurate too. You however didn't mention Roger Wilson who was one of the key players to Acorn making proper computers. Oh and Modes 3 and 6 can do graphics with 2 pixels lines between each character block... ^_^; Still you mention that the BBC does 8 colours with 8 Flashing colours. BBC BASIC was great and did end up on other machines too including the PC as BBC BASIC 86 even did some of the OS Calls too... ^_^

The 1Mhz bus wasn't used a great deal but it could be used as a high speed i/o bus as it had the lower 8 bits of the address bus plus interupt signals and a page signals as well as the data bus.

The problem I had with the BBC was apart from a handful of specific games (and Repton can be argued was originally a cheap clone of Boulderdash) most games seem to be me too or ports from other machines. :/ Exile, Elite, Revs and maybe a few others being good enough to stand out.

Still hope you cover Elite, with the 8 versions on the BBC Micro machines (plus the Electron and Archie versions of the game) as well as the 12 other machines Elite was published on.

The year the BBC Master 128 ended production was in fact 1993(!)... nice machine, even if it was useless for games but not as useless as the Master Compact, still if you were rich you could run some old IBM PC games on the 80188 co-processer slowly...

Remember you can only stamp your feet and say I'm going as the big kids won't let me play with my ball if your an editor of a majorish magazine.

[Ish]

Thanks for taking the time to go through the site MD - I really appreciate the feedback. At a mimimum I'm gonna hunt down some info on Roger Wilson and incorporate that (I vaguely remember the name but can't remember any detail).

[Il Postino]

Originally Posted by MD
The problem I had with the BBC was apart from a handful of specific games (and Repton can be argued was originally a cheap clone of Boulderdash) most games seem to be me too or ports from other machines. :/ Exile, Elite, Revs and maybe a few others being good enough to stand out.

A fair point, there were lots of "me too" titles on the machine, but these clones often placed a subtle spin on the design of the "big name" games they were "paying tribute" to. I suppose you could say this of all "me too" games, but somehow the BBC "me too" stuff seemed to have a peculiar charm about it. That's why I've got a soft spot for the Beeb. A case in point is Repton. As you've stated, it could be argued (quite fairly) that the game was a cheap clone of Boulderdash. With that said, it felt sufficiently different from Boulderdash to make it an interesting and enjoyable title in its own right. As Ish points out on his site "In a way the BBC lived a gaming life apart from the Commodore 64 and Spectrum".

By the way, I enjoyed reading through the site, nice work Ish. One thing though, I'm sure Thrust originally came out on the Commodore 64 (you seem to suggest that the Superior Software title was the original version). I could be wrong though, it has been known to happen.


PS. Yes, I did wear Clarks shoes when I was at school.

[Strider]

Nice work Ish
I'm currently looking for retro sites to put in our fairly majorish mag, so once you've added some more content I'll be more than happy to cover it.

[Ish]

Thanks for the feedback people. This is the first time I've handed out the link and the first time since school I've tried to write anything that wasn't a technical document. So its nice to know it doesn't suffer from major suckage.

On Thrust - I'd thought it had originally been written by Jeremy Smith for the BBC and then ported to the C64. But I could be wrong.... I frequently am

By the way Thrust Deluxe is pretty ace if you've not come across it.

And thanks Strider. Perhaps the possibility of fame and glory might spur me on to finishing off the things I have in progress!