Advanced Computer Entertainment (June 1989)

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Cover of the June 1989 issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment

Advanced Computer Entertainment (ACE for short) covered games for various computer platforms as well as console platform over the years it was published in the U.K. In 1989 that included the Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Spectrum, PC (DOS), the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System. The June 1989 issue includes:

Specials

  • Games Without Frontiers - An article on the impact that CD-ROM will have on gaming. One prediction was that games would become multimillion dollar productions in seven or eight years.

  • Playing Roles - The first part in a three-part guide to RPG games. Some games discussed here include The Black Crystal, Ring of Darkness, Swords and Sorcery, Questron II, Wizards Crown, Legend of Blacksilver, Might and Magic, and more.


Table of Contents from the June 1989 issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment

Gameplay

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89? Lemme see...

My VIC-20 with 20kb of BASIC was gone, after the 3rd RF modulator breaking down the vendor, that I also worked at, had given me a much more expensive Memorex.

That would have been lying around somewhere, but what I was really doing was DTP publishing on Pagemaker and Macintoshes, we got a laser printer that cost ~7000 dollars for the student newspaper then!

The equivalent of buying a tiny, newish car now I guess, with inflarion.

3 months later the price was cut to ~3000...

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In 1989 I was using a Commodore 64C at home...and wouldn't upgrade until 1993 when I finally got a "PC" which was a 486 DX2-66 from Gateway 2000. I loved both of those machines. The Commodore 64 was probably about $600 total but it was pieced together over like three years...computer then disk drive then monitor and eventually a printer and modem. The PC was $2999 plus shipping and tax if I remember correctly...but it had a CD-ROM drive and a luxurious 16MB of RAM.

I still have the Commodore 64 though it has been a while since I've had it hooked up. I've heard that old C64 power supplies are dangerous for your hardware as they fail in a catastrophic way that usually takes out the hardware. I need to pick up a modern replacement at some point.

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Cool, yeah changing the power supply should be trivial.

Have you tried out any of the emulators that you can find online or as apps?

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(Edited)

I have in the past...The first emulator I ever tried was one called C64S. Later on it was Vice and ccs64 that seemed to be the good ones. It's been a while though. I've been wanting to set up a machine just for emulation purposes for a long time now but just haven't gotten around to it.

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https://www.mdawson.net/vic20chrome/vic20.p

It was fun to cram enough functionality to get a game in 20kb! I did my own ones, and then found a book with lots of recipies, including how to remap characters by listing the values for each pixel.

Then the games was of course just different routines that move those "graphical characters" around the screen, as you know I bet.

I'm pretty certain that I found a way to use one loop grabbing arrow inputs that was generalized, where I had two different events that passed through the same loop, but I can't remember quite how I did it. It was basically an early function haha...

Its hard to say since I've not worked full time as a real coder or programmer through the years, but I d think that these early experiences has made me better at identifying & implementing the best open source solutions that both work and are somehow following some clear, consistent best practice, I really don't like things that are too hidden from me!

Take a website running some CMS as an example, how many know the full stack that it is running on, including the underlying libraries and so on?

Which made me think back to building installs using RPM on Red Hat and such, where the order of install mattered and so on hehe...

Oh, and this is fun: the Commodore 64 gang actually published a freaking webserver years ago that works, that prodded the Vic-20 gang to somehow magically doing the same haha!

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