The Retro Timer 💾

@carlosefr
377 Followers
88 Following
1.9K Posts
By day, I'm a systems and software engineer. By night, I'm curious about the history of computers. Posting from #lisbon, #portugal. 🇵🇹🇪🇺

Lately I've been exploring gaming from the '80s and '90s (something that passed me by as I was never much of a gamer back then). 🕹️

Expect posts on #retrogaming, #retrocomputing, or general old school computing, with very few exceptions. All posts are crafted by a human. 🧔🏻‍♂️
LocationLisbon, Portugal
GitHubhttps://github.com/carlosefr

The 1976 script for "Alien" by Dan O'Bannon is just different enough from the filmed 1978 script to be interesting.

📜 https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_early.html

«STANDARD
Well, those things out there aren't the same, you know—the spaceship and the pyramid. They're from different cultures and different races. That ship just landed here—crashed like we did. The pyramid and the thing from it are indigenous.

HUNTER
How could anything be indigenous to this asteroid? It's dead.

STANDARD
Maybe it wasn't always dead.»

"I am the Law!"

Judge Dredd for the SNES came out roughly at the same time as the film starring Sylvester Stallone in June 1995. I guess hard deadlines are one of the reasons tie-in games are usually not great.

It seems decent at first, but disappointment comes quickly once you realise that blowing up the wrong box, or jumping off a platform at the wrong time, turns levels uncompletable.

It's hard to play a game never knowing if you're making progress or already a zombie.

#retrogaming #snes

love how amateurish the ads in early PC Magazine are as they try to compete with the flood of multi-function cards littering the magazine and stand out (March 1984 issue)

#retrocomputing #PCMagazine #TheCRAMBO

It’s weird when you realize plugs and sockets used to be so huge you could just label individual pins.

@arroz That background is a scottish tartan, and MacOS would be the "OS" clan in Scotland.

But I guess this might be a more appropriate one: https://clan.com/design/2846-McIntosh/

@arroz Is that the tartan from the OS clan?

In "Sam & Max Hit the Road" (1993) you control the dog Sam who, together with the rabbit Max, form the Freelance Police.

Your orders (which you take out of a cat on the street) are to bring back a thawed Bigfoot that has escaped a carnival along with Trixie, the Giraffe-Necked Girl.

LucasArts adventure games are known for their zany humour, but S&M takes it one step further: the jokes are less subtle and sometimes spicy, keeping up with their maturing audience.

#retrogaming #msdos #adventure

@eobet Without the glasses it's just (exaggerated) parallax scrolling, yes.

@arroz @luisfcorreia But yeah, after Jira, Bugzilla has been on the less bad side.

And let's not talk about the Debian bug tracker. Last time I used that thing it felt like it belonged in a natural history museum, and that was more than 20 years ago (it still seems to be the same).

@arroz @luisfcorreia Off the top of my head: Trac, Bugzilla, Footprints, Remedy, Track-IT, Mantis, GitLab, GitHub, Jira.

The simpler ones promise a better experience, but then require discipline from its users, which is always too much to ask. They end up a disorganized, useless, mess.

The heavier ones require discipline from its managers. They end up a disorganized mess either from poor or too much configuration.

Remedy and Footprints (both from the same company) make Jira look awesome.