Dark Castle and Macintosh System 6 Emulator | Hacker News Reader

Dark Castle and Macintosh System 6 Emulator

jamesfriend.com.au

79 pointsBud21 comments

I can't tell you how happy this makes me. This game was LEGENDARYYYYY back in the day. I remember the day I got it in 1986, I was 14. Incredibly hard, incredibly addictive. And it showed off the Mac's digitized sound and high-res screen long before PC's had the former.

Trivia- This was actually the very first game in history to use WASD, I believe. (Even though this copy doesn't default to it, the original one did.)

I don't hear audio. Is there audio? The audio was one of the best parts of this game!

Trivia seems inaccurate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_keys#WASD_keys states that Wizardy (1981) used WASD first.

Looks like MORIA (1975) predates even that. Damn.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(PLATO)

Perhaps it was because I had the Mac version but I could swear that I used arrow keys on Wizardry 1

It always strikes me how often these "old" games stimulate imagination and satisfy the soul much more than all these µ%*$ "candy-crush-pay-per-view" stuff I see all over the place.

You don't even have to go back that far, just a few years before Zynga.

There are plenty of good games coming out today too (e.g. "The beginner's guide" that came out just a few days ago). Maybe more than at any other time in history.

Yeah, I agree. There were great games then, there are great games now. I'd expect MORE good games now due to the better capabilities, but games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne are legendary.

Maybe you could say that never so many people played so many bad games, but good games are still plentiful.

Gaming only became mainstream (the way tv, music, cinema, etc are) in the past few years though. So all these sorta make sense.

There are plenty of new games that are evocative and stimulate the imagination. I'd suggest not getting too caught up in the enormous mass of Candy Crush exploitative garbage out there (which, there was a metric shit-ton of crappy games in the 1980s, too).

Pay attention to stuff like Journey, the Portal series, Limbo, Device 6, etc. -- the games that people will look back upon nostalgically when they're complaining about how games made in the 2040s lack the imagination of the games of their youth.

Exactly this. A while back I was looking at old copies of defunct gaming magazines from my youth, and the thing that struck me was how most of the games in there were crap, and are now buried under so much landfill. We only remember the memorable. I actually think we're living in a gaming golden age right now, with more good games coming out than ever before.

Welcome to Zork!

That Mac Classic emulator booted on Safari on my iPhone 5s in about 5 seconds. A Mac Classic took up to several minutes to boot! Remarkable.

Oh man, that brings back memories. I used to play Dark Castle on my father's Compaq Portable III (a giant semi-portable suitcase of a machine, with a tiny amber screen). Viciously hard game as I recall (as so many were bath then).

I didn't even open up Dark Castle. Looking at the Scrapbook was enough to take me back!

Fantastic. This also led me to find that the entire trilogy is available on the App store. Now all I need is "Continuum," and some grape Crush, and I can pretend I'm 14.

Dark Castle was pretty good, but of they could get Crystal Quest...

This game was a real problem for me in college -- it arrived around the end of the term and I definitely scored lower on several exams due to being unable to stop playing it.

Love this game and the sequel. So innovative.

Fun fact - Jonathan Gay, the creator of Dark Castle, went on to create Flash. If you squint a bit you can see the lineage from Dark Castle leading directly to Flash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay

Love it!

Who's up for a game of Maze Wars?

I had always thought the intro music of both Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle were supreme. And then I discovered it was written by a guy called Bach. My (musical) life was changed forever.

PS: I was 9 at that time :)

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