Complete BBC Micro Games Archive
bbcmicro.co.uk
bbcmicro.co.uk
That one is especially cool IMO because it provides archives of the old cassettes in UEF format, which aims to preserve some of the audio properties as well (i.e. phase switches, dead spots, etc.).
Not super practical, but it does let you experience the screaming speed of 1200 baud while the computer makes loud noises at you!
Someone even wrapped it with a JS decoder, so you can assault your eardrums in your browser: https://www.8bitkick.cc/playuef.html
Whilst I loved the gaming it was the programming that I enjoyed the most and honing my 6502 assembly chops I'd been getting to to speed with on the school Apple ][; to the extent I wrote a sideways ROM (to provide modem control capability for running a BBS app I wrote) with some bodgery around the user port as well to capture the RS-232 signals the RS-423 port couldn't...carrier detect, ring indicate (all before the days of AT Hayes commands and responses).
I think this is the first time I've seen Demolator available on an emulator, I spent hours playing that, and of course Elite.
Ooh, the waves of nostalgia are almost overpowering :)
And once you finish all 6 levels you get to play them again, with inverted gravity. And once you get used to that it reverses back but the walls are invisible. And then both inverted and invisible
I always thought Repton was the greatest game ever. Am keen to see how it holds up now.
I also remember Imogen being very clever, Citadel I found a bit creepy, and everyone loved Chuckie Egg except me for some reason.
(Wikipedia claims that Beeb Repton was built entirely on the description of Boulder Dash found in a review, rather than actually playing Boulder Dash.)
I completed a lot more than when I was 7, but I still haven't solved them all.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superiorin...
I gotta play that this evening. I'm sure the game play will be awful, but I love the graphics ;)
Did you ever play Imogen? I think that one honestly holds up, graphics included. And of course Elite and Exile.
www.stairwaytohell.com/gamehelp/MAP-Exile-BC.png
The game is still genius to me. I love the teleport mechanic: in the game, you're invincible, but if you sustain too much damage in a short period, your suit teleports you away to safety so you can recover. You can "remember" up to four teleport destinations, with the ultimate fallback being your spaceship. Being forced to teleport is usually bad. You can potentially drop important items in a dangerous area, or find yourself having to redo a tricky navigation back to the area you teleported from.
The brilliance is that the big-bad Triax and his three robots have the same teleport mechanic. The only way to destroy them is to hit them with massive amounts of damage before their teleports kick in. This meant using physics puzzles, because damage sources would stack: I could destroy the final robot by luring it to and blasting it in the face with the experimental thruster, shooting it with the remote-controlled cannon, and using the icer simultaneously.
I love the emergent gameplay that comes out of that clever teleportation mechanic, and the amazingly robust physics. As you say, it plays fair -- the enemies use the same teleporters you do, and the monkeys jump in honest parabolas. It’s great how just about everything is destructible, although usually needing much more firepower than you have available.
I used to enjoy just zooming around the central cave with my jetpack, dodging the guided missiles that one of the tall robots launched from its side-tunnel. If you infuriated it enough, it would fall off the ledge and end up at the bottom of the cave!
Wonderful game, and an amazing technical achievement.
This was about as far as I got without a walkthrough. And I fear it wasn't close to 30%!
> It’s great how just about everything is destructible, although usually needing much more firepower than you have available.
Yes, I loved this. A significant part of the map, letting you into Triax's liar, is behind a "rune door" that must be destroyed. It seems that the game developers intended you to destroy this door by acquiring two radioactive rocks and dropping one on the other over the door, creating a massive explosion that would destroy it. But I read in a few places that people had successfully destroyed the door by very carefully collecting and stacking grenades to cause damage above the required threshold.
And there was a standard set of cheats for the game, one of which allowed you to fire cannon shot from your normal gun. It makes short work of that rune door.
I really like this way of designing games, where your puzzles aren't simple boolean rules (you must use the red key in the red door) but more real valued (you must deal x damage in y timeframe). For exile, it meant there were multiple solutions to puzzles that I suspect the designers had never considered.
I kind of find it to be kind of awesome. Some platforms like the BBC Micro, or C64, still have dozens of pieces of software released for them per year!
I’ve visited twice and thoroughly enjoyed it. Has many working classic machines, and a learning room full of BBC Micros, and even a Doomsday Laserdisc machine! It has a great collection of gaming consoles throughout the ages, 70s onwards including many rare gems.
I had a ZX Spectrum emulator running on the Z80 2nd processor, and an Atari ST emulator on the 68000 2nd processor.
Both very limited, and still having to go through the BBC's 6502 display and sound. But amazingly, some 3rd party code for those machines worked well enough in the emulators to give an impression of sort of working.