Christine Lemmer-Webbertell me what your favorite computing aesthetic was or is. a real one or even fictional!
go ahead! you're being given permission! infodump away in my replies here!
Patrick Loftus 🖖
@cwebber Probably just a first love thing. Atari 800XL, attached floppy, and a few controllers.
My sisters and I always fought over the red handled joystick.
An old CRT with dials and a button for switching between Black & White and Color display. The color didn't always cooperate.
Brooke Vibber 
ɹ uɐp 
we had the regular 800, and my friend had the XL
I was so jealous, though I'm not sure it made any actual difference.
What i really wanted was an Atari ST, which one of my Dad's work friends kids had, and it ran this insanely awesome game called BRATACCUS
And then I wanted an Amiga, and then I wanted a NES. But no, we stuck with the friggin' Atari 800 (and a 2600) all the way up until we got an 80286.
we may have have 2 disk drives and a custom "cartidge emulator" circuit board which allowed for playing pirated games. who can say
sigh
Brataccas Quick Play - Atari ST
@dannotdaniel @brooke @cwebber That game reminds me of Spy vs Spy.
My father may have had a friend who gifted him damn-near-every piece of software written on 5.25 disks - not saying he did just may have.
They also may have had a boot loader to select which application to run when multiple could fit on a disk, with hand written labels for the catalog.
Personal favorites were Preppie, Pacific Coast Highway, and Jumpman. I did waste a lot of time trying to beat E.T. - never did.
I can still hear the sound of that drive roaring as it loaded something.
@dannotdaniel @pwloftus @cwebber i think of stuff we used when i was a kid, only a couple of games actually made use of the full 64 KiB RAM on the 800XL (the 800 only went up to 48 KiB)
of which one was Sublogic Flight Simulator 2.0 (cousin of the modern Microsoft Flight Simulator line) which required the additional memory to display the wings/tail in the side/rear views, and to enable radio navigation features
(I still can't believe how much they packed into that flight sim for 8-bit computers!!)
@cwebber @dannotdaniel @pwloftus utterly ridiculous how little storage we made do with
back when pixels were the size of rocks and bitmaps were small ;) <3
@brooke @cwebber @dannotdaniel Meanwhile in 2026 - got any spare terabytes for this uncompressed multilingual audio for your game?
You only need 1 of the languages? Too bad.
Language packs and high res textures should be optional DLC. Just ranting but it would be a low-hanging fruit of optimization.
@pwloftus @cwebber @dannotdaniel you jest about terabytes, but microsoft flight simulator (2020 edition) was notorious for a 100+ GiB base install that ballooned to the better part of a terabyte if you installed enough add-ons
they rearchitected some stuff in the 2024 edition to stream more stuff over the network and only cache what you're actively using on disk
(which, naturally was itself controversial in the simmer community because they were also notorious for bad server download / streaming performance for users in many countries. some people are like "yeah i'll set aside a terabyte for flight simulator gimme the download ahead of time so my flight time is clear and consistent")
I have to ask - what were your favorite atari titles?
Couple of my faves:
- Bruce Lee, obviously
🏆 - F-15 Strike Eagle - the only sim I had.. but I think an apache helo one also existed
- Rally Speedway for 2-player offroading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_Speedway
of course at my buddie's house with the XL... I don't think he could play the pirated games... we mostly played Donkey Kong..
bri@dannotdaniel phew, i don’t think i ever played an atari port of bruce lee (had quite a few vcs titles but much less for the 8-bit computers) but i sure did log a lot of hours on the c64… brutal game 😹
@dannotdaniel @pwloftus @cwebber
Top favorite to this day:
* Rescue on Fractalus!
I regularly pull this one out and just stream myself rescuing pilots for an hour lol
* Sublogic Flight Simulator
really fascinated me though I was *terrible* at landing
* Ballblazer
had great graphics and 'twicthy' gameplay but it didn't hold up well imo
* Dig-Dug
I played a *lot* of dig-dug.
* Ghostbusters
Incredibly hard, not sure we ever actually beat the game. Just like real life! But by god you get sick of hearing the 'Ghostbusters' theme playing 24/7 during play
and of course:
* Star Raiders II
I really enjoyed this even though it was quite different from the original (because it was actually designed as a Last Starfighter media tie-in and got repurposed when the license fell through)
* Star Raiders (the original)
I spent many hours as a child zapping zylons.
@dannotdaniel @brooke @cwebber I may or may not have many of these loaded up on a steam deck as well.
Kelson